Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/tag/education-and-training/)
Proponents say hiring 18 year-olds is a win-win: Recent graduates fill a critical staffing need and jump-start their career right out of high school. Critics say teenagers lack the emotional maturity needed to work with inmates. Who is correct?
Most school shootings don’t just happen out of nowhere – there are typically warning signs. This past September 4, a 14-year-old boy was arrested for allegedly opening fire in his Georgia high school math class – killing two teachers and two students. Only a year ago, authorities visited his home to investigate several anonymous tips about online threats to commit a school shooting. What went wrong in Georgia and how can we prevent this from happening in the future?
A new state law lets teachers carry a gun at school. James Arrowood, who’s had a handgun permit for 15 years, is open to doing so if it can provide an extra layer of security against a school shooting. But between concerns about his personal liability and ambivalence about the new law from local school leaders, many teachers won’t be carrying guns to class this school year.
Ibtihal “Ibti” Cheko, 17, thought she would spend the legislative session in Tennessee advocating for laws about how guns should be stored and implementing background checks for those who want to buy them. Instead, Cheko and other organizers with Students Demand Action pivoted to trying to make sure Senate Bill 1325, which would permit faculty and staff to carry handguns at school, did not pass. They weren’t successful. The bill passed in both chambers in April.
On the first day of Zoom classes, my professor went straight into content that I’m all too familiar with: the school-to-prison pipeline. Every day as a certified peer support specialist at a maximum security prison, I see the long-term impacts of poverty and a broken K-12 system in marginalized communities. I’m taking the class on a contraband cell phone. Now, I’m connected to the world.
The number of children incarcerated in juvenile prisons across the United States fell to an all-time low in 2020, the latest year of available federal data about those facilities, fueling proponents’ hopes of entirely eliminating those detention centers.
The decline in incarcerations came as juvenile arrests have also dropped for most crimes except murder, which has been on the rise in recent years.
Along with New Jersey and California, Utah is among a growing number of states that are implementing postsecondary programming for incarcerated youth. Utah’s Higher Education for Incarcerated Youth program even goes beyond what’s offered to incarcerated adults in Utah: Most adults in Utah prisons do not have access to free college-level courses.