Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/education/)
The roundtable discussion focused on the importance and effectiveness of mentoring and encouraged participation in mentorship opportunities for Florida’s youth.
Parents in Boone County, Kentucky, were outraged this past January when a ninth grader who had been suspended a year earlier for threatening violence against his fellow students returned to class as soon as his punishment time was up.
“The kid had a ‘kill list’ which named students — friends he was going to kill,” said Republican state Rep. Steve Rawlings.
To Syrita Steib, the University of New Orleans denied her first application for admission in what seemed like lightning speed. With equal speed, though, the university accepted her second application. The difference? The second time around, Steib didn’t disclose her criminal history.
Bullied at his Philadelphia high school, Earl Morris’ son started defying his teachers and his father and allegedly stole from a convenience store. Those charges against the then 15-year-old, who’d been diagnosed with disabilities including anxiety and depression, were dismissed when a witness failed to appear in court, his father said, recalling what happened five years ago.
To some in the audience, Jeremy White sounding like he was preaching.
“I was 19 years old when I got incarcerated. I was facing 120 years,” White, 42, said, his words deliberate, his cadence suited for a Sunday morning pulpit, his Tennessee drawl full on.
“ … [I began] remembering where I came from … ”
“That’s good, that’s good!” Vickie Woodard exclaimed.
By September 2020, 11 new unarmed public safety support specialists, many with law enforcement-related backgrounds, were in place and on the Minneapolis Public Schools payroll. Two years and one pandemic later, initial data and interviews with students and staff suggest that fewer Minneapolis students are being punished and, consequently, missing class for suspensions or other punishment.
Most of the 50 states have clearly designated which agencies are in charge of hiring teachers for incarcerated juveniles, creating teaching curriculum and other education services. But how and by whom that instruction gets delivered varies substantially from state to state and locale to locale, resulting in a fragmented system that generally provides inferior instruction, according to a recent report from Bellwether Education Partners.
Researchers found almost all of 112 Philadelphians who have been released from lifetime prison sentences said they participated in some form of prison programming, but 53 percent reported having been restricted from vocational programs such as barbering (Pennsylvania prioritizes people who have less than five years left on their sentences for vocational training). “A lot of these guys who did end up taking advantage of the college programming were able to enroll through their perseverance as opposed to these programs being allocated for them,” said study co-author Tarika Daftary-Kapur, professor of justice studies at Montclair State University in New Jersey, which conducted the survey.
Scrambling to respond to a wave of violence and escapes from other juvenile detention facilities, Louisiana state officials quietly opened the high-security lockup last summer to regain control of the most troubled teens in their care. Instead, they created a powder keg, according to dozens of interviews, photo and video footage and hundreds of pages of incident reports, emergency response logs, emails and education records.
For Madeline Borrelli, a special education teacher in Brooklyn, N.Y., having NYPD-trained law enforcement officers in schools is a cut-and-dry issue: “School safety agents,” she said, using their official job title, “ … should not exist at all.”