The Annie E. Casey Foundation created a practice guide for ensuring the safety and well-being of LGBT youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
Words Unlocked is a national poetry competition that occurs in April (National Poetry Month) each year in juvenile facilities. Celebrities and poets judge the final round of the competition and the winners’ work is published online here. Each year they also choose a theme for the students to write on in order to give them inspiration. For example, the 2015 theme was transformation.
Unbound is a month long read-a-thon and book review project. The program creates a framework for students to engage in reading and to write book reviews that are published online on a blog for each other students see. For the reviews, students are given a series of questions to answer for each book. Scholastic Possible Fund partners with the program to provide a set of books to each participating school.
Start from Scratch is a national curricular program designed by CEEAS that can be implemented in any secure care facility across the country to teach students coding and programming. The program begins with a two-day writing exercise exploring the theme of transformation from a personal perspective. The curriculum next includes instruction in Scratch, a free downloadable programming tool, designed out of MIT, used for creating animations and games.
The National Training Curriculum for Educators of Youth in Confinement is the product of collaboration between the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) and the National Juvenile Detention Association. The curriculum is a 40-hour core training curriculum created for new educators in juvenile detention facilities. However, the curriculum was created and tested by experienced educators in detention and correctional education.
This letter from the Department of Education and Department of Justice emphasizes that federal civil rights laws apply in juvenile justice facilities to the same extent that they apply elsewhere.
The Youth Advocate Project (YAP) was originally founded to provide direct services to Pennsylvania youth returning from Camp Hill Prison. Today YAP serves more than 10,000 families a year in over 17 states. To do this YAP provides families with intensive wraparound services in their homes, schools, and communities. Youth are provided with structure, supervision and support from advocates. These advocates work with the youth to create weekly schedules that will help the youth meet their goals. Advocates work up to 30 hours a week including evenings and weekends.
This Dear Colleague letter from the Office of Special Education Programs and the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services emphasizes that students with disabilities in correctional facilities are entitled to all the rights and protections provided by the IDEA. This includes ensuring that students receive FAPE in the least restrictive environment and requires that records be transferred and IEPs be updated as soon as possible following a student’s placement in a correctional facility.
In December of 2014, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) in partnership with the Department of Justice (DOJ) released five guiding principles for the provision of correctional education in juvenile justice facilities.
First, facilities are encouraged to create a safe and healthy climate which prioritizes education and the provision of behavioral and support services necessary to address the individual needs of all youth.
This fact sheet, from the National Evaluation and Technical Assistance Center for the Education of Children and Youth Who Are Neglected, Delinquent, or At-Risk (NDTAC), discusses the prevalence of disability within the juvenile justice system and describes some of the challenges of providing effective services for this population. Children with disabilities are more readily referred to the juvenile justice system than their peers and are often referred directly by their schools.
