Discussion
Prescriptive Approaches
Read the rational planning and prescriptive approach case presented in Comparative Approaches to Program Planning. How did political influence or context impact this case? How would you have approached this case from a planning perspective? Respond to a minimum of two of your classmates by Day 7.
This assignment is worth 4 points of the total course grade.
This assignment aligns with the following weekly outcomes: 3.
This assignment aligns with the following course outcomes: 1b, 2.
Case: The Mayor and the Street Educators
In one of the larger metropolitan areas of Brazil, the newly elected mayor used his power to announce that the Street Educators, who had been previously employed in the mayors office, would change the service direction of the Childrens Street Education Program. The new direction would be aimed at getting street children off the streets and into the citys unused and abandoned detention facilities. The new program would be featured as the mayors initiative to rescue children from street life. Until now, the Street Educators met children on the streets and helped them with developing survival skills, including such things as health self-care knowledge, self-defense, reading ability, and identify-in means of legitimately acquiring income.
The Street Educators, a team of five college-educated professionals with undergraduate social work degrees, and 10 para-professionals, some of whom were themselves graduates of the Street Education Program, were extremely dedicated to their work; proud of their successes; and totally surprised by the announcement from their new boss, the mayor. Nothing in what they were currently doing to assist street children included removal of children from the streets; rather, the idea was to provide practical education to help the children survive, if not thrive, in a difficult environment all members of the team understood the historical background and sociological roots of street children in Brazil. They recognized that history and culture led to a constant flow of children onto the streets and that, while social reform was an issue con-scantly discussed in the media, their jobs were to conduct a professionally based program to address the situation faced by children on the streets at any given moment. Theories of education drove their work, and it was understandable that they would be surprised by a new political mandate for institutional care, especially in what seemed like unfriendly former detention facilities. Clearly, their professional commitment and current programming were being put into a whole new context.
Within one week of the mayors announcement, the mayors wife, who had been placed in charge of all issues related to human services, walked into the Street Education Program office early one day. She declared that she and the mayor wished to know exactly how many street children there were in the city; how many were receiving services; how many children needed services but were not receiving them; and what services were being provided. The team responded that they had some of the information in their records but that they would need help in providing a reliable and verifiable estimate of the total numbers of street children. They were also unsure as to how they could determine how many children needed services but were not receiving them. When the mayors wife left, one of the Street Educators contacted her former research professor in the Social Research Institute at the local Federal University to see if the institute might be able to assist. It turned out that the professor was looking for a hands-on research experience for her research students, so together they decided to undertake a point in time, or snapshot survey. The mayors wife was pleased with such a quick response to them; and what services were being provided. The team responded that they had some of the information in their records but that they would need help in providing a reliable and verifiable estimate of the total numbers of street children. They were also unsure as to how they could determine how many children needed services but were not receiving them. When the mayors wife left, one of the Street Educators contacted her former research professor in the Social Research Institute at the local Federal University to see if the institute might be able to assist. It turned out that the professor was looking for a hands-on research experience for her research students, so together they decided to undertake a point in time, or snapshot survey. The mayors wife was pleased with such a quick response to the “request, so she facilitated a small stipend for the student researchers through the mayors office. In the meantime, the Street Educator team reviewed their records to provide a service record-based accounting of the numbers of children contacted by the team, and what precisely was delivered to each child by way of service. This was quite an undertaking because each street educator had his or her own way of reporting on his or her daily activities. Some did head counts. Others did service activity counts. Still others wrote a narrative about the day. Sometimes the files contained sweet notes from the kids, either expressing gratitude or recounting successes. Other times there were death notices of children from street violence, drug over-doses, or unknown causes.
On one weekend, right after the winter term started in March, about 50 student researchers fanned out across the city to do a person-by-person count of the children, but they also asked a few extra questions to try to understand why the kids were on the street. Forty-eight hours of data collection and weeks of data analysis later, the numbers they came up with were surprising, even to the Street Educators. They had found 3,120 children images ranging from about 6 to about 18, with most of the children being in the 10 to 13 age range. There were slightly more boys than girls in all ages, except over 14, for which very few girls were located. After the count, based on the research design, the student researchers could not provide assurance that the figures they provided would be valid during different seasons of the year, from year to year, or during varying economic conditions. How-ever, based on additional questions they asked the street kids, and from discussion with the team members, they were able to develop a typology of street children.
The first type was on the street for the purposes of earning money for their families. They maintained strong connections “with families and returned home most nights with whatever money they were able to earn. A second type was children who had fled from their families; they were of the street, as they left home due to abuse or neglect and had no inclination to reconnector maintain family ties, or for that matter, leave the street (unless they died of AIDS or were killed). A third type was composed of children who were on the street and wished to return home but could not do so because they could not find their families. Their families, living in abject poverty, could not afford stable housing and, while the children were on the street, had left the home known to their children without having or providing a forwarding address. These children were essentially abandoned to the streets with a similar life expectancy of the children of the street, which was about 6 years total as a street kid.
This information was passed up to the mayor through the mayors wife, with a very professionally worded request for further exploration as to how the educational component of the teams work might be maintained while bringing children off the streets to the institutions that were located all over the city. In response, the mayor sent back the message that the research findings were very useful. He also stated that education was a wonderful idea, but not if it included street survival instruction, since that would no longer be the direction of the mayors office program. The mayor also expressed great interest in the three types of street children because that, in connection with the count, would allow for planning the appropriate number and types of beds in rehabilitated detention facilities.
This gave the team greater insight as to what was going on, and they pressed the mayors wife for more information the next time she stopped by to share a confession with them. It was clear that she was not totally comfortable with the discussion, reminding them that being a city employee meant not getting too far into elective politics. Reasoning that just about everything out of the “mayors office tended to be political, the team members continued to press the mayors wife. She was a well-intentioned, though rather bored, wealthy matron who really wanted to make a difference in the plight of these children. She also really enjoyed the benefits of being the mayors wife, and it was clear that she felt torn about what was happening.
Nothing was really resolved, and no clarity was achieved even as the team continued to chat with the mayors wife, until she came one morning with a message that led the team to realize they had better get on board and start planning a new program if they wanted to maintain any educational effort at all for street children. In fact, their city positions might just depend on that! The message was, while nicely and very reasonably put to them, very pragmatic, in a political sense. Essentially, the mayor had been backed in the election by local business interests, which found the presence of street children discouraged business and investment in the city. The children made a mess around popular tourist spots. They tended to beg outside the best stores. Some of the more entrepreneurial kids would stop traffic at major inter-sections to wash car windows, whether the drivers wanted the service or not. When traffic was heavy, the kids tended to beg in the same spots, creating an added complication to the already challenging traffic patterns. Discussion about these challenges had been appearing in the editorial section of the newspaper on and off for years, but the Street Educators had no idea how strongly the local business leaders felt about their children. The mayors wife certainly wasnt specific, but in roundabout discussion, she helped the team understand that the business interests had not gone public with this concern because they realized that in order to win the election, the mayor also needed votes of poor people. A couple of team members thought these might be the very families who had children on the street during the day. It also became clear that both business leaders and the mayor feared a negative reaction from Church authorities, who had a long history in organizing the street children so that the children could gain their rights as established in the Brazilian Constitution.
“However, the mayor, once elected, had to hear the concerns of these supporters, who had added much to the campaign treasury because they trusted that he would act to solve the street children problem. Immediately it became clear to most of the team that the other issue at play was related to homelessness and the efforts of the homeless advocates in helping those with-out shelter to take over abandoned buildings owned by the city, citing squatters rights. This created havoc all over the city, which undoubtedly wasnt pleasing to these same business leaders. The deterioration of state and city properties could be corrected, and the invasion of homeless persons could be stopped, if rehabilitation of the facilities for street children were to occur. Now, none of this was ever explicitly stated. What was stated was that the mayors wife was certain that the team wanted to help make the new mayors administration successful, as this was so important to the city and to its children.
Armed with all this information, including the data and the typology from the university researchers, the team held a strategy session to focus on planning for the change in services demanded by the mayor. They knew now that they would have to respond in very different ways than they had previously, as the challenge was now being identified as getting children off the streets and into institutions, rather than as helping children on the streets in the community.
Based on their experience and the data, it was clear to the team that they had three very different populations in need of service, and to combine them might not only be dangerous to some, but “was sure to create mayhem in the institutional settings. So, the team divided into three subcommittees. One, composed of one graduate educator and three paraprofessionals, was tasked to develop ideas about how to serve the children on the street during the day. It was felt at that stage the regular program might be able to continue with these children; but something elsewise also needed so that they didnt slip into the last category of street kids, who lose track of their families. A second subcommittee was tasked with developing ideas about how to serve the street kids who wanted off the streets and really wanted to be in a family, but who could not find their families. The last team was tasked with generating ideas about how to deal with the children lost to the street. They needed to determine what could be developed to keep these children off the streets altogether.
Each team went to the various university libraries to see what ideas they might discover. Because the libraries had such old holdings, they also asked the mayors wife if she might make it possible for them to use one of the city computers to access Internet resources. Two team members visited some of the internationally funded foundations in the area to see what helpful publications they might have. They all had to keep reminding themselves that they were dealing with three different kinds of street kids, probably with different needs, but all of whom would have to be housed in these new institutions. Each team seemed to have one member who believed the only acceptable approach was education. These individuals believed that if the children were not educated, they would never be able to enter responsibly into civil society, and that they should not be allowed to simply move from these new institutional settings for youth, when they came of age, to the next institutional setting, which probably would be prison.
As the subcommittees progressed in their efforts, the team as awhile would meet to share what they were learning and finding. It became clearer and clearer that they could propose a unitary intervention based on an orphanage model, with a positive peer culture twist added to it, and figure the total cost of that; but most of the kids needed something else. They began to worry about how much the mayor was willing to spend on all this. They knew, at a minimum, the current budget for the Street Education Program would be available, but that certainly would not cover housing and maintenance for the approximately 1,000 children served last year on that budget. They also knew that this figure was a guesstimate based on what they could pull out of the disorganized files from last year. That also did not account for the other 2,000 or so children the student researchers had located who had never found their way to the Street Education Program; nor did it account for what they thought was the ideal intervention of differential programming for each of the three different groups.
Finally, the team decided to plan a program designed to serve at least 3,000 children. They researched some potential funding sources over and above what might be available from city, state, and federal governments; they knew to do it right, some serious money would need to be made available. The plan detailed everything that would be needed. It started with an outreach/assessment effort designed to first get the kids off the street, and then to triage them for placement into the appropriate program setting. They developed three distinctive interventions depending on the type of street child; these were built upon assumptions about housing, food, and the elements necessary to make the children safe while they were being appropriately educated. They developed a family outreach aspect intended to connect kids with their own families whenever possible, and when that was not possible, to find other families willing to take in the children. And difficult as it was to admit, they were sure some of the “institutionalized children would not find families. Thus, they needed to prepare some children to go into the world as responsible citizens without any family support.
All this work took several months, during which time they kept the mayors wife informed about what they were learning and thinking. Finally, they prepared a fully developed plan that they shared with her first. She liked it so much that she facilitated a quick response from the mayor so that the two most senior Street Educators could present their ideas in a formal session with him.
The two educators were well versed in the literature about street children, along with what worked in other places and what had not; they also thoroughly understood all the numbers and were well prepared to present their ideas to the mayor. They were certain they could explain clearly all the reasons for the choices the team had made. In short, they believed that the plan had a good chance of success. Then, just before they were to go into the meeting, they got word that one of the wealthiest people in town would also be in attendance. Neither of the Street Educators knew this person, but everybody in town knew the family. The word on the street was that the family was very interested in becoming a major philanthropic force in town. They went into the meeting convinced that they had found the best way to solve the problem of street children in their city, and they were ready for any questions that might come their way. “
