LINC PROJECTS

To continuously strengthen their work to protect the fundamental right to parent, the Office of Respondent Parents’ Counsel (ORPC) partnered with the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab (Colorado Lab) to build evidence for the interdisciplinary team model of parent representation. Together, the ORPC and the Colorado Lab are moving the model through the Steps to Building Evidence. As part of the evidence-building strategy, the project team will focus on a preliminary exploration of outcomes of the interdisciplinary team model using LINC, including who receives interdisciplinary team representation and understanding the value of interdisciplinary team representation for case outcomes around keeping kids safely at home. This work aligns with federal and state priorities and illustrates the value of the interdisciplinary model from a system and legislative perspective.

The goal of this project is to evaluate the labor market impact of Colorado’s Equal Pay for Equal Work Act. In particular, the researchers are interested in understanding how wages and employment responded to the requirement that all online job postings must include salary information starting January 2021. There will be a particular focus on recent graduates and enrollees at Colorado-based higher education institutions.

The results of this project would help policymakers in Colorado and elsewhere forecast the effects of increasing pay transparency, improve enforcement of pay transparency laws, and provide empirical evidence on the benefits of giving college graduates clear information on the expected salaries in different careers.

Reverse transfer allows students who transferred from a Colorado two-year institution to a four-year institution to combine credits and apply them toward an associate degree. Colorado Re-Engaged Initiative (CORE), enacted into law as part of HB21-1330, expanded the reverse transfer program to the entire university population by allowing any four-year student (even those who did not begin at a two-year institution) to apply for an associate’s degree after accumulating enough credit hours. This project will answer the below questions in an effort to help policymakers and higher-education officials forecast the likely effects of CORE and adjust its implementation in order to maximize net benefits for students.

• What are the degree-attainment and labor-market effects of reverse transfer programs?
• How effective is reverse-transfer eligibility in raising associate’s degree attainment for students who otherwise would have left higher education without any credential at all?
• How beneficial are these additional associate’s degrees to students’ long-run employment status and labor earnings?
• How extensive are any diversionary effects of reverse-transfer eligibility
• How many students who otherwise would have successfully obtained a bachelor’s degree are induced by the reverse transfer program to leave higher education with only an associate’s degree?

This project will produce comprehensive, streamlined, quality data on the early care and education (ECE) workforce able to inform high-priority policy decisions. This builds upon an earlier LINC project that exclusively examined data within the CDHS Office of Early Childhood data systems. While these data greatly improved our knowledge on the ECE workforce, there remained significant gaps in knowledge critical for understanding sector differences and informing the rollout of the recently-funded universal Pre-K effort. The current LINC project will integrate key information from new LINC partners to fill in the data gaps identified in the previous work, including:

• Post-secondary pathways pursued by prospective and working ECE professionals
• Turnover within the ECE field and where professionals go when they leave the field
• Compensation by ECE professional roles and disparities by key subgroups

This work will result in a refreshed annual ECE Workforce Snapshot Report, an updated ECE workforce data dashboard, and the piloting of My Colorado Journey pathways for prospective ECE professionals.

The Federal Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Planning Research, and Evaluation is funding a multi-state evaluation of interventions designed to prevent homelessness among youth exiting foster care. This LINC project seeks to evaluate the Colorado Pathways to Success program that provides a comprehensive service model, an intensive, coach-like case management model for youth and young adults in foster care.

This project has multiple phases and anticipates expanding to include data from other LINC partners to evaluate youth outcomes such as homeless services, labor and employment records, and higher education records. This first phase of work will connect the research study data collected through surveys with child welfare records to assess baseline information for youth enrolled in the study in the early months of recruitment and to obtain a statewide look at the descriptive picture of youth in foster care who would be eligible for the Colorado Pathways to Success program.

The subsequent phases of the research study to examine youth outcomes will be accomplished annually through December 2026.

Crossover youth are the young people with two types of court cases: (1) dependency and neglect and (2) juvenile justice. Using LINC, the crossover youth project will connect child welfare and court system records to help meet federal reporting requirements and inform policies and practices aimed at serving crossover youth. This LINC project will yield:

• Demographic and geographic descriptions (e.g., age, gender, race/ethnicity, judicial district, county).
• Point-in-time and annual numbers of youth in congregate care with a dependency & neglect (D&N) case, delinquency case, or both; clear information on why youth are in out-of-home care at a given point in time.
• Point-in-time and annual numbers of youth in family-like placements with a D&N case, delinquency case, or both.

This work will inform the implementation of the federal Family First Prevention Services Act and Colorado SB 18-154 Crossover Youth Plans.

LINC is supporting a project to estimate homelessness among youth ages 14-24 by connecting data from multiple state and local systems. The first phase of work involved a descriptive analysis of linked local and state administrative data in the Denver area and will be used to better understand the extent to which these systems identify and serve Denver’s youth homelessness population. The research team used 5 years of longitudinal data to describe the characteristics and experiences associated with homelessness. This project is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and conducted in partnership with the Center for Policy Research.

The next phase of this work will focus on using the approach of the Denver project at a statewide level. The researchers will also expand the Denver project to look at characteristics of youth experiencing homelessness. The project team will develop a Best Practice Guide for using integrated administrative data sources to produce rigorous and efficient estimates of youth homelessness.

Project Materials

1. Identifying financial predictors of child maltreatment that may indicate CCR as an appropriate intervention.
2. Examining cross-system financial outcomes for caregivers in an ongoing rigorous evaluation of CCR.

This work will inform OEC’s ability to identify caregiver’s in financial distress before they come to the attention of child welfare and will build the evidence base around CCR to inform program improvement and potential expansion.

This LINC project came from the leadership of human services in the state and a deep commitment to preventing future homelessness among youth aging out of the foster care system. 

This priority project inspired the onboarding of the Metro Denver Homelessness Initiative as a LINC partner so the state could have a view into the intersection of child welfare and homeless experiences in the largest metro area of the state. An initial analysis of these data shows that a sizeable proportion of adults experiencing homelessness had previous involvement in the child welfare system, indicating that further study of potential prevention strategies may be fruitful.

Project Materials

Denver Collaborative Partnership is taking an upstream preventative approach to serving youth who run away and their families. A rapid response team is meeting the youth and families where they are and connecting them to evidence-based services (e.g., Multi-Systemic Therapy, Functional Family Therapy) aimed at preventing juvenile justice involvement and the need for out-of-home care. The Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab conducted an evaluation of this effort funded by Pay for Success and used LINC to connect the appropriate data for the baseline information on youth involved in the evaluation.

Project Materials

In 2019, the Colorado state legislature passed Senate Bill 19-228 to address the opioid crisis and authorized a LINC project focused on understanding the prevalence of perinatal substance exposure and identifying prevention opportunities within and outside of healthcare systems. This demand for knowledge refocused the LINC leadership team’s energy toward addressing a common data sharing barrier—utilizing information on substance use and treatment for research and evaluation purposes without disclosing sensitive personal information. The LINC team sought and received guidance from the Center of Excellence for Protected Health Information, funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, on how LINC can receive such data for approved projects. LINC is now implementing this guidance and is able to onboard data partners who would like to better understand issues related to substance use and prevention.

Project Materials

Governor Jared Polis holds a strong commitment to expanding quality pre-K opportunities for young children and recognizes that a high-quality early care and education (ECE) workforce is essential to fulfilling this goal. The state had no centralized information on the ECE workforce to guide its plans to roll out investments, such as the size of the workforce, where teacher shortages existed, qualifications earned by educators, and recruitment and turnover rates. Using LINC, the Office of Early Childhood was able to partner with the Colorado Evaluation and Action Lab to connect data from the state’s workforce registry, background check, and early care provider systems to produce the first comprehensive look at the ECE workforce in Colorado. These data are now available in an interactive dashboard and a statewide snapshot report that will be routinely updated. 

A second phase LINC project is in development that will propose to add wage data as well as data on post-secondary pathways from the Colorado Departments of Labor and Employment and Higher Education.

Project Materials