Elizabeth Drake - June 2007

Six juvenile offender programs identified by Institute as evidence-based are profiled through program descriptions, quality assurance information, and cost-benefit figures.

Annie Pennucci, Theresa B. Smith, Robert I. Roth - June 2007

The 2006 Washington State Legislature directed the Institute to "hire a meeting facilitator to conduct a series of meetings with a broad group of stakeholders to examine the strengths and weaknesses of educational services available to deaf and hard of hearing children throughout the state." This report describes the stakeholder consultations conducted and summarizes stakeholder views regarding Washington's educational system for deaf, hard of hearing, and deaf-blind children.

Jim Mayfield - June 2007

In its 2006 regular session, the Legislature charged the Department of Social and Health Services Mental Health Division with establishing a pilot program to provide evidence-based mental health services to children, and the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (Institute) was directed to study the pilot.

The Institute's study will examine outcomes of children eligible from July 2007 through June 2008. A preliminary report will be completed by December 2008, an interim report by December 2009, and a final two-year follow-up report by September 2010.

Annie Pennucci - April 2007

This summary presents findings to date on these topics, organized by report release date.

Robert Barnoski, Wade Cole - April 2007

This report attempts to identify schools whose students performed above and below expectations on the 10th-grade WASL in spring 2006 given their demographic characteristics.

Robert Barnoski, Elizabeth Drake - March 2007

The Offender Accountability Act (OAA) was enacted by the Washington State Legislature in 1999. The OAA requires the Department of Corrections (DOC) to supervise felony offenders according to their risk for future offending.

In a 2003 report, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy (Institute) analyzed the validity of DOC’s risk for reoffense instrument, the Level of Service Inventory—Revised (LSI-R). As part of the analysis, the Institute suggested that the predictive accuracy of the LSI-R could be strengthened by including more static risk information about an offender’s prior record of convictions. DOC subsequently asked the Institute to develop a new static risk instrument based on offender demographics and criminal history.

This report describes our evaluation of the validity of the static risk instrument developed for DOC. In October 2008, we updated Appendix C of the report to include the intercepts or constants for the three static risk score calculations. These intercepts are added to the summed weighted item scores to produce the risk scores. These constants are +20, +15, and +10 respectively for the Felony, Property & Violent, and Violent Risk Scores.

David Lovell, Jim Mayfield - March 2007

In 1999, legislation was passed to better identify and provide additional mental health treatment for mentally ill offenders who were released from prison, who pose a threat to public safety, and agree to participate in the program. A “Dangerous Mentally Ill Offender” (DMIO) is defined by the legislation as a person with a mental disorder who has been determined to be dangerous to self or others.

As part of its legislative mandate, the Washington State Institute for Public Policy has published a series of reports that evaluate the DMIO program. A 2005 report demonstrated that the DMIO program significantly reduced recidivism after 1 1/2 years, and the 2007 follow-up report found that reductions in recidivism were sustained at the 2 1/2 year mark. The benefit-cost analysis in that report indicated that the reductions in DMIO recidivism generated financial benefits to taxpayers that were more than program costs.

This report examines how DMIO program funds are being used, how services and billings are tracked, changes in mental health funding, interagency collaboration, and how these impact program viability.

Steve Aos, Marna Miller, Jim Mayfield - March 2007

The Washington Legislature directed the Washington State Institute for Public Policy to begin conducting economic analyses of certain K–12 policies. Augmenting the work of the recent Washington Learns process, this report describes our initial cost-benefit findings for class size reductions and full-day vs. half-day kindergarten. Upcoming reports will examine other K–12 topics.

Robert Barnoski, Wade Cole - March 2007

This report tracks 4th-, 7th-, and 10th-grade WASL performance over time and by recent cohorts of students.

Wei Yen - March 2007

In this report, we discuss existing measures of long-term and cycling use in public mental health services. We then propose new definitions that are relevant to the public mental health system in Washington State. Finally, we apply these new definitions to the state’s public mental health clients in 2002 to obtain counts of long-term users and cycling users.