Stephenson Disaster Management Institute/Louisiana State University
One record
per cadet.
From the application a family starts on a phone at the kitchen table to the twelfth month of post-residential mentoring, STARS keeps one record per young person — and one system per state program.
On record today
- 171,831
- People
- 45,969
- Applications
- 25,116
- Cadets
- 124
- Classes
- 2012
- Earliest record
What STARS carries
The whole arc, not a slice of it.
Most systems a program could buy stop at the decision letter. Youth Challenge does not stop there, and neither does the record.
Intake
A family applies
One application, from a phone at the kitchen table. Documents, consents, and signatures arrive attached to it.
Review
A counselor works it
Eligibility, missing paperwork, and the interview — routed to the recruiter who covers that county.
Placement
A class is assigned
The applicant is matched to a campus and a cycle, and the family is told which one.
Residential
22 weeks on campus
Platoons, attendance, TABE testing, sick call, write-ups, and every day in between.
Graduation
The class graduates
The cohort finishes together. The record does not close with the ceremony.
Post-residential
12 months with a mentor
Month by month, for a year after the young person goes home. This is the phase nothing else tracks.
In the system
Purpose-built, down to the vocabulary.
A general-purpose tool has no word for a platoon, a cycle, or a post-residential month. STARS is built out of them.
- Intake
- Application forms configured per state, with document requests and signatures collected inside the form.
- Recruiting
- County territories, recruiter assignment, shared coverage, and split credit on the board.
- Cadets
- Cycles, classes, platoons, and the residential record behind each one.
- Medical
- Sick call, medications, insurance, and duty restrictions.
- Conduct
- Write-ups with their review chain, through academic and commandant sign-off.
- Documents
- Requirement packets, versioned forms, generated PDFs, and a receipt for every sensitive read.
- Workflows
- Processes defined in code and versioned with the program, so work moves without anyone chasing it.
- Reports
- A shared library of built-in and saved reports, run on demand or on a schedule.
- Programs
- Youth Challenge and Job Challenge run side by side, each administering its own roles without reaching into the other's records.
- Assistant
- An in-app assistant that finds a report, runs it, and drafts a new one.
It holds information about minors
- Encryption
- At rest and in transit, with a second layer on sensitive fields
- Tenancy
- Each state's records isolated from every other state's
- Access
- Role-based, resolved per permission rather than per session
- Audit
- Every sensitive read and export leaves a receipt
Programs on STARS
Find your state.
Every program runs its own intake, its own campuses, and its own branding. Pick yours to apply or sign in.