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Title: Appendices for Addressing the Needs of Youth with Disabilities in the Juvenile Justice System: The Current Status of Evidence-Based Research May 2003

Author: National Council on Disability (KACW 6/19/03)

Appendix A:

Appendix A discusses:

  • The characteristics of juveniles involve with special education, including race and socio-economic background;
  • The questions a judge, public defender, dispositional advisor, probation officer, and/or other corrections staff should address when making adjudication and placement decisions including questions related IEPs;
  • Best and promising in transition practices for youth in custody including, forming a transition team immediately upon student entry into a long-term correctional facility to design and implement the individual transition plan;
  • Barriers to addressing the needs of youth with disabilities at risk of entering or in the juvenile justice system including professionals not understanding how cognitive and other disabilities affect behavior;
  • Practice and policy recommendations identified by respondents include fully funding and enforcing existing law to ensure that youth in schools and in the juvenile justice system receive the services; making prevention and early intervention a fundamental priority, educating the public, practitioners, and policymakers about disabilities among youth and their civil rights;
  • Recommendations identified by respondents included: research is needed on almost all dimensions bearing on youth with disabilities in the juvenile justice system, assess the prevalence of disabilities among youth at all stages of the juvenile justice system; assess the validity of assessment procedures and instruments in the juvenile justice system; examine the extent sharing of education, as well as non-education, information occurs between schools and the juvenile justice system; and identify and study the unintended impacts associated with efforts such as full funding and implementation of IDEA (will the problem of misdiagnosis and over diagnosis of youth, especially minority youth, as having disabilities when they do not, become better or worse).

Appendix B:

Appendix B lists the Internet resources on youth with disabilities and juvenile justice:

Appendix C:

Appendix C discusses interview protocol for the paper. The core questions were:

  • The intended and unintended impact of federal disability and juvenile justice legislation on addressing the needs of children and youth with disabilities at risk of delinquency or involved in the juvenile justice system;
  • The primary barriers to effective implementation or attainment of intended impacts of federal disability and juvenile justice law;
  • The best way to improve services for children and youth with disabilities at risk of delinquency or involvement with the juvenile justice system;
  • Any points or settings in the juvenile justice system the most challenging in addressing the needs of children and youth with disabilities;

Appendix D:

Appendix D discusses case studies.

  • Achievement and Learning for All Students (ALAS): ALAS is a pilot dropout and high-risk behavior prevention program located in the Los Angeles that was designed and evaluated with a focus on 7th through 9th graders from low-income neighborhoods, who were diagnosed with LD, SED, or were manifesting other severe behavioral or academic problems and were at risk for school dropout. ALAS focuses explicitly on incorporating the racial/ethnic and cultural views and experiences of youth and their parents.
    ALAS students were less likely to have dropped out of school, failed a class, have excessive absences, or to have been incarcerated and special education students from ALAS were more likely to stay in school and earn a full year of graduation credits and less likely to fail classes.
  • Juvenile assessment centers (JACs): The JAC model is based upon the understanding that at-risk youth and juvenile offenders face multiple risk factors and as these factors accumulate, levels of delinquency and problem behavior increase. JACs typically have several goals, including providing comprehensive assessment of juvenile needs, improving case management and treatment, making efficient use of law enforcement, juvenile justice, and treatment resources, avoiding unnecessary detentions, enhancing information-sharing across agencies, and improving monitoring of system performance.
    For children and youth with disabilities, JACs hold particular promise because they focus on assessment and linking of youth to services. Potential problems include lack of due process, net widening, unavailability of youth services especially in more rural areas, the possibility of stigmatizing youth, information confidentiality concerns, and increasing overrepresentation of minorities.
  • Mental Health Courts: Mental health courts, gun and teen/peer courts, and community courts are on the rise nationally. Mental health courts hold considerable promise for serving youth with disabilities who enter the juvenile justice system, although some observers of the juvenile justice system point to potential problems with the implementation of these courts. The target population of juvenile mental health courts is nonviolent juvenile offenders with serious mental illness (SMI) who have committed misdemeanors or other low-level offenses. The juvenile mental health court model does not just focus on the issue of guilt, but instead it examines the crime as a symptom of a mental illness.
    The National Mental Health Association recently expressed concern that mental health courts may play too coercive a role and may criminalize and stigmatize persons with mental illness. A related concern is net- widening that is mental health courts might pull into the "net" of the justice system youth who in the past would never have received any type of sanction. Research may show that mental health courts do not work, or that they do not work well for all youthful offenders, or for youth with specific types of mental illnesses.
  • Multisystemic Therapy (MST): Multisystemic Therapy (MST) focuses on changing how youth function in their natural settings. MST aims to promote positive behavior while decreasing antisocial behavior by using the family preservation model of service delivery. MST therapists provide services in the family’s home in order to identify family strengths and use them to develop natural support systems and remove barriers. Strict adherence to the nine core principles of the MST model by trained therapists has been shown to be a cost-effective alternative to out-of-home placements for youth presenting serious clinical problems. The basic strategies of MST include improving caretaker discipline skills, enhancing family relationships, increasing youth association with pro-social peers, decreasing youth association with deviant peers, engaging youth in pro-social recreational activities, improving school/vocational skills, and providing long-term and ongoing aftercare.
  • The Oregon Transition Support Initiative: The Oregon Transition Support Initiative is the collaboration between the Juvenile Corrections Education Program (JCE) in the Education Department, local school districts, and state corrections personnel. The Farrell School is an accredited education program with its own curriculum and academic structure that focuses on academic skills, social skills, and workplace- relevant skills. The target population includes youth between the ages of 12 and 20 who are incarcerated. The main goal of the program is to reintegrate adjudicated youth into the community and school system. Program outcomes have included a 400 percent increase in high school diplomas and an increase in GED completion.
  • Project ACHIEVE: Project ACHIEVE is a school reform and school effectiveness program developed for use in preschool, elementary, and middle schools that want to implement school wide positive behavioral prevention programs. It was designed with a particular emphasis on increasing student performance in the areas of social skills and conflict resolution, improving student achievement and academic progress, facilitating positive school climates, and increasing parental involvement and support. The Jesse Keen Elementary School became the first Project ACHIEVE school when the program’s School-wide Positive Behavioral Self-Management System (SPBSMS) was implemented during the 1990-1991 school year.
    After implementation of Project ACHIEVE at Jesse Keen, positive outcomes included a 61 percent decrease in special education referrals, a 57 percent decrease in special education placements, a 16 percent decrease in overall discipline referrals, a 29 percent decrease in out-of-school suspensions, and a 47 percent decrease in grade retentions. Higher percentages of students scored at or above the 50th percentile in reading, math, and language standardized tests.
  • Wraparound Milwaukee: Wraparound Milwaukee is a collaborative county-operated behavioral health care maintenance organization that provides services for children and adolescents and their families referred from both the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. Wraparound Milwaukee began as a successful pilot for returning youth in residential treatment centers to the community, and developed into a Medicaid managed care program by March 1997. In its first two years (1994-1995), Wraparound Milwaukee served 175 children. That number has grown to a total of 869 youth and their families in 2001.Wraparound Milwaukee defines its target population of youth using three qualifications: has a diagnosable mental health disorder; involved in two or more service systems; and is identified for an out-of-home placement in a residential treatment center or could be returned to such a facility with the availability of a Wraparound Plan and services.
    The program has been described as a best practice by the Office of Juvenile Justice Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) for working with youth with serious mental health needs in the juvenile justice system and as a promising practice in children’s mental health by the Center for Mental Health Services Data collected one year prior to enrollment and one year following enrollment shows that Wraparound youth had lower recidivism rates for a variety of offenses. The average monthly cost per enrolled youth in Wraparound is $4,350, whereas a child in residential treatment or a juvenile facility would have cost over $7,000.

Appendix E:

Appendix E describes the history, mission, and duties of the National Council of Disability (NCD). The overall purpose of NCD is to promote policies, programs, practices, and procedures that guarantee equal opportunity for all individuals with disabilities and to empower them to achieve economic self-sufficiency, independent living, and inclusion and integration into all aspects of society.

The current statutory mandate of NCD includes the following:

  • Reviewing and evaluating, on a continuing basis, policies, programs, practices, and procedures concerning individuals with disabilities conducted or assisted by federal departments and agencies.
  • Making recommendations to the President, Congress, the secretary of education, the director of the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, and other officials of federal agencies about ways to better promote equal opportunity, economic self-sufficiency, independent living, and inclusion and integration into all aspects of society for Americans with disabilities.
  • Providing Congress, on a continuing basis, with advice, recommendations, legislative proposals, and any additional information that NCD or Congress deems appropriate.

NCD’s present list of key issues includes:

  • Improving personal assistance services,
  • Promoting health care reform, including students with disabilities in high-quality programs in typical neighborhood schools,
  • Promoting equal employment and community housing opportunities,
  • Monitoring the implementation of the ADA,
  • Improving assistive technology,
  • Assuring that those persons with disabilities who are members of diverse cultures fully participate in society.

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