The Long-Term Effects of After-School Programming on Educational Adjustment and Juvenile Crime: A Study of the LA's BEST After-School Program

The project study has two major goals: The first goal is to examine the long-term relationship between juvenile delinquency, educational adjustment, and participation in LA's BEST elementary afterschool program. the second goal is to determine the cost-effectiveness of LA's BEST in students' educational adjustment and juvenile crime reduction. The grantee will employ a sampling frame from which they will use a stratified (by cohort) random sample of 2,000 LA's BEST students and a comparison sample. The comparison sample will consist of 4,000 students (2,000 students will be non-participants from the same schools as the LA's BEST participants, and 2,000 will be drawn from schools without LA's BEST programs. To build the sample set, the grantee will track all students who reached middle school by the 2001-2002 school year (approximate age 12). The sample will be roughly evenly split between male and female students. Moreover, the sample is expected to reflect the ethnic/racial makeup of the program: Hispanic (about 75%) and African American (about 12%) with the remaining students falling into other categories. The research design will involve the compilation of a longitudinal database including academic, delinquent, and juvenile crime data. NCA/NCF