special education

The 2011 edition of the C.A.R.E. Guide contains student activities, educator reflection opportunities, and video clips of experts sharing research and practice tips for educating culturally diverse students and students from low-income families.

"In considering different strategies for promoting productive and safe school environments, it can be difficult to know what works and what doesn’t. In particular, longstanding debates about zero tolerance policies leave many people confused about the bas ...

All children and youth have a human right to quality public education in safe and supportive learning environments. Such an education provides a foundation for access to higher education, meaningful employment and full participation in society. Although a ...

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 ...

On October 23, 2007, a 14-year-old boy at the Kennedy Middle School in Springfield, Massachusetts, was arrested after he refused to walk with a teacher to her office and instead returned to his classroom. According to the police report, he yelled at the t ...

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 ...

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn law enforcement officers in schools as School Resource Officers (SROs) as a means of improving school safety and improving relations between police officers and youth. However, when this project began in ...

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 ...

The term complex trauma describes the dual problem of children’s exposure to traumatic events and the impact of this exposure on immediate and long-term outcomes. Complex traumatic exposure refers to children’s experiences of multiple traumatic events th ...

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 ...

Article focuses on problem solving at the tail end of the school-to-prison pipeline, once youth have been adjudicated delinquent.

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 ...

In 2005-2006, juvenile justice professionals in Pennsylvania’s 67 counties were assessed to determine their current aftercare practices. As a result of this assessment, this Toolkit was written in 2006 to address one of their main areas of concern: helpin ...

This report presents the findings and recommendations of the Youth Justice Board, an after school program that engages New York City teenagers in studying public policy issues that affect young people. Since August 2012, the Youth Justice Board has focuse ...

This High School Early Warning Intervention Monitoring System (EWIMS) Implementation Guide is a supporting document for schools and districts that are implementing an early warning system or, specifically, the National High School Center’s Early Warning S ...

Learning is not just a cognitive process. Research shows that powerful social and emotional factors affect learning. Some of these factors involve social relationships. These social factors include the teacher's relationship with the student, the student' ...

The most disadvantaged, troubled students in the South and the nation attend schools in the juvenile justice systems. These children, mostly teenagers, usually are behind in school, possess substantial learning disabilities, exhibit recognizable behavior ...

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 ...

School Resource Officer (SRO) programs can play an important role in maintaining and increasing safety at schools and in neighboring communities. In order to effectively implement such programs, law enforcement agencies and schools should develop a Memora ...

Criminalizing kids for minor misbehavior in our schools unnecessarily exposes them to our justice system and increases the likelihood they will drop out of school and face later incarceration. Involvement of all stakeholders, including judicial leaders, i ...

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 ...

Youth who become involved with the juvenile courts have many common background risks. These risks are related to the individual (e.g., early aggression, mental health problems, substance use, trauma, education deficits, special education disabilities), fa ...

The Children’s Defense Fund’s report, Suspensions: Are They Helping Children? first brought the issue of racial disparities in discipline to national attention. African American over-representation in out-of-school suspensions has increased steadily from ...

Many students across the Nation struggle with emotional and behavioral problems that may lead them to act out in ways that school administrators and teachers might not understand or be prepared to respond to effectively. In today’s era of highstakes testi ...

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 ...

Article describing the collateral consequences to education, public housing and employment for adjudicated youth.

Exert: This document provides answers to frequently asked questions on the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act and the education rights of children and youth in homeless situations, based on the amendments made by the Every Student Succee ...

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 ...

Millions of U.S. public school students in grades K‒12 are suspended or expelled in an academic school year, particularly students in middle and high school.2 Research demonstrates that when students are removed from the classroom as a disciplinary measur ...

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 impact of students’ life experiences on their behavior has garnered increasing attention as schools strive to develop more supportive academic environments that address the needs of at-risk youth and facilitate continued academic engagement. Few event ...

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 ...