This story was told by a staff member at Centinela.
UCI: Beautiful. How have the facilities been handling your program during COVID?
Caller: Well, all of our in-person programming was suspended once the lockdown began, and we were, we pivoted to distance learning or what they called prison in-cell packets, so we essentially figured out how to sort of change our format to a written format and write those out in, you know 10-page lessons and then submit them through the mail. Some of the prisons, we mail them directly to the participants.
UCI: Okay.
Caller: In the classes and to our correspondents, which is directly to them. And other institutions didn’t want that to happen, so they would either have us email them the lessons, some of the more cooperative and active CRMs would put them themselves and take them to the participants and then collect them and then scan them and mail them back to us. Others we would drop them off and give them prepaid postage boxes where they would disseminate the lessons and then collect them and mail them back to us, was the original plan.
Now, some of the CRMs, which is community resource manager, some were more attentive and active than others and were really on top of it, and others would kind of just fell through the cracks in a lot of ways. We would deliver the lessons, and we wouldn’t get them back from the CRMs for up to 90 days.
UCI: And how has the response been from your students that, I mean, just in general, I guess you know you can’t tell whether it’s the students that aren’t responding or it’s the CRMs that are not collecting the lessons in time?
Caller: That’s it. You know, that’s kind of the, the data we were receiving back was, you know, all over the place. It would be like well, participants didn’t want to continue being involved, and/ or you know, they would say they hadn’t received any back. And then others were, like I said, you know, some of the CRMs were more on top of it they got directly to them and we got them directly back and the response was positive.