The Office of Standards for Prevention and System Improvement (OSPSI) serves as the administrative office of community-based youth service agencies and the juvenile justice and delinquency prevention unit.  OSPSI utilizes data to guide and shift the operations within the juvenile justice system to ensure responsiveness to the needs of Oklahoma youth, their family systems, and local communities.

• We believe all Oklahomans, regardless of age, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation deserve access to public services, and all services must be evidence-based, best practice-informed, and grounded in scientific research.
• We believe taxpayer dollars must be managed and monitored to ensure all Oklahomans have the opportunity to benefit from the services and resources those dollars provide.
• We believe Oklahomans are safer when they are able to contribute to the betterment of their communities.
• We believe in supporting the families of the youth we serve. By partnering with them to meet the needs of the children in their care, we are supporting a stronger Oklahoma.
• We believe juvenile justice system staff are allies, and the youth we serve must be empowered to have a voice and impact on all system improvement strategies.
• We believe in supporting our frontline staff and community partners to ensure the youth in our care have the opportunity to be restored back to the communities where they struggled to belong.
• We believe in bringing staff, families, youth, communities, and stakeholders together to identify local challenges, and address those challenges with real solutions that can bring real change.
• We believe in supporting our staff with resources to ensure they have what they need to successfully engage, support, and empower youth to accept responsibility, respond to accountability, and demonstrate leadership in their journey through the restorative justice process.
• We believe the monitoring and oversight of the facilities that children and youth reside in on a temporary basis are necessary and critical to ensure the safety and well-being of children and staff.

Effective Practices for Positive Interactions with Oklahoma Youth Project: This project expanded the Connecticut Model: Effective Police Interactions with Youth to widen the audience to include all child-serving professionals. In addition, the training addresses why youth do what they do, the unique needs of diverse youth, understanding bias and how biases can affect the decisions we make, and practical strategies for how to communicate more effectively with young people. In the next year, Oklahoma will collaborate with law enforcement to train officers in facilitating the EPIY model across the state.

CBYS works to ensure that quality counseling, outreach, intervention, diversion, and emergency shelter services are available to any youth across the state. This unit contracts with 37 designated Youth Service agencies to provide, with no requirement to pay or be insured, programs that intervene with at-risk youth and families which strengthen their relationships, life skills, and overall functioning so that they may be diverted from future juvenile justice involvement.  Thousands of youth each year benefit from these services, leading to decreased rates of youth crime and smaller juvenile justice caseloads. The five (5) major service areas provided include:

1. Children's Emergency Resource Centers (CERCs)
2. First Time Offender Program (FTOP)
3. Outreach and counseling
4. Community at Risk Services (CARS) and Re-Entry
5. Botvin Life Skills*

*Through a partnership with the Oklahoma Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, youth service agencies now have the capability to automate and streamline pre and post test results of students who participate in the Botvin Life Skills training. The online prevention reporting system supports the tracking and reporting of longitudinal outcomes of this evidence-based curriculum. For more information on the Botvin curriculum, click on the following link: https://www.lifeskillstraining.com/

Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities/DMC:

Nearly 500 OJA staff, contract providers (group homes, detention centers, youth service agencies, etc.), juvenile bureau staff (Oklahoma, Tulsa, and Comanche Counties), judges, attorneys, jail administrators/staff and law enforcement have participated  from August to date. We are on track to reach our goal of 1,300 employees and partners trained by June of 2021. SAG sponsorship of this project is having a major impact! An OJA supervisor recently reached out to me and shared that this training is the best training he has had in the thirty years he has worked for the agency. He went on to talk about his own implicit bias and how he would like to take the class again because it really made him stop and evaluate why he is making the decisions he makes. We talked at length about supporting our current and new workers with opportunities to dive deeper into empathy building, the impact of trauma, and understanding our own triggers. It has been exciting to hear the responses from our field staff. We have had numerous reports from those who have attended that this training was exceptional. It is my hope that once the open meetings law passes, we will have a special training day for SAG members that will also be used to carry us into our three year planning. The curriculum and training developed through your sponsorship has brought opportunities for OJA staff and partners to talk about the current strengths and weaknesses of our juvenile justice system. It is my hope that this information combined with quantitative data, will be used for our ongoing efforts to improve the system. For me personally, I have been recharged by the number of staff  excited about this training and the direction our agency is going. It is a breath of fresh air and so many people who started their career with hope to be a change maker, have been recharged and are on a mission to be a part of the change!

As you will recall, the City of Ada and the Chickasaw Nation Lighthorse Police Department partnered with OJA to receive the training to train the expanded Effective Police Interactions with Youth training to rural police departments. Officers were trained and a team has been established. Implementation has slowed down but the JJDP team and the Ada Police Department are committed to ensuring this project moves forward. I hope to have a positive update on this part of the project when we meet for our SAG meeting.