A Chicago non-profit received $25 million in funding Thursday to lead a previously discontinued violence-prevention program after the school board voted unanimously for its restatement.
The program, called Back to Our Future, was designed to be a trailblazing initiative to prevent gun violence and reengage youth ages 14 through 21 who were disconnected from Chicago public schools. Armed with an $18 million grant, the joint effort between the city of Chicago, the state, the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab and three local non-profits aimed to reach 1,000 youth in 15 neighborhoods on the South and West sides who had stopped going to school 18 months prior or longer and re-enroll them in school.
The program started in 2022. A year later, according to a 2023 Crime Lab report, Back to Our Future hadn’t met even half its goal to lure students back to the classroom. It was put on a corrective action plan and later its funding was cut off in 2024 due to challenges with coordination and enrollment.
According to CPS, 446 students joined the program, only 71 students re-engaged in school and only 32 had earned a high school diploma. Only half of those enrolled in the program had been out of school for 18 months.
Officials and stakeholders involved with the program’s first iteration, say it’s unclear if the new school board-approved new operator, Metropolitan Family Services, is up to the challenge of bringing in youth who meet the criteria for the program’s target population. And meaningful success, they said, takes time.
“If this is going to have a sustainable impact, it’s going to be really important to understand the complexity of the population,” said Roseanna Ander, founder and executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, a research lab that provided pro bono support for the program. “You need to go slow to go fast. This is a population that has a … not monolithic set of barriers that they face and needs that they are struggling with.”
The procurement report in Thursday’s school board agenda allocates $25 million over three years to Metropolitan Family Services, a large, regional, non-profit social services provider, to work with smaller organizations to recruit and engage teenage participants to fulfill Back to Our Future’s goal. MFS will be allocated over $25 million for three years to support the subcontracting process in collaboration with CPS and increase participant outreach, according to the school board agenda.
Several people involved in the program who declined to use their names because they weren’t authorized to speak are against the investment due to the previous lack of transparency and poor data oversight. MFS did not immediately respond to a request for comment about how it plans to lead the subcontracting process or guarantee that Back to Our Future’s mission is carried out.
Back to Our Future is run through the district’s Office of School Safety and Security, a branch of CPS that used to be led by Jadine Chou, head of safety and security. Chou left the district at the beginning of February.
But despite Chou no longer taking the lead on this new iteration of the program, “administrative support” for the program’s student recruitment process was already lacking the first time, said Yolanda Fields, executive director of Breakthrough Urban Ministries, one of the non-profits involved in the program the first time.
Members of Breakthrough’s outreach team, for example, were provided lists of dozens of students from CPS. Those lists had outdated addresses and numbers, Fields said. In some cases, the students provided by the district were already victims of gun violence.
“None of the people on my team thought in a million years that we would go knocking on doors and making phone calls and have moms tell us, ‘You’re too late. My son is dead,’” she said.
More than 90% of school-aged victims of gun violence were inactive at the time they were shot, according to University of Chicago research.
Fields said Back to Our Future succeeded in bringing community-based resources to those types of students — “who are the most vulnerable for violence, for hunger and housing insecurity.” When the program stopped, Breakthrough continued to provide services for 30 students they had on track to graduate, she said. Breakthrough plans to reapply to be part of the program under MFS, she said.
The Back to Our Future participants had varying levels of academic needs, from being just a few credits away from graduating to struggling to read. Some students participated in online school to avoid falling back into the same patterns they encountered in their CPS schools. They re-enrolled at neighborhood and charter schools and registered for GED programs and vocational educational programs.
Youth who registered participated in a year of programming that started with 12 weeks of paid soft skills training and cognitive behavioral therapy.
In practice, however, many students didn’t participate in Back to Our Future in full. The Crime Lab 2023 analysis found students spent an average of seven hours on the program, less than half of the 20-hour target. The engagement rate increased slightly as the program went on, the analysis shows.
More pressing for those involved in the program the first time was Crime Lab’s finding that less than half of the students referred — 41% — actually fit the criteria of being out of school for 18 months. Among referred youth, 46% had been previously arrested, and 23% had specialized education needs, according to the report.
Crime Lab took a step back from the program after it wrapped up its analysis at the end of 2023 — which recommended looking beyond conventional outreach methods, such as home visits and phone calls, to increase enrollment rates for the target demographic. It also recommended adapting the programming to better respond to the unique needs of this population.
CPS did not respond to a request for comment about how data will be gathered without Crime Lab, or the specifics of its plans to work with MFS.
Crime Lab’s Kim Smith called the program “ambitious” and said Back to Our Future’s directors “learned a lot about barriers to engagement.”
“It’s important to be aligned on how we determine success in the program,” she said. “There’s not like a one-size-fits-all all cookie-cutter approach.”
