A New York City Department of Probation program, "Project Zero" offers alternatives to locking young offenders in juvenile jails, with an emphasis on rehabilitation and keeping young people connected to families and schooling. The program evaluates its progress regularly and makes adjustments based on the data—and is showing signs of success.

Even with failed teen voting bills on each coast in Cambridge, Mass., and Berkeley, Calif., student activists haven't lost their passion for lowering the voting age. Here, Connect for Kids highlights Children's PressLine's coverage of the issue.

In a notoriously troubled New York City neighborhood, Isis Sapp-Grant has created a supportive haven for girls besieged by drug dealers, sexual predators, family violence and gangs. Holly St. Lifer spoke with Sapp-Grant about her Blossom Program for Girls.

In Brighton, NY, city officials, parents and schools are all involved in helping their kids become politically active and aware. One result: kid-conceived and kid-produced ads on the importance of voting, developed in conjunction with the National Student Parent Mock Election. Rob Capriccioso reports.

The mission of Community Association of Progressive Dominicans (ACDP) is to promote and develop the physical, emotional, social and economic well-being of the residents of Upper Manhattan, the Bronx, and New York City by facilitating community empowerment through education, provision of human services, and the development of individual skills and community leadership.

The Columbia University TeenScreen Program is a voluntary adolescent mental health and suicide prevention screening initiative, which exists in 44 states, Guam, South Korea, and Panama. The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health recognized the TeenScreen Program as a model program in its July 2003 final report. In addition, the national Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC) listed the TeenScreen Program as a Promising Program on its list of Evidence-Based Practices in Suicide Prevention Programs. TeenScreen offers consultation, the screening instruments, and training, free of charge to qualifying communities.

To let every child eligible for adoption become available for adoption. The Adoptive Parents Committee of Long Island (APC) is a volunteer organization that is dedicated to providing adoption information, support and education. We are knowledgeable about all types of adoption, including domestic infant adoption, international adoption, and adoption through the foster care system. Monthly meetings with workshops on both pre- and post- adoption topics are free and open to the public.

The mission of this organization is to find and support foster and adoptive families, and to educate communities of the Capital Region of New York State about the need for foster and adoptive homes.

Mathematica gives good marks in its report to Congress on the State Children's Health Insurance Programs (SCHIPs) that offer health care coverage to children in families with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level and beyond. In almost all areas examined—outreach, enrollment and access to services—the programs are succeeding. In the 10 states studied, programs were put in place quickly, and overall, families were satisfied with the ease of enrolling children, many of whom remained enrolled for 12 months, depending on the state.

Elementary students in high-poverty schools who have a Teach for America (TFA) teacher achieve comparable reading results and better math results than students taught by other novice teachers or those with a few years of experience, according to a new Mathematica Policy Research evaluation. Researchers found that many teachers in high-poverty schools lacked certification and formal pre-service training, and tend to come from less competitive colleges than TFA teachers. The bottom line, according to this report: Teach for America is a program that can help deliver quality teaching to poorly resourced schools.

The New York state attorney general has filed a lawsuit alleging pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline concealed data from its trials that showed the anti-depressant Paxil was no more effective in adolescents and children than a placebo, and in some cases was more likely related to suicidal thoughts than the placebo, reports the Kaiser Family Fund.

Key to providing quality foster care for kids is recruiting and supporting good foster parents. True Insights offers a model marketing campaign that dramatically increased calls from prospective foster parents in NYC.

Status of young adults in NYC and nationally
Strategies for improving the quality of services to young adults
Youth development for young adults.

Transition to independent living
Aging out of foster care
Out-of-school youth

Girls in Juvenile Detention
Children with incarcerated parents
Girls in Foster Care
Teen Mothers