The report shows that only 33% of youth are placed within Philadelphia or 10 miles of it, a considerable decrease from 52% two years earlier. Meanwhile, 57% were placed 50 miles or more from Philadelphia, up from 37% in 2023.\n<\/p>\n
With the shift in location and school district, it can often take months for youth to be placed in a steady public school program. Johnson said the gap in education negatively affects a child\u2019s development and confidence. Additionally, she notes that moving young people far from Philadelphia can also sever connections to their previous schools.\n<\/p>\n
Data collection is a core part of the OYO\u2019s work, and they publish their data and survey reports annually. During visits to facilities, Johnson and her team began collecting information not traditionally tracked. They asked young people about their religious background, sexual orientation and gender identity.\n <\/p>\n
\u201cA lot of people look at age, race, and gender, and that\u2019s it. But in our first year, we started looking at religion, and we started noticing that the majority<\/a> of the young people in the facilities that we were going to were Muslim,\u201d she said.\n<\/p>\n It was through this process that the OYO found that some Muslim residents were not provided with the accommodations they needed to practice their faith, including access to prayer rugs, Qurans and kufis. In one facility, Johnson\u2019s team worked with leadership and a community partner to provide those materials to young people in time for Ramadan.\n<\/p>\n For Johnson, the experience showed the value of asking questions that traditional data collection can miss. By learning more about how residents identify, OYO was able to pinpoint needs that otherwise might have gone unnoticed. \u201cWe had to learn that through the facilities, and then we began to act on it,\u201d she said. Speaking up to spark change<\/p>\n In her three years as youth ombudsperson, Johnson has found that young people in residential facilities sometimes believe speaking up won\u2019t change anything.\n<\/p>\n That sense of powerlessness and lack of agency is not unique to young people in residential facilities. Nationally, half of Americans age 18-29 say that people like them have no say in what the government does<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n But Johnson and her team try to counter that belief by showing residents that their complaints can lead to change. Sometimes, Johnson said, young people later recognize that speaking up helped improve conditions for their peers.\n<\/p>\n
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Resources provided to young people by the Philadelphia Office of the Youth Ombudsperson.(Rana Rastegari\/WHYY)\n<\/p>\n