Diversion programs for youth increase after boost to county funding • South Dakota Searchlight

A 2023 bill that paved the way for higher payments to counties that keep kids out of the justice system has increased the number of diversion offers from prosecutors across South Dakota.

That was among the takeaways from an annual juvenile justice report presented recently to the state’s Juvenile Justice Oversight Council.

Senate Bill 5, passed in 2023, extended the lifespan of the council, a group created in 2015 alongside a sweeping juvenile justice reform package that aimed to reduce the number of youth in secure detention. The reforms were meant to avoid the harms associated with incarceration for children and offer more fiscally responsible alternatives. Locking up children costs considerably more than probation supervision or in-community programming.

The bill also empowered the council to make adjustments to things like the amount of money paid per kid for diversion programs. The council recommended offering $750 to counties for each successful diversion, a $500 increase. The Department of Corrections (DOC) sponsored a successful bill to boost that funding during the 2024 session.

In the past nine years, counties have collected $4.2 million in incentives from the state. 

Avoiding a judge

Children are not charged with crimes in the juvenile justice system, but rather “adjudicated” for the alleged commission of a criminal act. With diversion programs, prosecutors use a report from law enforcement for criminal behavior as the starting point for a set of actions an accused child must take to avoid seeing the incident move through a formal adjudication.

A child charged with alcohol consumption, for example, might be asked to complete a substance abuse evaluation and to check in with the prosecutor’s office monthly while maintaining good behavior for a few months. If the child satisfies the diversion requirements, their case will be closed without them ever seeing a judge.

Juvenile justice report: More delinquent kids taken to court

According to the annual report presented to the oversight council on Tuesday, diversion programming increased for the most common juvenile infractions in 2024. 

The last fiscal year “saw two times as many kids getting diversion opportunities from where we started” with the reforms nearly 10 years ago, according to Kristi Bunkers, an oversight council member who leads the DOC’s juvenile justice programming.

Those opportunities translate into better long-term outcomes for troubled youth, Bunkers told the oversight group.

“The research continues to come out in support of diversion,” she said. “It’s a really promising window of opportunity for the system to get it right.” 

About 82% of the 2,439 kids offered diversion programming last year were successful, the annual report says. The year before that, there were 2,180 diversions, and just over 83% were successful.

Diversions for alcohol and drugs, crimes against property and persons, sex offenses and tobacco use increased in 2024, according to the report.

Truancy, however, saw fewer diversions than in 2023, down to 270 from 313 in 2023. There were 694 and 565 in 2021 and 2022, respectively.  

Homeschooling concerns with truancy

David Knoff, a First Circuit judge and oversight council member, said the council’s truancy subgroup met three or four times this year to discuss the issue. Truancy is when a kid is chronically absent from school. Knoff was among the council members to note that truancy cases often suggest deeper issues in a child’s home life. 

A child has often missed weeks or months of school by the time a case lands in court, Knoff said, so the subgroup was focused on finding out ways to intervene sooner. The Department of Social Services’ Division of Behavioral Health offers programming to kids and families, serving 4,775 youth in individual or family sessions in 2024.

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“How do we make the family aware of how they can tap into those resources, or school districts, how they can get those to the families and get them tapped in to see that they can qualify and get the counseling they need to find out what kind of issues are going on within the homes,” Knoff said. 

Knoff also talked about the possibility that truancy cases have been affected by a 2021 law making it easier for parents to pull their children from school and place them in “alternative instruction” such as online schooling or homeschooling.

The law change struck down things like testing requirements and instruction time requirements, and removed a clause that allowed the state’s Department of Education to investigate situations where there’s concern a child might not be getting the instruction they’re required to under state law. 

If a child is pulled from school for in-home instruction, Knoff said, “then there is no truancy.”

Knoff said he and others on the council are concerned that some students’ attendance and participation have suffered in certain homeschooling situations.

“It’s not that homeschooling itself is the problem,” Knoff said. “It’s certain parents who maybe don’t have the ability or resources to be able to effectively homeschool, and they can just pull their kid out of school, which has a lot of long-term effects.”

Council member Tiffany Wolfgang of the DSS will leave state government, and the council, at the end of the year after nearly three decades in various social service roles. Wolfgang told the council that as valuable as state-level reports and oversight can be, local school districts and community leaders are critical to crafting the approach to things like truancy.

“Truancy really is a local, local issue in really, truly needing to get the players at the local level in a room together, communicating and talking about what resources we have,” Wolfgang said. “How do we want to address truancy in this community and who needs to talk to whom?”