Quality Assurance

The Montgomery County Juvenile Probation Department's Quality Assurance unit  was established in 2016 to support and enhance the Juvenile Justice System Enhancement Strategy (JJSES) within the department.  The JJSES has allowed the department to strive to implement evidence based services and treatment with fidelity, through every stage of the juvenile justice process.  The Quality Assurance unit is responsible for the collection and analysis of data to measure the quality of programming in both our residential programs and community based programs.  The results of the data collections and analysis allows the department to continously improve the quality of our decisions and services used to ensure the youth under the departmentscare is receiving high quality supportive services to reduce recidivisim throughout the community.  To truly realize the recidivism reduction potential of interventions, probation officers are now equipped with new knoeldge about key concepts and are skilled in critically important processes including Motivational Interviewing, Detention Risk Assessment Instrument (PADRAI), Youth Level of Service (YLS), case plan development, and graduated responses. 

Additionally, the unit is responsiblefor safety, security and well-being of all of the youth placed outside the home.  Probation officers in the Quality Assurance unit interview, track, and ensure that the youth in our care are safe, educated, and are receiving the services needed to return to their community.
 
In 2018, the Quality Assurance unit was trained in and began to utilize the Standard Program Evaluation Protocal (SPEP) with all of our service providers.  The Standardized Program Evaluation Protocol (SPEP) is a validated, data driven rating scheme for determining how well an existing program or service matches the research evidence for the effectiveness of that particular type of intervention for reducing the recidivism of juvenile offenders.  The SPEP scheme is based on a meta-analysis of over 500 studies conducted by Dr. Mark Lipsey and his colleagues over the last 30 years.  These analyses have investigated the general porgram characteristiccs that are most strongly associated with reductions in the re-offense rates of the juveniles served.

The goal of the Quality Assurance unit is to continue to provide Balanced and Restorative Justice, monitor the quality of services provided by all of our services providers and to increase family engagement across all services.  High quality services used in conjunction with strong family support and engagement has proven to help suport our youth and families under care to be successful and to reduce recidivism.