Laura Dobson, left, who is support coordiantor of the Center for Community Resources, and Debra Gould of Community Action look over Paper Pantry items at Community Action on the Sunnyview campus recently. The Paper Pantry was one initiative of the Butler Collaborartive.

SLIPPERY ROCK — Butler County's young people are under increased scrutiny this month as a class at Slippery Rock University is conducting a study of residents ages 12 to 25.

The findings of Assistant Professor Alice Del Vecchio's 46-member Community Development and Community Change class will be turned over to the Butler Collaborative for Families.

The Butler Collaborative, a group of 42 education, social service and faith-based organizations, hopes to use the gathered information to identify the needs of children and youths and create services to meet them, said Dr. Elan Welter Lewis of Family Pathways, a member of the collaborative's executive board.

Del Vecchio and her class divided the county into 10 regions with each region assigned four to five students. Each student will be responsible for researching one community within that region.

Del Vecchio said some information can be gleaned from crime rate figures and census data. Other information will come from other sources in each region.

“They will identify the resources as well as the needs of the community,” Del Vecchio said. “Talk to to as many people as possible, focus on high school kids, talk to pastors.

“Probably they won't be knocking on doors,” said Del Vecchio of her students' efforts. “If there's a survey, it may be up to the student council in a school to conduct it. Then the students analyze the data.

“We are really collecting resources to kind of give a snapshot of what is going on with youth in Butler County,” Del Vecchio said.

At the end of the semester, the class will make a presentation of its findings to the collaborative on Dec. 5 and 12.

This information will be welcome, according to Lewis, because it will allow the collaborative to marshal its resources more effectively.

“What makes it a special level of collaboration is that the culture we have, we work together to meet the needs,” Lewis said.

For example, the collaborative had gotten a grant from the Child Trust Fund for teen parenting classes because most teen parent programs have been eliminated from schools, Lewis said.

Other new initiatives the collaborative has started include Put My Best Foot Forward, which provides shoes for school children and people interviewing for jobs, and the Winter Relief Center, which supplies the needs of the homeless during frigid weather.

“Although the Children's Center deals with birth through five-year-olds, we're all in it together. Any information will be shared for future use,” said Debbie Eddinger, disabilities liason at the Butler County Children's Center, 139 Rieger Road, and treasurer of the collaborative's executive board.

The collaborative may get the information, but the class gets a lesson its members could never learn from a book.

“This kind of strategy is called service learning or action research,” said Del Vecchio, whose professional studies department works with students to creat their own majors. “My students learn more about community development by providing a service. For the community, they get the information needed to solve problems.

“We don't give them enough real work. This is an opportunity to make an impact,” Del Vecchio said. “Most tell me when they finish, it's the first time they've done something in class that will be used.”