data

Exert from publication: A mid-sized urban district in the Northeast and Islands Region formulated and implemented a new discipline policy using data and research. To do so, the district examined a national report on districtwide suspension rates, co ...

"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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: The Averted School Attacks Data Collection Platform seeks to improve the amount of information pertaining to averted school attacks as a part of the data systems enhancement efforts that stem from the Comprehensive School Safety Initiative. T ...

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 ...

Girls of color face much harsher school discipline than their white peers but are excluded from current efforts to address the school-to-prison pipeline, according to a new report issued today by the African American Policy Forum and Columbia Law School’s ...

Every day, hundreds of thousands of youth cycle in and out of state and local juvenile justice systems throughout the county. They are seen in probation offices, juvenile detention centers, juvenile courts, and correctional facilities every day. Many of 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 ...

National Center for Mental Health and Juvenile Justice (NCMHJJ) and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ) presented the second in a four-part webinar series on school-based juvenile justice diversion models for youth with behav ...

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 ...

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 ...

Excerpt: Communities of color have a long-standing history of inequitable treatment by the police in the U.S. In recent years, activists with the Black Lives Matter movement have helped to raise the profile of the destructive treatment of the black comm ...

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

High rates of suspensions and expulsions are daunting problems affecting many California schools. In part, these rates are the result of Zero Tolerance policies enacted in the early 1990s to improve school safety. Although Zero Tolerance policies original ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Mission Judge Steven Teske, a juvenile court judge in Clayton County, Ga, began to observe and learn that referrals to law enforcement skyrocketed as soon as school resource officers were stationed at local schools. In fact, in the mid to late nineties ...

The National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, in partnership with the National Association of School Boards of Education and supported by the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention's School Justice Collaboration Program, present ...

Every young person has the human right to a high quality education and to learn in a safe, respectful school environment that protects human dignity. Research has shown that punitive, zero-tolerance approaches to discipline do not prevent or reduce misbe ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the name of public safety, Black children in Oakland are being arrested at vastly disproportionate rates. This derails their opportunities for educational success while failing to ensure our children’s safety. From Report Card to Criminal Record: The I ...

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 ...

Exert: Volume 2 of Helping Traumatized Children Learn: Creating and Advocating for Trauma-Sensitive Schools, safe, supportive learning environments that benefit all children offers a Guide to a process for creating trauma-sensitive schools and a policy ag ...

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 ...

In the wake of the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, communities, advocates, and policymakers across the country are proposing and already implementing different ways to address gun violence in our society—such as passing new gun control me ...

The federal guidance released in January by the U.S. Departments of Justice and Education on school discipline policies was necessary to advise school districts of their responsibilities under the Civil Rights Act to protect children from discrimination. ...

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 ...

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' ...

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 ...

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. ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

There has been a growing interest in placing sworn police officers in schools as SROs to improve school safety. However, when this project began in May 2000, little was known about SRO programs (appendix A identifies the principal published and selected u ...

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 ...

For schools and districts across the U.S., family engagement (1) is rapidly shifting from a low-priority recommendation to an integral part of education reform efforts. Family engagement has long been enshrined in policy at the federal level through Title ...

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 ...

The Council of State Governments (CSG) Justice Center has released a new report "Realizing the Full Vision of School Discipline Reform: A Framework for Statewide Change," which documents how five states have reduced their reliance on suspensions while mov ...

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 ...

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 ...

WHEREAS: San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) believes strongly in creating a District-wide, positive, relationship-based culture that is supportive of all members of the SFUSD community and has been a statewide leader in initiating policies to s ...

"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 ...

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 ...

In February of 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched the Leadership Team on School Climate and Discipline—a one-year task force charged with developing policy recommendations to enhance the well-being and safety of students and staff in the City’s public sc ...

The report that follows has been supported by a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense. While it draws on research and examples from public schools across America, the issues of school connectedness have special salience for children who have one or b ...

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 ...

A survey of almost 700 school resource officers includes sobering statistics about the high number of crimes and assaults prevented by school-based police officers. A high school principal who lived through a school shooting told Education World that such ...

Some policymakers have expressed renewed interest in school resource officers (SROs) as a result of the December 2012 mass shooting that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. SROs are sworn law enforcement officers who are assigned to w ...

As scrutiny of the relationship between law enforcement agencies and the communities they're charged with protecting continues – heightened following the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, among others, at the hands of police – some are ...

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 ...

With more attention being paid to the safety of young people while they are at school, many communities are considering strategies which are intended to make schools safer environments. Although statistics on school crime and violence convey that such cri ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

A tool for SWPBS self-assessing admin support, team-based system, use of data, policies, products (e.g., handbook), district support, family involvement, budget, and visibility.

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 ...

Prior to the passage of the Gun Free Zone Act of 1994 (GFZA), school administrators and educators were largely responsible for addressing students' misbehavior in school. However, since the implementation of GFZA, there has been an increasing number of sc ...

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 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 ...

Excerpt: "Suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests are used too often in our schools and disproportionately impact students of color. According to data from the U.S. Department of Education, during the 2013-2014 school year, Black K-12 studen ...

Columbine High School, Littleton, Colorado. Heath High School, West Paducah, Kentucky.3 Westside Middle School, Jonesboro, Arkansas. Zero tolerance policies5 were adopted in these schools and around the country in response to tragic school shooting eve ...