School and Special Education
This report challenges the notion that Georgia’s youth legal system is built to rehabilitate and suggests measures that protect the health and humanity of all the state’s children. First, this report will explore the myth of the “superpredator” and its impact on perceived Black youth criminality. Second, it will detail the state’s school-to-prison pipeline and…
Examines the impact of race on age at the onset of school disciplinary actions and police contact, and the rate of receiving increasingly severe disciplinary actions.
An evaluation report for the LEAP initiative Prepared for the Annie E. Casey Foundation June 2024.
Florida routinely pushes Black children out of schools and into a legal system with well-documented harms. In recent years, the state has made significant investments in school law enforcement and self-proclaimed “tough love” youth legal system policies, purportedly in the name of public safety. However, these investments have yielded a system that disparately disciplines, arrests,…
The answer, then, is not to simply reform the system of punishment, but to stop surveilling and punishing kids and instead invest in the things that set kids up for success, like education, family support, and access to healthcare. We need to start seeing children as children, not as criminals, and giving them the tools…
The National Youth Justice Network released a report detailing legislative trends on youth rights from 2023. This report highlights key gains made by several states around juvenile court fines and fees, expungement, transfer, and youth interrogation among other issues, and flags several regressive legislative trends rooted in harmful narratives about young people. This overview of…
School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from the perspective that suspending disruptive students was necessary to protect their classmates, even if this caused harm to perceived offenders. Restorative practices (RP) – focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary justice – are designed to address undesirable behavior without imparting harm. This study looks at Chicago Public…
In this webinar from May 17, 2023, the Gault Center kicked off the 70th year of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. Nearly 70 years ago, the US Supreme Court ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment. Specifically, the Court acknowledged that separating children…
Webinar provided by the Gault Center on April 25, 2023. This training provided an historical overview on the racialized use of medicine, provider bias, and cultural mistrust, followed by a discussion on practical tools youth defenders can utilize to litigate against medication conditions and/or misdiagnoses of youth in the juvenile legal system. This training built…
School-based arrests have long made up a substantial number of cases in the juvenile legal system. This is particularly true for Black, Native/Indigenous, and Latino students; immigrant students, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and other historically marginalized students. Despite significant decreases in the rate of serious crimes and violence on school campuses over the past…
In this session of our 2022 Racial Justice Training Series and Book Club, held on August 31, 2022, Prof. Kristin Henning and Ebony Howard, Deputy Director of The Gault Center, were joined by Harold Jordan, Nationwide Education Equity Coordinator at the ACLU of Pennsylvania; Reyna Rollolazo, Community Engagement and Anti-Racism Director at TeamChild; and Amir…
We all want young people to thrive. But referring them to the juvenile court system often gets in the way. Learn how to help youth mature into thriving adults. Check out www.njdc.info/futuresinthebalance. Video by Next Day Animations (www.nextdayanimations.com).
This article calls for the categorical exclusion of young children from juvenile court jurisdiction as a pathway toward the abolition of the juvenile legal system in its current form. This article highlights the landscape of age-based jurisdictional boundaries across the country: 24 states have no minimum age of arrest and prosecution, while 18 states have…
This report is an update to the December 2022 report that analyzed incidents of violence by school police officers against students and the disproportionate impact on Black and Latino/a students attending low-income schools. This update provides additional incidents from the 2022-2023 school year and more context about the reported incidents, such as geographical region and…
This report details findings from the International Independent Expert Mechanism to Advance Racial Justice and Equality in Law Enforcement (The Expert Mechanism), who were appointed by the president of the Human Rights Council in 2021 with a mandate to examine the human rights of Black communities in the U.S. as they relate to police interaction…
