For teens in juvenile detention, education means overcoming disconnection
The 17-year-old Española teen does not want to stay behind bars his entire life. Someday, he wants to be a firefighter, he told Pablo Sedillo, director of public safety for Santa Fe County. “You need to go for it, OK?” Sedillo told the teen, who does not want his name in the newspaper. “Being in here is not what you want to be.”
The “here” that Sedillo refers to is 4250 Airport Road — the Youth Development Program, also known as the Santa Fe County Juvenile Detention Facility. The teen has been there for more than three weeks, but being “locked up” doesn’t mean that he doesn’t attend school. He takes classes for 45 minutes to an hour each day at the small school, overseen by Santa Fe Public Schools, inside the center. There he and others study subjects ranging from the dangers of narcotics to history lessons about World War II.
“I like class, whatever it is. I like to learn,” the teen said.
His story is not a unique one. He is one of 70,000 youth across the country, according to the Southern Education Foundation, who are in custody on any given day — a population that overall is “receiving a substandard education … setting them even further back in their ability to turn their lives around,” the foundation said in a report.
Improving these teens’ education is a goal many activists are working to achieve.
“The fact that a kid is locked up is no excuse to deny a young person their rights to an education,” said Jason Szanyi, deputy director for the Center for Children’s Law and Policy. “One of the big areas of our work is ensuring that the kids who are locked up are not just protected from abuses, but that they’re getting services and supports that will help them be successful when they’re released, and one of the biggest sources of support is high-quality education.”
The center and other youth-oriented organizations have developed a set of standards to measure how such facilities are faring when it comes to providing a good education. The news isn’t always good. “Unfortunately, what we find in many facilities is … not only are [the incarcerated youth] not getting an education according to the standards that we use, they’re not even getting what’s legally required under federal and state law,” he said.
But, Szanyi said, “The good news is that there are places that are doing good work.”
One such facility may be the Youth Services Center, also known as the Bernalillo County Juvenile Detention Facility, where Albuquerque Public Schools oversees a program that runs from 8:15 a.m. until 2 p.m. every day.
The facility, which houses kids from 11 years old to 18, offers courses ranging from mathematics to English as well as life-skill development programs such as gardening and equine therapy. But while it may run like a typical public school, its students often enter the curriculum with more challenges to face.
“The difference is that we have kids who have been charged with a delinquent act, and that usually comes with a history or trauma in their family, maybe some history of drug use, a whole bunch of things that might impede their ability to get a good education,” said Craig Sparks, director of the facility. “Over 70 percent of the kids that come in here have had some sort of drug or alcohol issue. … We also have a fair amount of kids that have mental health issues, or developmental disabilities, and that can be a barrier to their education as well.”
Sedillo agrees: “Some kids have very broken lives. For some kids, this is generational, meaning Mom, Dad, brother, sister, aunt, uncle — whoever — may have gone through the system already, or may be currently in the system, in the adult side. So sometimes I’ve talked to kids who come in with an attitude that’s very negative.”
Sedillo said this is why it is important for these detention facilities to have a committed staff that will communicate with the students and help them express themselves. “Some of these kids need that mentorship; some of those kids really need somebody that will listen to them,” he said.
Sometimes such facilities need more than that human connection. For example, Szanyi said he has seen behind-bars classrooms that are “very bare, that don’t have computers because they don’t want to trust the kids to not get on the internet and do something inappropriate. Or they don’t want to trust kids with a microscope because it could be used as a weapon potentially, and that means that oftentimes we see classes that are just based on worksheets and workbooks, things that just aren’t engaging, that wouldn’t … motivate a young person to be curious and to learn.”
He said experience also shows that many such operations offer only half-day school or fourdays-a-week learning, which can lead to another challenge: earning credits in these facilities and then transferring back into a traditional school.
“I hate to tell you this, but we have probably one of the best schools in our detention center, and still the youth get pretty far behind,” said Gerri Bachicha, the Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative Administrator for Bernalillo County and Prison Rape Elimination Act Coordinator for the Youth Services Center. “They have to be there in that school for a whole month before their credits are valid. … We’re a short-term facility, so our average length of stay is 17 days, so the kids are still going to school, which is still very helpful because it keeps them in that kind of mode of going to school. But they’re not getting credit for it.”
And some kids tell her that their transcripts reveal they earned credits while in detention, “so it’s very stigmatizing and embarrassing for them.”
A U.S. Department of Education study said that only one-third of justice-impacted students actually re-enroll in traditional schools upon their release. Bachicha, who analyzes data of policy and practice to better the outcomes for youth in the justice system, says a lot of this is due to the stigma many of these students feel about being behind bars.
Fortunately, New Mexico recently passed two bills to help these young students adapt back to a regular high school curriculum. Both Senate Bill 213 and House Bill 301 support those students by ensuring they get priority placement in required classes and access to electives, sports and extracurriculars that will help them attain their diplomas.
On top of that, Szanyi believes that in order to help these students succeed even further, it’s vital to see the potential in this population of youth as kids “who are in their facility as students and as learners, not as juvenile delinquents or as kids who are locked up. Because if you see them as the latter, you’re going to start making concessions with their education that we would never want to see made for our own kids.”
Jay Henderson, one of two teachers who works part time in the Santa Fe County Juvenile Detention Center, agrees.
“There’s great minds here,” he said. “Just bad choices.”
Wyatte Grantham-Philips is a senior at Santa Fe High School. Contact her at wyatte. granthamphilips@gmail.com.