The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (CJJ) envisions partnerships between educators, school resource officers and other law enforcement representatives, parents and students as essential to meet the varied needs of individual students.
All share a common vision of ensuring school engagement and success for all children and youth, yet for some youth—particularly those vulnerable to involvement in the justice system—it may be challenging to achieve this vision.
CJJ sees a primary goal of partnerships to ensure school engagement as emphasizing and supporting inclusion and effective responses to youth at risk, versus exclusion or responses that seek to remove rather than resolve problems generated by students who may disengage, become disruptive or experience academic and/or social failure in school.
Related to this goal, we would ask communities and schools to:
- ensure that all means are taken within a positive school environment to ensure that students experience high levels of school engagement and success;
- strive to keep students in school, to involve parents, families and other responsible adults in assisting in this effort;
- guard against any bias in school discipline or policy that may adversely and disproportionately affect students of color and students of linguistic, ethnic and racial minority backgrounds;
- provide school-based and family-connected services for students who are struggling to learn and those who have emotional and behavioral health needs and other disabilities.
CJJ shares the goal of every school environment being safe, secure, welcoming to students and families, and designed for student success. With this in mind, we are concerned that some attempts to increase school safety, such as “Zero Tolerance” and other school disciplinary policies and practices have had negative results for students, especially students from racial/ethnic minority groups and those with special needs and other disabilities. In some cases, such policies exclude students from schools and push them into juvenile justice systems.
To effect real change in this area, it is important to understand problems that occur as a result of overly-broad application of “Zero Tolerance” and other school disciplinary practices, including:
- high rates of out of school suspensions and expulsions;
- school disengagement and failure among students subject to harsh policies;
- punishments too extreme to fit student infractions;
- over-representation of youth of color adversely affected by school discipline;
- over-representation of students with disabilities, particularly behavioral/emotional disabilities and special needs, adversely affected by school discipline.
— Developed by the CJJ Ethnic and Cultural Diversity Committee and approved unanimously by votes of the Executive Board (May 2009) and the CJJ Council of State Advisory Groups (May 2009).
[1] See all positions.
[1]: http://juvjustice.org/positions.html