University economics professors and students are collaborating with the City of Charlottesville and Albemarle County in an effort to make social services more cost-efficient and effective.
The project focuses on the Charlottesville/Albemarle Commission on Children and Families, an agency charged with managing the Comprehensive Services Act, Commission Director Gretchen Ellis said.
“The Comprehensive Services Act is a state-wide program that provides funding for kids that need foster care, are at-risk, or have special-[education] needs that can’t be met in public schools,” Ellis said. “Since 2000, the costs for operating this program have increased more than two-fold, and we have been conducting a study for the past year to find how to make the services more efficient and effective.”
The faculty involved — Prof. Steven Stern, Asst. Prof. Amalia Miller and Assoc. Prof. John Pepper — “were asked to think about the programs and try to find out why costs were increasing so much,” Pepper said.
Sri Gopalan, a fourth-year College student studying economics and computer science, said he worked on data analysis for the project.
“We had data from the city [and] county that was not in the right form for us to perform the necessary data analysis,” Gopalan said. “The data came from many different places, and I used my expertise with consolidating information via Microsoft Excel to put the data in a form that was useful for analysis.”
The professors then were able to provide a broader picture of what was affecting the rise in costs for social services.
“We were able to calculate the average costs of services per child, the kind of services children get and how quickly they leave the system,” Pepper said. “We are trying to use complex statistical models to measure the effects of different interventions on children, especially how they influence the length of duration children spend in the program.”
The commission hopes to use the research’s findings to help provide services that are more efficient and cost-effective.
“We are in the process of implementing a new program focus that is based on system of care philosophies providing services that are child-centered, family-driven, strength-based, culturally competent and cost-efficient,” Ellis said. “We found that serving children locally is cheaper and more effective in regards to connecting them to their home communities and family.”
This project reflects a broader collaboration between the University and the local community.
“The scale of collaboration is vast, and you find partnerships between almost all the schools of the University and the Charlottesville community,” said Megan Raymond, director of the Office of University Community Partnerships.
“The projects run the gamut from internships to volunteer work to field studies,” Raymond said.
The partnerships formed between the University and local community serve an invaluable purpose in serving the interests of both sides, she noted.
“Faculty can apply research directly to work with the local community,” Raymond said. “For students, it shows where a U.Va. degree can take you.”
Raymond said the University seeks to further this collaboration through community-based research grants as well as the Jefferson Public Citizen Program, which is currently being developed.
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