Casey Life Skills is Changing

November, 2021

Casey Life Skills (CLS) is a set of free tools that assess the independent skills youth need to achieve their long-term goals. It aims to guide youth toward developing healthy, productive lives. In Virginia, the LDSS will work with the youth to take this assessment within 30 days of turning 14 years old, or within 30 days of coming into care after age 14. David Sanders, Ph.D., Executive Vice President of Systems Improvement, sent this update through email. The text below is the same as what was sent to subscribers in November.

It’s with great pleasure that I’m announcing a major change to the Casey Life Skills (CLS) platform. Today a new version of CLS is available at https://www.casey.org/casey-life-skills. The toolkit has been revised in collaboration with foster care alumni, resource parents, service providers and child welfare experts to reflect the current needs of the youth. This aligns with Casey Family Programs’ focus on empowering communities, and centering a diversity, equity and inclusion lens. The updated versions will be going through test-retest and other validation processes. In the future, we will also be providing a Spanish translation to the assessment tools. Future updates to the toolkit will be posted to https://www.casey.org/casey-life-skills.

This toolkit can be downloaded and implemented in your own systems. Assessments are now in an Excel spreadsheet format, allowing for more flexibility in how you choose to administer them. Youth no longer need to create an account on the CLS website. If you wish to use a tool other than Excel we’ve updated our license agreement so that you can export and import the questions into the assessment tool of your choice. Additionally, we recognize that organizations need to be able to secure their patient/ client data in a manner that meets their local needs such as compliance with HIPAA, SOPPA and other frameworks.

To ensure that agencies administering the assessments have control over their data, we have updated the legacy CLS website (https://caseylifeskills.secure.force.com/) with an improved data download tool to make it easier to download historical assessment data—this function will be available for a limited time to support your CLS transition. Instructions on how to use this tool are available at https://www.casey.org/media/CLS-Data-Download-Instructions.pdf. We realize this is a big shift and we want to give ample time to allow organizations to adjust to the new tool. The legacy version of CLS will be available until April, 11, 2022. All assessment data will be deleted on May 9, 2022. If you have any questions about this transition, please contact lifeskills@casey.org.

To learn more, visit the website https://www.casey.org/casey-life-skills/.