behavioral health

"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 ...

A well implemented early warning system can help educators and others identify students at risk of dropping out and assign and monitor interventions to keep them on track for graduation. This guide describes and provides examples of early warning system ...

Juvenile justice probation and detention workers play an important role in helping system-involved youth and families navigate justice and social service systems; achieving goals of accountability, competency, and community safety; and promoting safety, s ...

Each year, nearly 380,000 minors experience “unaccompanied” homelessness — meaning they are homeless and without a parent or guardian — for a period of longer than one week. (1) These young people, much like their adult counterparts, are often cited, arre ...

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 ...

Excerpt from website This second Webinar in the joint U.S. Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services Supportive School Discipline (SSD) Webinar Series provides the knowledge that school, district, residential facility, and cour ...

This second Webinar in the joint U.S. Departments of Education, Justice, and Health and Human Services Supportive School Discipline (SSD) Webinar Series provides the knowledge that school, district, residential facility, and court staff, law enforcement, ...

Screening and assessment of traumatic stress and its psychosocial after-effects play an important role in a trauma-informed juvenile justice system. Trauma exposure and its negative consequences are highly prevalent among justice-involved youth. For examp ...

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 CODE OF CONDUCT is based upon the laws, rules, regulations, and policies that seek to allow access to education for all while protecting the due process rights of the individual. Discipline, as defined by the Code, must have the qualities of understan ...

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 ...

Example cooperative agreement between public school system, police department, child welfare, district attorneys, behavioral health services, and juvenile justice.

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 ...

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 ...

Dealing with a child’s traumatic experience is confusing and stressful for parents as well as for the child. They wisely seek help, but the search for help can itself be confusing. How do parents know whether a proposed treatment has a good chance of work ...

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 ...

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 ...

The National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice (NCMHJJ) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) for the four-part webinar series. The series will explore the fundamental components of developing effective school-b ...

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 ...

The first webinar in this series of four provides an overview of two school-based diversion initiatives that emerged from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Models for Change Mental Health/Juvenile Justice Action Network, and that have be ...

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder and Education Secretary Arne Duncan issued the first ever national guidelines for school discipline in public schools, in an effort to keep more students in class and reduce racial disparities in punishment. The fed ...

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 ...

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 ...

Experiences of elevated, prolonged stress or trauma rock the very core of children and young people. In these circumstances, children are overwhelmed with the internal reactions that race through their brains and bodies. They do anything to survive, not b ...

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 ...

Passed in the 2014 legislative session, Substitute House Bill 2739 (Chapter 196, Laws of 2014) directs that an analysis examine the effects of community factors such as economic well-being, safety and family challenges on academic and youth success. In c ...

Corresponding document on 'Understanding and Responding to Escalating Behavior' presentation by Dr. Sugai and Dr. Colvin.

The Office of Special Education (OSEP) Technical Assistance Center for PBIS, was established by the OSEP, U.S. Department of Education to give schools capacity-building information and technical assistance for identifying, adapting, and sustaining effecti ...

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports is an evidence-based way for schools to improve student behavior and establish a positive school culture - and when discipline improves, grades and test scores improve as well. PBIS pulls together research-ba ...

Historically, most educators have recognized two primary aims of school discipline: (a) managing student behavior, relying primarily on the use of teacher‐centered techniques for preventing and correcting misbehavior and (b) developing self‐discipline, co ...

Excerpt from website This Webinar was the fourth in NDTAC's 2012-2013 Webinar series, Tailoring Academic and Behavioral Support Services for Youth. NDTAC Director Simon Gonsoulin opened the Webinar with an overview of NDTAC’s work and the context o ...

These comprehensive documents are intended for educators who work primarily with preschool, elementary, middle school, and high school students, respectively. They describe how to identify children in the four age groups who may be experiencing traumatic ...

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 ...

Severe trauma in children causes toxic stress in kids, which can damage the brain and lead to the child being put in a flight, fight, or fright mode that is physiologically impossible to learn in. Being a trauma-informed school means shifting the discipli ...

Severe trauma in children causes toxic stress in kids, which can damage the brain and lead to the child being put in a flight, fight, or fright mode that is physiologically impossible to learn in. Being a trauma-informed school means shifting the discipli ...

Humans are born to learn, but we don’t learn in isolation. We learn based on positive relationships and interactions with peers and in environments like schools that foster opportunities for students and staff to learn and grow together. Educators recogni ...

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 a Technical Assistance Bulletin on the School Pathways to the Juvenile Justice System: A Context for a Practice Guide for Courts and Schools as part of a larger project addressing school discipline referrals to the juvenile justic ...

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 ...

This Field Guide is written for Assistant Attorneys General, Child Protective Service Specialists (case managers), County Attorneys, Court Appointed Special Advocates, Behavioral Health Treatment Providers, Juvenile Probation and Parole Officers, and Scho ...

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 ...

Ironically, zero tolerance policies once promoted as a solution to youth violence have created a school to prison pipeline. Widespread discipline practices of suspension, expulsion, and arrest for school behavior problems are turning kids in conflict int ...

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 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 ...

Traumatic events cause terror, intense fear, horror, helplessness, and physical stress reactions (for example, heart beating fast, strong startle, stomach dropping, shakiness). The impact of these events does not simply go away when they are over. Instead ...

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 ...

The restraint and seclusion of individuals—practices usually associated with highly restrictive environments—are extreme responses to student behavior used in some public schools (see Box 1). This brief aims to answer important questions about the extent ...

This document provides a list of simple and straightforward strategies educators can use to accommodate a traumatized child in the school setting. It also teaches educators how to determine when traumatic stress reactions are severe enough to merit a refe ...