evaluation

New data from the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) estimates that over 3 million students are suspended or expelled every year, with minorities and special needs students often facing harsher discipline than their peers for the same offenses. Such excl ...

Alternative schools are essentially specialized educational environments that place a great deal of emphasis on small classrooms, high teacher-to-student ratios, individualized instruction, noncompetitive performance assessments, and less structured class ...

The main body of this report documents gross disparities in the use of out-of-school suspension experienced by students with disabilities and those from historically disadvantaged racial, ethnic, and gender subgroups. The egregious disparities revealed in ...

Excerpt: School-based police officers, known as school resource officers (SROs), have become a common and growing presence in schools across the nation. The presence of law enforcement in school, while intended to increase school safety, has also been ...

The Council of State Governments (CSG) released a groundbreaking report, Breaking Schools’ Rules, in 2011, which documented the negative impacts that suspension or expulsion from Texas public schools have on students. The CSG report revealed a large “huma ...

Two years ago, Houston, Texas, Assistant Chief of Police Brian Lumpkin was assigned by Chief of Police Charles McClelland to increase and improve programming for the citizens of Houston. A federal funding opportunity through the Community Oriented Policin ...

This guide was written to educate policymakers about the scope and impact of childhood trauma, to offer effective solutions that can be implemented with the support of informed public policy, and to provide information about additional resources. The Nati ...

Juvenile courts nationwide handle cases referred by schools for truancy or behavioral incidents. Since 2012, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) have trained jurisdictions on strategies and policies to reduce the number of re ...

This manual summarizes the major activities of the Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative (SBDI); an initiative funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The manual is intended to aid communities in developing their ...

This report examines how the involvement of the criminal justice system in school discipline policies and practices causes deprivations of human rights for children in four key areas: the right to be free from discrimination, the right to education, the r ...

Disparities in the use of school discipline by race, gender, and sexual orientation have been well-documented and continue to place large numbers of students at risk for short- and long-term negative outcomes. In order to improve the state of our knowledg ...

"This report aims to make transparent the rates at which school discipline practices and policies impact Black students in every K-12 public school district in 13 Southern states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nor ...

Throughout the 1990s, the rise of zero-tolerance school discipline policies resulted in the widespread adoption of strict and mandatory responses for a large range of misbehavior in school. An unintended consequence of these policies and practices were yo ...

Fueled by increasingly punitive approaches to student behavior such as “zero tolerance policies,” the past 20 years have seen an expansion in the presence of law enforcement, including school resource officers (SROs), in schools. According to the U.S. Dep ...

Excerpt: Research shows that youth who have supportive caregivers have better outcomes than youth with less supportive caregivers. This is true across the juvenile justice, child welfare, behavioral health, and education systems. Youth whose caregiver ...

The National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice, in partnership with the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention and Futures Without Violence, will present \"Emerging Opportunities to Use Medicaid to Support Trauma Services in Sch ...

The Engaging Youth in Schools: Tips for Law Enforcement webinar will provide tips and helpful recommendations for law enforcement agencies to engage and build trust among youth in schools by focusing discussion around the principles 21st century policing. ...

Excerpt: This Toolkit provides practical tools and resources to assist law enforcement agencies in building or enhancing effective operational responses to children exposed to violence (with or without a mental health partner). This toolkit contains t ...

Therapeutic treatment of the psychosocial after-effects of childhood exposure to traumatic stressors is a key component in the development of trauma-informed juvenile justice systems (Kerig, 2012). More than 80% of juvenile justice-involved youth report a ...

In the nine years since Congress reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) as the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), startling growth has occurred in what is often described as the “School-to-Prison Pipeline”1 – the use of educational p ...

AASA, The School Superintendents Association, and the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF) believe that all schools should be warm, welcoming and productive places for children to learn and for teachers to teach. We believe that exclusionary discipline – suspend ...

Developing positive school climates and improving school discipline policies and practices are critical steps to raising academic achievement and supporting student success. However, there is no single formula for doing so. Rather, the growing body of res ...

Our nation’s schools should be safe havens for teaching and learning free of crime and violence. Any instance of crime or violence at school not only affects the individuals involved but also may disrupt the educational process and affect bystanders, the ...

Excerpt - There has also been little research on how youth behaviors and decision-making influence police–youth contact (Brunson and Weitzer 2011), or on how officers’ concerns for community safety and their own safety influence these interactions. ...

Large numbers of youth involved with the juvenile justice system have significant mental health and substance abuse issues. Many of these youth could be better served in community settings, and juvenile court judges can lead or support community efforts ...

The zero tolerance policies that were adopted by many local and state education agencies in the 1990s had the unintended effect of unnecessarily introducing low-risk youth to the juvenile justice system for disruptive behaviors that are very typical of ad ...

As the education of our children – our nation’s future – and the school-justice connection has increasingly captured public attention, the sunshine of increased graduation rates has brought into sharp focus the shadow of the so-called school-to-prison pip ...

Excerpt: The “school-to-prison pipeline,” a term that has garnered a great deal of attention in recent years, describes the direct link between exclusionary school discipline practices and students’ subsequent involvement in the juvenile justice syste ...

The last twenty years have seen a remarkable increase in the criminalization of American schools and students. What officially began in 1994 with the signing of the federal Gun Free School Zone’s Act (GFSA), has escalated from a series of reforms intende ...

Excerpt: Several high-profile incidents of violence at U.S. schools have, understandably, raised concerns about the safety of students while at school. Just one incident of violence causes significant harm. In light of this, it is important to examine ...

Exert: "As state policymakers strive to provide students with equal educational opportunities, they must look beyond test scores and graduation rates to assess the school environment more broadly, and particularly the role of discipline policies and p ...

This chapter will address the excessive use of suspensions and other disciplinary actions against Black males who are disengaged from school. Academically disengaged students often come to school late, miss assignments, have difficulty understanding schoo ...

Many schools across the United States have enacted zero tolerance philosophy in response to perceived increases in violence and drugs in schools. It is believed that aggressive and unwavering punishment of many school infractions, including relatively min ...

"Oakland unified is no different than many urban districts struggling with the repercussions of zero-tolerance policies and related teacher and staff practices that for decades have failed our students of color. The complex web of policies, practices and ...

Schools and school districts around the country are turning to restorative justice practices as an alternative to harsh exclusionary discipline practices. Restorative justice is a philosophy, rather than a specific program or curriculum, which focuses on ...

The Safe Schools/Healthy Students (SS/HS) Initiative, developed as a collaboration of the U.S. Departments of Education (ED), Health and Human Services (HHS), and Justice (DOJ), strengthens the role of schools as healthy environments that support the acad ...

The NCJFCJ has published this guide as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justice system. The project aims to reduce the number of referrals to the juvenile justice system for school based behaviors through the ...

For students and educators to achieve their full potential, safe schools are fundamental. Students who report feeling safe in school are more engaged in class, have higher academic achievement, and have lower rates of absenteeism, truancy, and behavioral ...

The third webinar in this series of four provides strategies for identifying youth who are both at risk of juvenile justice system referral from the school setting and who may have behavioral health needs. On this webinar, experts will discuss the most ef ...

The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) funded the School-Based Partnerships (SBP) grant program for the purpose of partnering law enforcement agencies with schools to address crime and disorder problems in and around middle and h ...

The Let Her Learn Survey revealed that more than 1 in 5 girls have been sexually assaulted, while 1 in 3 girls reported either sexual assault or other violence. As a result of educational barriers, girls are being pushed out of school. There was an increa ...

In the early 1990s, many schools adopted zero tolerance policies, which mandate the use of specific disciplinary consequences—often severe and punitive—in an effort to increase school safety. Originally designed to reduce weapon-carrying in schools, these ...

This toolkit provides a step-by-step guide for implementing some of the core principles and activities of the full SBDI initiative. A simple-to-use checklist is included to guide you through implementation of key SBDI elements. There are self-assessment q ...

RESEARCH AND DATA ON SCHOOL DISCIPLINE practices are clear: millions of students are being removed from their classrooms each year, mostly in middle and high schools, and overwhelmingly for minor misconduct. When suspended, these students are at a signif ...

The last webinar in this series of four addresses the crucial role that embedding structural supports such as memorandums of agreement (MOAs), graduated sanction grids, and trainings into the diversion initiative will play in the success and sustainabilit ...

Discipline Disparities: A Research-to-Practice Collaborative Recent national tragedies—the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice keep issues of race at the forefront of our national consciousness. As much as we try to lo ...

Throughout the United States violent crime has seen a marked reduction—reports of violent crime have decreased from 1.4 million in 2007 to 1.2 million in 2011. In the past few years, a growing awareness in high percentage rates of the detention of mentall ...