graduation

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 ...

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 ...

Infographic

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 ...

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 ...

Discipline in schools, when appropriately used, can help to create structure and establish rules for a well-functioning classroom and school. All students should feel safe, and have a positive environment in which to learn. The underlying empirical data s ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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 ...

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 juvenile justice system in America is a paradox when it comes to promoting the welfare of our nation’s young people. We have come a long way from old English common law which treated children as adults under the "vicious will” doctrine,1 to creating j ...

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 ...

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 ...