Brought to you by Dalton and Debbie

Site assessments allow the IDOC Community Corrections Division to better understand the county agencies. Site assessments are a tool for assessing the county as part of the grant review process. Site assessments allow IDOC to assess CC programs and their use of Evidence-Based Practices, and identify areas of strength and weakness.

Your Regional Program Director will conduct your assessment. The state is split into two regions, eastern and western.

Debbie Braun is the Program Director for the western side of the state and Dalton Haney is the Program Director for the eastern side of the state. Other IDOC Community Corrections staff may be present to observe the assessment.

The previous assessment had 15 domains that were looked at concerning Evidence-Based Practice. Each domain had a possible 5 points available. Total score was out of 75 points. The assessment was taken from the National Institute of Corrections website and is from The previous assessment, although valuable, is not as comprehensive as the new tool.

Work that you may have done to prepare for an assessment or improve your score using the previous tool will greatly help you in preparation for an assessment with the new tool, since the focus of both is EBP. The previous tool is the foundation for the new comprehensive assessment tool.

The new assessment tool was designed by Mark Carey and the Carey Group in 2011 as a self- assessment. It is a checklist which allows staff to evaluate their own agency and its use of EBP. The questions of the new assessment reflect the domains on the old tool.

There are 6 sections in this assessment tool. They are: Cultural Alignment and Readiness Assessments Effective Staff and Offender Interactions Continuum of Programming Quality Assurance/Performance Data Organizational Supports Each section is comprised of 10 questions, each of which is rated on a scale from 1-5.

Total points available for each section is 50. Total points for the assessment is 300. The score out of 300 will be divided by three for a final score out of 100. The written grant and grant committee scores will be given a score out of 100 also. Hopefully this will simplify the scoring process.

As this new assessment tool was designed as a self-assessment, we are asking each Community Corrections agency to complete a self assessment. This self-assessment should be completed by the Director and approximately 10% of all staff.

The staff completing the assessment should represent a cross-section of employees. The self-assessments are due to your Program Director between the dates of December 1, 2012 and December 31, 2012.

Your site assessment will be scheduled with your Director between the dates of January 1, 2012 and March 31, Debbie and I will try to accommodate scheduling issues, however, with 67 agencies to assess, this may not always be possible.

The site assessment will be conducted with the Director, although the Director may have any other staff present that he/she wishes. During the actual assessment, the self-assessments that were completed will be used as a guide. Documentation to support the answers given in the self- assessment will be requested.

Any Questions??