Two social work professors and a few computer science doctoral students from the University of Southern Mississippi (USM) are developing just such a budget-challenged and necessity-driven program. SWORD is a data management system built specifically to aid the Forrest County Youth Court and Detention Center in tracking the young people who filter through its juvenile justice system.
Professors Tim Rehner and Mike Forster created the SWORD concept after learning of an untapped $60,000 Juvenile Accountability Incentive Block Grant. The two have long been involved in juvenile delinquency issues and operate the Family Network Partnership, a community-based delinquency prevention program.
"For years, we said we needed a database," said Rehner. "This grant came along aimed at database creation, so we decided to develop a database."
But accessibility to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's block grant funds came with complications. Disbursed by the federal government to states, the block grants eventually reach county and city levels where they are available for a small variety of program purposes.
Rehner and Forster initially thought to acquire funds allocated to Forrest County, but soon found more money available through the city of Hattiesburg, where USM is located.
However, when the duo learned that neither county nor city designated a use for their grants, they decided to try something different.
"We wrote a proposal for the city," said Rehner. "And got the county to agree to pool their monies with the city, and then the university is really the one contracted to do the work."
As if the uniqueness of SWORD's funding wasn't enough, the project itself is an uncommon example of creative money-management.
Hiring a high-priced technology development team was not feasible, so Rehner and Forster turned to Maria Cobb of USM's Scientific Computing Department for help. Knowledgeable, eager and budget-friendly doctoral students seemed a natural fit for the project.
"Maria hooked us up with our first batch of doctoral students," said Rehner. "Almost all were international students."
Indeed, according to Rehner, since the project began in late spring 2000, students working on the project have hailed from such diverse regions of the globe as Czechoslovakia, Romania, Iran, Sweden, China and Indonesia.
Rehner set up his own minilab with workstations to accommodate his student developers.
"I've been able to buy all the hardware we needed, and I've been able to get the hardware for the Youth Court and network their system and server," Rehner said.
Of course, working with students -- and foreign students at that -- can present difficulties.
Because many of Rehner's doctoral students are teaching assistants, they can generally devote just 20 hours or less each week to the SWORD project. And since the very nature of student life is transitory, there is no guarantee those currently involved will be around to see the project through to completion.
Hong Zhou, a doctoral student from China, has worked with SWORD for more than a year. Currently project manager for version 2.0, Zhou is enthusiastic about the project and says the development process has been and continues to be, "a very good experience."
Zhou was not around for the development of version 1.0 -- the SWORD system currently in use by the Forrest County Youth Court and Detention Center. That version was developed in Visual Basic 6.0 specifically for those facilities. And it has served them well -- so well in fact, that almost immediately following implementation, other Mississippi counties began expressing interest in SWORD.
Now version 2.0 is being formulated using .NET technology with the integration of multiple counties and agencies in mind.
"SWORD was designed for one county," explained Zhou. "Version 1.0 is not so good for multicounty or multi-agency use."
A component-based system -- version 2.0 -- will allow adding counties to the Forrest County database as warranted.
One somewhat unusual problem developers encountered is the lack of broadband Internet connectivity not only in Hattiesburg, but also throughout much of Mississippi. Forrest County users still use dial-up connections to the Web, and Zhou and his staff must expect that most in-state users -- at least in the foreseeable future -- will log onto the system via the plodding dial-up workhorse.
In fact, when the first version was installed at the Youth Court -- located just 10 miles from the USM campus -- developers planned for court personnel to access USM's server via the Web. That idea was quickly scrubbed, however.
"The dial-up was so slow it took them forever to get a page to load, so we had to give up that plan in a hurry," said Rehner. "We finally just took a server down there and networked them to our server here."
The change means end-users can now almost instantly access information on their individual monitors while the system is backed up on campus each night. Security is handled via a virtual private network (VPN).
The new component-based scheme used in version 2.0 will help bypass dial-up issues. Individual agencies throughout the state will access their own component as an intranet system. Thus, data management within individual components should be fast and easy. Any authorized user can access information from separate components via mobile agent technology.
Mobile agents are programs that can migrate from host to host within a network. The status of a given running program is saved, transported to the new host and restored, allowing the program to continue where it left off.
Zhou said component technology will also make security management much easier.
For all its innovative design features, SWORD keeps relatively routine data, and its capabilities are still in their infancy. Basic information like a juvenile's name, ID number, family and contact data, as well as court-related specifics like charges and disposition of case details are currently stored in SWORD. If privacy concerns are resolved, the database may one day integrate with school and law enforcement computer systems to provide education and other significant information.
The idea of SWORD is to allow counselors and others to access disparate agency records to provide a critical full-view understanding of each child.
This lets them better serve juvenile offenders by providing more complete histories, situations, actions and experiences.
Although counselors still maintain paper files for each client, most reports are now generated and completed via SWORD, then printed and filed. Zhou and his team hope SWORD will someday facilitate electronic document transfer and create a virtually paperless workplace. That day, however, is still some time away. In fact, one of the most time-consuming aspects of creating the original version of SWORD was reckoning how the youth court and the detention center operated.
According to Rehner, although much of the information required by the youth court and the detention center was similar, the two entities operate differently and classify charges in their own ways. "We had to come up with an elaborate scheme for taking charges, coding those and translating them with the administrative office of the court language, then doing the same for the Department of Human Services."
The prospect of repeating -- to at least some degree -- that process for various youth courts and detention centers throughout Mississippi could be overwhelming for some projects with limited funds and personnel, but not for the SWORD team.
"Funding for SWORD is not that much, so they cannot afford full-time professionals," explained Zhou. "But even though we are students working part time, everybody works hard when they come here, and they keep it moving."
Zhou said he believes version 2.0 will be ready to deploy by early summer 2004.
