For four consecutive days last month, a group of Los Angeles County students was suspended after a fight broke out in their classroom inside a juvenile detention facility.

This is according to Stacy Nuñez, an education attorney representing one of the students, who said her client was among those suspended and questions why he was penalized before the facility called a meeting to discuss other behavioral interventions.

The Los Angeles County Office of Education can interrupt education services, even those legally required under an Individualized Education Program, if there is “an immediate threat to the safety of youth or others,” according to a  with . A second settlement with Los Angeles County, including its Probation Department, Department of Mental Health, and Department of Health Services, was also entered at the time.

But exactly how an “immediate threat” is defined is unclear and appears to be “completely discretionary,” Nuñez said.

This lack of clarity on the legal settlement with the county education department, often referred to as LACOE, is just one of the reasons advocates say education access for detained youth must be prioritized in ongoing court hearings to decide whether L.A. County’s juvenile halls should be placed into a receivership.

Saying it is “the only option left to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the youth currently in its care,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a request in July to grant full operational control of the county’s juvenile detention facilities to an appointed receiver. He also said the county is “substantially compliant with just 25% of all requirements” in the 2021 settlements.

After several court hearings on the receivership request, L.A. County Superior Court Judge Peter A. Hernandez has listed education as one of five core reform areas, along with staffing, room confinement, use of force and data management. The next hearing is on Friday.

The county’s education department declined an interview to discuss the status of the settlement stipulations.

“Over the past four years, we’ve made substantial progress across multiple areas of the agreement, even while managing significant operational changes, including the closure of Central Juvenile Hall and the opening of Los Padrinos,” Elizabeth Graswich, LACOE’s executive director of public affairs and communication, wrote in a statement to EdSource. “As with many complex, multi-year agreements, some areas required additional time to fully implement.”

Prioritizing education

Full operational control under receivership would include management of its Probation Department, which contracts with the county education department for services to students enrolled in schools within detention facilities. The most recent enrollment  shows 532 students enrolled across seven juvenile detention facilities, with at least 225 in juvenile halls.

It’s this memorandum of understanding between the departments, plus how closely they must work on a regular basis to ensure students receive an education, that makes changes to one department nearly inextricable from the other.

Despite this, advocates say education is not always a priority in discussions about reforms to the juvenile justice system.

“It’s kind of a theme that education is a secondary thought … but I think the point is really valid that young people spend a majority of their waking hours in school each day when they’re in a facility, so we should really be focusing on that,” said Megan Stanton-Trehan, a senior attorney with Disability Rights California.

When Stanton-Trehan represented detained students during the initial years of the settlement with LACOE, staff would sometimes say her clients refused special education services, only to later learn her clients weren’t always clear on what the services were.

The settlement requires that the county “document efforts to send youth to the classroom on the same day that the youth refuses to go to school, except when there is an immediate threat to the safety of the youth or others.”

But Nuñez agreed that, to this day, it still isn’t always clear whether students actually refused services or how the alleged refusal is documented.

“If I go visit a client and they don’t come out to see me, all I’ll be told is ‘they refused,’” said Nuñez, who was recently told a client didn’t want to meet with her. It was only when she pressed further that she was told the client was in the middle of completing a test.

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Local government agencies in charge of youth violated the educational and civil rights of students in Los Angeles County’s juvenile justice facilities for decades by punting responsibility and inaction, according to a report released Wednesday.

“” blames the disconnected, vast network of local and state agencies — from the board of supervisors to the local probation department to the county office of education and more — that play one role or another in managing the county’s juvenile legal system, for the disruption in the care and education of youth in one of the nation’s largest systems.

“This broken system perpetuates a harmful cycle of ‘finger-pointing,’ often between Probation and Los Angeles County Office of Education, which hinders the resolution of issues that significantly affect the education of incarcerated youth,” wrote the Education Justice Coalition, authors of the report.

The coalition includes representatives from Children’s Defense Fund-California, ACLU of Southern California, Arts for Healing and Justice Network, Disability Rights California, Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, and Public Counsel.

The authors listed three demands for the board of supervisors, including reducing youth incarceration by way of implementing the previously approved Youth Justice Reimagined plan, providing access to high-quality education, and adopting transparency and accountability measures.

Decades of documented rights violations

A timeline outlines repeated student rights violations, some of which have resulted in class-action lawsuits and settlements requiring the county to be monitored by the federal and state departments of justice for years at a time.

Since 2000, the timeline notes that Los Angeles County has faced:

• A civil grand jury report calling on the board of supervisors to “improve collaboration” between the probation and education departments in order to address unmet educational needs
• An investigation by the federal Department of Justice — and subsequent settlements — found significant teacher shortages, lack of consistency in daily instruction, and issues with support for students with special needs
• A class action lawsuit against the county office of education and the probation department
• An investigation by the state Department of Justice, followed by settlements, found excessive use of force and inadequate services
• Multiple findings by a state agency of L.A. County juvenile facilities being “unsuitable for the confinement of minors”

Most recently, the state attorney general has , which would mean full state ownership of the county’s juvenile halls.

The Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, the probation department, and the Office of Education did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lasting impact of academic disruptions

Dovontray Farmer experienced the mismanaged system when he entered Los Padrinos Juvenile Hall a second time as a 10th grader. Now 24 and serving as a youth mentor with the Youth Justice Coalition, Farmer said that his time in L.A. County facilities “played a major role in not being able to get properly educated — I felt betrayed, honestly.”

Returning to school after being released was difficult, he said, because he quickly realized he was several grade levels below his classmates at his local high school.

He’d also been part of his school’s football team before his detention at Los Padrinos when he was 17, and said he tried returning to the team once released but wasn’t allowed back.

He said the disruption to his education and participation on the football team, which he saw as a positive influence, affected how he viewed his life.

“There was nothing I really could do, so I was really giving up,” he said. “Like, everything that I really cared for was already gone.”

The environment at the juvenile facilities didn’t help matters. 

Los Padrinos recently came under fire after a  published by the Los Angeles Times showed probation officers standing idle as detained youths fought. Thirty officers have been indicted on criminal charges for encouraging or organizing gladiator-style fights among youths.

Farmer said he was put through those same types of fights when he was at Los Padrinos as a teenager.

“A lot of the coverage recently has been about the recent gladiator fights in 2023, but clearly this is a very systemic issue that even when a problem is resolved in the short term, we’re uncovering that it’s really indicative of a larger systemic problem,” said Vivian Wong, an education attorney and director of the Youth Justice Education Clinic at Loyola Law School, whose recent clients have included Los Padrinos students.

Education data across several years backs Farmer’s experiences while detained.

The most recent state data available when Farmer was detained at Los Padrinos is from 2018, when 39% of students were chronically absent, less than 43% graduated, and 12% were suspended at least once.

That same year, the  was 9% for chronic absenteeism, 83.5% for graduation, and 3.5% for suspension.

Ongoing education concerns

The report’s authors note that students across several facilities have lost thousands of instructional minutes, with a “lack of transparency and concrete planning to ensure that the missed services are adequately made up for, leaving students at risk of falling further behind educationally.”

While compensatory education has typically been used to resolve instructional minutes owed, “I am not sure that’s the most realistic way to remedy the injustice that young people face, because they have endured so much abuse in these facilities,” said Wong. “It’s much more than just a loss of instruction.”

A more appropriate response to the loss of instructional time would be a consistent investment in avoiding detention and keeping young people in their communities to maintain school stability, she added.

Past attempts at reform have often been “done without community input or leadership, both in the design and in the implementation of those reforms,” Wong said.

The new report, she added, is meant to be a tool toward implementing Youth Justice Reimagined, or YJR, a model against punitive measures that was largely developed with input from community organizations to restructure the local juvenile legal system.

Three demands

, approved by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors in November 2020 to reform the local juvenile legal system, would move the county away from punitive approaches, such as detention, and toward rehabilitative support through counseling, family and vocational programming, small residential home placements, and more.

Youth detention results in “severe disconnection from and disruption to their education trajectory,” wrote the report’s authors, as they urged the board to address abysmal educational access and achievement by fully funding and implementing YJR.

The disconnect, they added, is exacerbated by delayed school enrollment when detained and upon release, the constant presence of probation officers, and turnover of educators and classmates.

These common experiences are particularly difficult for students with learning disabilities or a history of trauma, they wrote.

“After more than a decade of incremental reform, it is time for the County to truly reimagine youth justice,” wrote Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Mark Ridley-Thomas in their November 2020  to approve YJR. “In the same way that the Board has embraced a care first, jail last approach to the criminal justice system, it is incumbent upon the Board to embrace a care first youth development approach to youth justice.”

Despite the approval, a report published in August 2024 by the state auditor found that less than half of the YJR recommendations had been implemented by mid-2024.

To address the high rates of chronic absenteeism, poor testing results and instructional minutes owed, the Education Justice Coalition’s second demand is to adapt educational opportunities “to address the unique and significant needs of the court school population.”

They listed 18 actions the county probation and education departments should work together on, including:

• Appropriate education support for students with disabilities 
• Access to A-G approved courses for every student in a juvenile facility
• Classrooms led by educators, rather than probation officers
• Appropriately credentialed and culturally competent educators
• Education access that is not disrupted due to probation staffing issues

The coalition’s third demand centered on transparency and accountability measures by providing families with access to education planning for their children and establishing work groups that include community members.

This was originally published on .

Throw parents in jail. 

Chronic absenteeism nearly doubled — to about 30% — the year after the pandemic shuttered classrooms, and of more than 1 million Americans. Student attendance rates have improved by just a few percentage points since the federal public health emergency expired nearly two years ago, a reality that’s been dubbed “Education’s long COVID.” 

But Johnson, a Republican district attorney representing three counties , said the persistent absences have nothing to do with the pandemic and instead are because “we’re going too easy on kids” and parents have been given “an excuse not to be accountable.” 

Since Johnson was elected in 2022 on a campaign promise to enforce Oklahoma’s , he’s forced dozens of students and parents into hasty court appearances and, on several occasions, put parents behind bars in the hope it will compel their children to show up for class.

Lawmakers nationwide have taken a similar approach, including in Indiana, Iowa and West Virginia, where new laws leverage the legal system to crack down on student absences. 

“We prosecute everything from murders to rape to financial crimes, but in my view, the ones that cause the most societal harm is when people do harm to children, either child neglect, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence in homes, and then you can add truancy to the list,” Johnson said. 

“It’s not as bad, in my opinion, as beating a child, but it’s on the spectrum because you’re not putting that child in a position to be successful,” continued Johnson, who has dubbed 2025 the “

Since the pandemic, policymakers have taken on a heightened role in addressing persistent student absences, and lawmakers nationwide have proposed dozens of bills this year to combat chronic absenteeism, typically defined as missing 10% of school days in an academic year for any reason. Such efforts have fallen broadly into two camps: incentives and accountability. have taken a similar approach to Johnson’s, imposing fines and jail stints for missed seat time. Other efforts have focused on addressing the root causes of chronic absenteeism, like homelessness, and have sought to draw kids to campuses with rewards. 

In Hawaii, for example, pending legislation seeks to entice student attendance with the promise of . In Detroit, where 75% of students were chronically absent last year, the district employs both the carrot and the stick: handing out $200 gift cards to 5,000 students with perfect attendance while warning those with an extremely high number of absences that they can be held back a grade in K-8 or made to repeat classes in high school.

In Oklahoma, where parents can be jailed for up to five days and fined $50 each day their child is absent from school without an excuse, proposed legislation would let schools off the hook. 

For years, Oklahoma schools have received poor grades for chronic absenteeism, one metric the state uses to gauge school performance. If approved, would strike chronic absenteeism from the state accountability system, a change officials said is necessary because it’s the responsibility of parents — not principals and teachers — to get kids to class. 

Schools in Oklahoma “have very little control over whether or not a kid gets to school,” Rep. Ronny Johns, a Republican from Ada, told The 74. Ada, the county seat of Pontotoc County, is ground zero for Johnson’s truancy initiative, an effort that Johns, a former school principal, said should be replicated statewide. 

“We can encourage them to get their kids to school and everything,” Johns said. “But in the end, parents have got to get their kid up and get them to school.”

‘A shared responsibility’

The , collected by the U.S. Department of Education for the 2022-23 school year, found that some 13.4 million students — nearly 28% — missed 10% or more of the academic year. In a majority of states, chronic absenteeism has shown marginal improvements since its peak. Nationally, chronic absenteeism reached an all-time high in the 2021-22 school year of nearly 30%. Pre-pandemic, the national rate was about 15%. 

Some states like Colorado and Connecticut have seen substantial improvements in absenteeism, the data show. In others, including Oklahoma, since 2021-22. In 2023, nearly a quarter of Oklahoma students were chronically absent, according to the federal data. 

among Native American, Pacific Islander, Black and Hispanic students, as well as those who are English learners, in special education or live in low-income households. 

Hedy Chang, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Attendance Works, said the key to solving chronic absenteeism is to address the underlying problems that make kids absent in the first place. The California-based nonprofit focused solely on improving student attendance identifies a range of , including student disengagement, boredom and unwelcoming school climates. Caregivers’ negative education experiences are a factor, according to the nonprofit. So, too, is homelessness and community violence.

Last year, lawmakers in 28 states focused on identifying, preventing and addressing chronic absenteeism, according to analyses by the nonprofit FutureEd. This year, legislators in 20 states are weighing focused on chronic absences, including efforts to improve data collection and create early interventions. 

The Oklahoma legislation seeks to replace chronic absenteeism in its school accountability system with an alternative, such as a climate survey, a softer measure that would gauge students’, parents’ and educators’ opinions about their schools. The move would require approval from the U.S. Department of Education. 

States have been required to collect chronic absenteeism rates since the passage of the federal Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015. Since then, chronic absenteeism has been included as one of six school performance indicators on Oklahoma’s annual A-F report cards from the state education department. Currently, 38 states use chronic absenteeism to grade school performance, Chang said. 

For schools in Oklahoma, the measurement has proven to be a hurdle. In 2022-23, the state’s schools received an F grade in chronic absenteeism. Last year, the state grade ticked up slightly — to a D. 

Removing chronic absenteeism from the state accountability system, Johns, the state lawmaker, said, could allow schools across Oklahoma to receive better grades. Meanwhile, he supports initiatives to handle student absences through the courts, arguing that “parents need to have some skin in the game.” 

“Chronic absenteeism is driving our report card down,” Johns said. “Without the chronic absenteeism [measurement], our report card is not going to look as bad as it is because our public schools are doing some really good things, so why shouldn’t the report card be a reflection of that?”

Chang argued the move is misguided. She pointed to a growing body of research that has found schools can combat absenteeism if they form meaningful relationships with parents and partner with social services agencies that to attendance, like food insecurity. 

There’s little research to suggest that fines and other forms of punishment improve attendance. Even as some states ramp up truancy rules, others have scaled them back as studies report that punitive measures can backfire. In South Carolina schools, for example, students placed on probation for truancy wound up with even worse school attendance than they had before the courts got involved, by the nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center. 

In , the Oklahoma State Department of Education highlighted school districts that have made “impressive strides in reducing” chronic absenteeism and that “offer valuable lessons on how schools can re-engage students.” Among them is a 24% drop in absenteeism at Dahlonegah Public Schools, which hired a school-based police officer to visit the homes of students who failed to attend school. The district also credited improvements to “a welcoming and engaging school environment.” 

The state education department didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

“Families have to be involved and they have to be partners and they have to take responsibility for getting kids to school, but it’s not solely about what families do or don’t do,” Chang said. “I think it’s a mistake to assume it’s only one group’s responsibility. This is a shared responsibility.”

‘Broken families, no economic opportunity, no education’

Johnson, the district attorney, said his office has stepped up to address a problem that state education leaders have failed to solve. He took particular aim at the state’s high-profile education secretary, Ryan Walters, who has become an outspoken champion of conservative education causes. 

Yet, as far as chronic absenteeism goes, Johnson said the state schools chief “has no interest in talking about” the topic except “when he could get a soundbite on Fox News.” The state education department did not respond to Johnson’s comments.

The 51-year-old father of four also pinned persistent chronic absenteeism on parents — those living in poverty, in particular. Children in his district who most often miss school, he said, are “kind of feral.” 

“My friends generally don’t have children that are in crisis because, just economically speaking, they’re on the higher end of the spectrum,” Johnson told The 74. 

Johnson said there are about 7,500 K-12 children in the counties that make up his district and estimated that at least 30% contend with “economic poverty, multi-generational drug abuse, domestic abuse in the home, broken families, no economic opportunity, no education.”

“If you live in a school district where there is a real high poverty level and a real high incarceration rate, then a lot of times you’re going to get kids that have been raised in those environments,” Johnson said. “So you’re going to have a lot more challenges with that group than you would if every person had a four-wheel drive vehicle and in their driveway and everybody has a good industrial job and is making a good living and providing for their families.”

Johnson said schools should play a role in encouraging students to go to school, but when that doesn’t work, threats of jail are needed. In Pontotoc County, just two truancy charges were filed against parents in 2023, according to data provided to The 74 by Johnson’s office. That number jumped to 20 last year and, so far this year, there have already been eight. 

David Blatt, the director of research and strategic impact at the nonprofit Oklahoma Appleseed, questioned the accuracy of the data and said it could be an undercount. He said he attended a truancy court case in Ada last year where as many as 30 parents and students made appearances before a judge that lasted just 60 to 90 seconds each. 

In , Blatt found that truancy laws were enforced inconsistently across the state and urged policymakers to adopt interventions and supports for families to address chronic absenteeism rather than criminalize them. Blatt backs the legislation to remove chronic absenteeism as a school accountability measure, acknowledging that certain attendance barriers are outside of educators’ direct control. But he said Johnson’s characterization of the problem is “rather harsh and one-sided.” 

Rather than being apathetic toward their children’s education, he said many parents struggle with work responsibilities and transportation while children wrestle with in-school factors that can discourage attendance, such as persistent bullying. 

“There may be cases where being called before a judge will help convince them of the seriousness of things, but for other cases, it’s just going to compound their problems,” Blatt said. “Adding court appearances and fees and fines doesn’t solve their problems. It just adds to them.” 

Yet for Johnson, the issue stems from a lack of repercussions. By enforcing truancy cases, he said schools have “a little bit of a weapon” against parents whose children are missing school and can threaten them with jail time. Most of the time, he said, threats alone improve student attendance and in many cases the charges wind up getting dismissed.

In fewer than a dozen instances, he said, his truancy crackdown has led to parents serving time behind bars. 

“Generally, they’ll go in for about four hours,” Johnson said. “We’ll give them the taste of it.” 

Black youth show up in emergency rooms with gunshot wounds or other violent injuries in the United States. Some hospitals have that can be effective in keeping these kids safer after they are treated, but in most cases victims are sent back into the world to continue their struggles.

“The distance between the federal government and your local school principal is huge,” said Ken Trump, a school safety expert who consults with districts across the country. “The federal government is the last place they look for resources.”

Launched in 2020, was an outgrowth of the Federal Commission on School Safety created after the 2018 mass shooting that left 17 dead at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Max Schachter, the father of one of the students killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the updated clearinghouse in the new law. 

The legislation gives the Department of Homeland Security responsibility for the Federal Clearinghouse on School Safety Evidence-based Practices. That could suggest the resources included would lean more toward what is often referred to as “hardening” schools with armed officers and tighter security, Trump said. 

“Are we really saying that our education departments are inept and incapable of handling school safety?” he asked. 

The clearinghouse is part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the gun reform law sparked by the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 dead, including 19 fourth graders. While some observers said the new law makes only “modest progress” on , others were pleased that it broadens the scope of what it means to keep schools safe by emphasizing mental health services. 

“I take some consolation from the fact that we are not trying to ram through the increasing militarization of schools,” said Meg Caven, a senior research associate at the Education Development Center, a nonprofit research organization near Boston. But she added that there’s still limited evidence behind many school safety efforts. “[Schools] want an out-of-the-box solution and there isn’t one.”

The legislation comes as the , released Tuesday, shows 93 school shootings with casualties occurred during the 2020-21 school year — the highest number since the government began collecting the data in 2000. Many of the incidents occurred on or near school property while the buildings were closed for remote instruction.

Research backs to school safety — securing the physical space as well as emphasizing violence prevention and ensuring students feel welcome and supported at school. But researchers note that schools and communities face “enormous challenges” in striking that balance. 

A 2018 Johns Hopkins University study found on the effectiveness of controlling access to schools and adding more school safety hardware. 

Adam Lane, principal of Haines City High School in central Florida, said he’s viewed the existing clearinghouse, but relies much more on local sheriff’s deputies who regularly walk through his school site and review safety procedures. 

“I’ve got a face, a name and a cell phone number,” he said. “They know me. They know my students.”

His 3,000-student school also has 12 counselors, a social worker and a school psychologist. He said he would use any additional funding from the law to further reduce counselor caseloads, currently at 300.

The law provides roughly $2 billion for school safety improvements, school climate initiatives and student mental health services. Other provisions that focus on students and schools include:

• Expanding criminal background checks for gun buyers under 21 to include juvenile justice records, as well as mental health histories, which some say could result in unintended consequences. Riya Saha Shah, managing director of the Juvenile Law Center, said there currently is no central repository for juvenile mental health records and that states might try to make it easier to access such information because of the law. “We don’t know what it will be used for beyond this particular background check,” she said, adding that it could make students reluctant to seek help from school counselors and mental health specialists. 
• Allowing districts to bill Medicaid for mental health services to students with an individualized education program, including telehealth, and providing $50 million to update Medicaid systems for school-based services. AASA, the School Superintendents Association, has been for this flexibility. Within a year, the education department must also work with other federal agencies to create a technical assistance center to help districts, especially small and rural ones, with billing questions and administrative issues.
• Providing $1 billion for the education department’s Student Support and Academic Enrichment program — the part of the Every Student Succeeds Act that calls for students to have a “well-rounded” education. The funding can be used to improve student engagement and school climate with offerings such as art and music programs, foreign language and environmental education. The funding also supports educational technology
• Providing $500 million for training school counselors, social workers and psychologists through an existing Department of Education .
• Including $240 million for , which stands for Advancing Wellness and Resiliency in Education. A partnership between state education and mental health agencies, the program provides training to school staff members and other professionals working with students. Sixty grantees have received funding since 2018, and according to the website, over 141,000 students have been referred for mental health services.
• Increasing funding for the 21st Century Community Learning Centers program by $50 million. These funds will be used to expand afterschool and summer programs for older students.
• Including $40 million for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network — a system of 116 centers that provide care and train educators and other professionals to understand the impact of trauma on children.

“My wife’s mom is from St. Johns, and we would come here for family things,” says Latham, who was raised in the Mormon Church and studied law at Brigham Young University in Utah. He had been working at a law firm in Phoenix but wanted to spend more time in the courtroom. So after they moved to St. Johns, he ran for office and told his wife, “We’ll either win, or we’ll move again.”

They won, and, in 2014 he became Apache County’s Superior Court judge. Latham had no specific vision for his new role, aside from wanting to try new approaches to old problems. “In small counties and towns, a lot of times things are being done the way they’re being done, because that’s how they’ve always been done,” he told me.

At the top of his list was reforming the town’s underutilized juvenile detention facility. Latham knew that the facility, which was built to hold up to 11 kids, cost the county over $1.2 million a year even though it sat empty for six to eight weeks at a time. “When you average 1.7 kids a day, those costs just stop making sense,” he said. “In a small county like this, you just don’t have the numbers and you don’t ever want to make the numbers.”

Apache County wasn’t the only place with empty juvenile halls. Nearby rural counties like Navajo and Gila saw only one or two kids a day held in detention. It was unclear to Latham whether police were doing fewer referrals or whether kids simply weren’t getting into trouble as much. 

The more he looked into it, the more he thought St. Johns resembled the many communities, both rural and urban, across Arizona and the West, where juvenile crime was decreasing even as public opinion about harsh punishment had started to shift.

In the 1980s, America faced growing rates of both adult and juvenile violence. In the decade between 1980 and 1990, arrests for offenses like murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault rose by 64%, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Urban Institute. The nationwide juvenile arrest rate for murder almost tripled during that time, from five to 14 young people out of every 100,000.

There were several reasons, sociologists thought, for the spike in violence, including an increase in the use of handguns as well as the growth of illegal drug markets, especially for crack cocaine. And the future was expected to be even worse: The ’90s had already been dubbed the “Superpredator Era.”

Coined by Princeton University sociology professor John Dilulio, the term superpredator referred to “a young juvenile criminal who is so impulsive, so remorseless, that he can kill, rape, maim, without giving it a second thought.” Speaking to the press in 1995, Dilulio predicted that the number of juveniles in U.S. custody would rise exponentially over the next few decades; these young cold-blooded criminals, he claimed, “fear neither the stigma of arrest nor the pain of imprisonment.”

Dilulio’s critics slammed his warnings as racist and partisan. And Dilulio turned out to be wrong: Even though the population of 10- to-17-year-olds continued to grow, violent crime in America began to drop starting in 1994, falling to its lowest point in two decades. Dilulio later publicly apologized for his grim predictions, saying his approach was misdirected.

But the damage had been done. Sensationalist media coverage of children committing gruesome crimes frightened Americans, and by the late ’90s, nearly every state in the country had begun treating minors like adults, even sentencing them to life without parole. By the year 2000, more than 100,000 young people — mainly Black and brown teenagers — were in custody in the U.S., and larger detention facilities were being built to accommodate them, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. 

That was around the time Victor Chávez began work as a corrections officer for the Navajo County adult corrections system in Arizona. Chávez defies the corrections officer stereotype: He has a mellow, friendly demeanor and was a mentor for the local Boys & Girls Club. He sought to reduce the incarcerated population through a program called Intensive Supervised Probation, which allows convicted offenders to rejoin their communities while they are monitored by someone like Chávez. Some people, he explained, do well on probation and go on to have successful lives. “But when you have to revoke them, then they end up having to go (back) to prison,” he said, his voice cracking a bit. “Sometimes that gets to you. And it does to me. As I get older, I have more empathy for people and their families.”

By 2015, Chávez had a family of his own. And he was ready for something different; he wanted to provide more hands-on mentorship. One day, he got a call from Paul Hancock, a former fellow corrections officer who was now director of Juvenile Court Services for Apache County.

“He was like, ‘Victor, we’re going to do something,’” he said. “‘Hopefully, it’s going to be really awesome. And I’d like you to come be a part of it.’”

Hancock told Chávez that the Apache County juvenile detention facility, located about an hour and a half from where he worked in Navajo County, was closing. The new judge, Michael Latham, had some ideas for how to use the space, and he wanted forward-looking people like Chávez to be part of a social experiment.

Two years after Chávez spoke to Hancock, the Loft Legacy Teen Center in St. Johns celebrated its grand opening in August 2017. A YouTube video of that day shows Judge Latham talking to a group of about 30 excited teenagers. “Hopefully, this is something that will be here for decades,” he said to loud cheers from the kids. Standing over to one side, Chávez and Hancock, the two former corrections officers-turned-mentors, smiled. They were dressed in casual clothing — T-shirts, jeans, baseball caps — just like the teens in the audience.

The Loft occupies the old juvenile facility building on Cleveland Street, but it looks very different now. Repurposed and cleaned up, it resembles an industrial loft space: The white walls are finished with wood and aluminum, and there are couches and beanbag chairs in every room.

In one area, teenagers can study and use free internet from 2:30 to 5 p.m. during the week. There’s even a fully equipped recording studio, and a music space with a keyboard and electric guitars. The setup was inspired by The Rock, a teen center started in Phoenix by the legendary rocker Alice Cooper.

“We started off with one pool table, but it was wildly popular,” Hancock said as we watched the kids trickle in after their high school let out. “And the great thing about pool is that it’s like a social game. You can’t play pool and not talk to somebody. So we have kids that don’t know each other at the high school, but they know each other really well here.”

For Hannah Wilkinson, The Loft, which opened in her freshman year, became a refuge. Her parents were strict, so she spent most afternoons during high school here. It made such a difference that, after graduating from high school, she became a mentor.

The job basically requires her to hang out with younger kids and model good behavior. Sometimes, she has to act as the disciplinarian, even though, at 19, she looks as young as the teens she supervises. “Some kids will just come up and start talking,” Wilkinson told me. “If there’s a life in danger or something illegal going on, I have to report it. I’ve only had to do that once, thankfully.”

One of the Loft’s regulars is a 17-year-old I’ll call William. (I’ve agreed to not use his real name because St. Johns is a small town and what he tells me could impact his life.) “I’m one of the biggest nerds you’ll ever find in this town,” he joked when we met, without turning away from the X-Box. William, who dropped out of school after eighth grade, comes to The Loft religiously to play video games. Like Wilkinson, he lacks an ideal relationship with his parents, and sometimes he comes in just to talk with her.

As a socially alienated teenager who’s not into sports, William has often felt like he doesn’t belong. “Most of the time, if you talk to certain people, you feel like you’re getting judged or something. But when you talk to them here, they don’t immediately jump to one conclusion,” he said. William’s mentors are working with the high school counselor, trying to help him return to school.

While he chatted with Wilkinson in the main room, I talked to Richard Gwinn at the reception desk. “I’d like to think we are part of a bigger shift,” Gwinn, a former sheriff’s deputy, told me, explaining how The Loft works to keep young people out of the criminal justice system through truancy prevention and mentorship programs. “And I think it has worked, because we’ve had a tremendous reduction in the number of referrals.” The year The Loft opened, juvenile arrests in Apache County dropped by 55%. And the center operates at roughly a quarter of the amount it cost the county to run the juvenile facility.

Still, the drop in juvenile arrests is due to more than a local shift in resources. In 2011, the state established a detention-screening tool that determines whether a juvenile should be put in detention in the first place. “If a judge or a probation officer gets upset with a kid and the response is detention, the tool kind of re-guided them and said, ‘No, this kid really isn’t a public risk,’” said Joseph Kelroy, the director of the Juvenile Justice Services Division at the Arizona Supreme Court.

Other states are attempting more ambitious reforms. California is shutting down its Division of Juvenile Justice altogether; by July 2023, its three remaining facilities will close and California will replace it with a new Department of Youth and Community Restoration, which promises rehabilitation along with educational and job training.

California’s shift amounts to a massive undertaking. But The Loft has shown that it’s possible to move to a care-first model even in a rural county in a politically conservative state. If the teen center continues to partner with local organizations to address illegal activity and minimize arrests, the mentors say, youth detention facilities will eventually become obsolete.

 During my visit this spring, I was invited to attend graduation and watch as 66 local teens received their diplomas. About half of the kids came through The Loft, part of the first high school class that has had the youth center as a resource since freshman year. 

Backstage, Hancock and Chávez chat with William, who is there to film the ceremony and stream it online for everyone who couldn’t attend due to the pandemic.

While they wait for the ceremony to start, Hancock and Chávez urge William to go back to school, as they often do. “Just get your high school diploma,” Hancock says. “Then you could study video or animation. Wouldn’t you like to graduate like the kids here today?”

William looks shyly at the ground. He seems unaffected by their words, perhaps a little confused. But as long as he spends time at The Loft, Hancock and Chávez will keep encouraging him. Try sports, they’ll say, or video or music — whatever.

The graduates’ names are called and they throw their caps in the air as Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration” plays over the loudspeakers. William checks in with Chávez, who says he’s good to go home. “See you on Monday!” Chávez shouts, as William makes his way out of the auditorium. 

This originally appeared at  and is published here in partnership with the .

Juvenile lock-ups in the city are facing a staffing “crisis within [a] crisis” as overworked guards manage an aging and increasingly listless population of detainees.

Youth advocates and union officials are asking for more staff and structure in the detention facilities as the city’s child welfare agency struggles to maintain a workforce dealing with injuries and exhaustion.

According to the Administration for Children’s Services, only 401 of the required 850 so-called Youth Development Specialists were working as of Monday. This as nearly 250 positions have been left unfilled, and more than 200 specialists are out on worker’s compensation or other reasons.

Social workers and kids primarily want more and better “programming” outside of their halls, which includes educational courses, job training, therapeutic work and physical activities. Meanwhile, union members are calling for the city to hire hundreds of workers that were promised years ago.

Both groups say more social and educational stimulation for the young detainees — which would require more staff — would help quell violence and foster a healthier environment.

“There is a sitting audience that is thirsting for knowledge and thirsting for positive activities while they’re there,” said Ron Schneider, a social worker with Brooklyn Defender Services. He said his young clients have noted a marked decline in creative outlets since the pandemic began.

Older ‘Youth’ Present Challenges

The recently released shed some light on the current state of affairs at New York City’s juvenile facilities, even as most eyes were focused on the problems at .

The data showed an older population, staying longer than before at the city’s two secure juvenile detention centers, Crossroads, in Brooklyn, and Horizon in The Bronx.

Currently, the population at the facilities is shifting towards late teens: 48 of the 139 kids currently detained are over 18. Youth detained there as minors can now stay until they are 24, following the 2017 passage of , which removed minors from adult jails and the purview of the city’s Department of Corrections from the juvenile lockups.

That presents a challenge, say staff, who complain that older detainees are physically more difficult to control, and can be a bad influence on younger kids.

According to the MMR, the average daily population of youth in juvenile lockup decreased 7.6% across the city’s network of detention facilities — from about 129 kids in 2020 to nearly 119 in 2021.

But fewer kids are returning to detention as well: Some 49% of detainees locked up in 2021 had previously been incarcerated, down from 58% of youth last year.

The dive in population was “largely the result of the COVID-19 pandemic” according to the report. The Legal Aid Society also to release children held as the virus raged — and ultimately, dozens were .

This marked the mayor’s third management report since state legislators passed the landmark Raise the Age legislation, which removed New York from the short list of states that automatically prosecuted teens as adults.

Lisa Freeman of Legal Aid called the shrinking population “a wonderful thing that has come out of the pandemic and something that should be a lesson going forward.”

Regularly Scheduled Programming

For advocates of youth still on the inside, programming and school remain paramount.

“The kids do state that if it’s not for school, they’re sleeping all day long, there’s nothing else to do. So they are asking for programming,” said Schneider.

Last year, THE CITY found that kids in detention doing remote learning were stuck on mute and could not speak to their teachers for much of the pandemic. Now, youth have returned to full in-person schooling, according to ACS.

Schneider visits his clients at Crossroads on a daily basis and said that the structure young detainees receive from school and programming outside their units helps to dampen potential conflict at the facility — and staves off depression and loneliness in kids.

Before the pandemic, he said, outside agencies would provide consistent in-person programming such as mentorship, job training, even work through the city’s Summer Youth Employment Program. But since COVID-19 descended on the facilities, youth have reported that activities have been severely limited.

ACS would not say what percentage of programming at Crossroads and Horizon is by outside providers, or how much of it is happening as scheduled.

As of Wednesday, at total 139 youth were living at Horizon and Crossroads and about 21 children were staying in less-secure settings. Many are being held there while still awaiting a trial.

ACS blamed the now typical 38 days of stay on court slow-downs. That’s up from 29 in 2020 and more than double the 17-day average in 2019, according to the agency’s numbers.

“If we want safer facilities where youth have the opportunity to spend the majority of their time productively working towards their employment and career goals, the city needs to make a significant investment in workforce programming,” said Laurel Gwizdak Rinaldi, director of youth services at the Center for Community Alternatives,  in a statement to THE CITY.

Rinaldi’s organization helps run programming at Horizon and Crossroads, and called for more city funding to help career-minded youth.

“Ideally youth would be engaged every evening and weekend in high-quality vocational, certification, pre-apprenticeship and college access programming,” she explained, but added that hands-on workplace training in detention is “ far more costly than your typical arts and recreational afterschool program.”

An Understaffing ‘Crisis’

To Darek Robinson, the vice president of grievances for SSEU Local 371, which represents the youth development specialists who run the facilities, agrees that programming is “necessary, definitely necessary.”

“But you’re gonna need constant supervision,” he added.

He added, “That’s been falling a little short because they’re short staffed. Just too many people out on worker’s comp.”

According to ACS, as of Oct. 4, 201 staffers were out on sick leave or on worker’s compensation — leaving less than half of the number of staff required to properly run the facilities on duty. ACS also changed shifts from seven to 12 hours as the coronavirus .

Union President Anthony Wells called the mix of understaffing and the pandemic “a crisis within the crisis.”

“The state implemented Raise the Age too soon,” said Wells, “because it didn’t give us enough time to really prepare. We don’t want the kids treated as adults. But it could be done a lot better.”

Similar to Rikers, staff shortages have meant exhausted workers, said Robinson.

“You’re doing 16 hours a day, 18 hours — you feel [that] by the time you get home you’re not getting proper sleep, you’re exhausted, you’re not 100% so that has an immediate effect on the decision making process, watching kids — has an adverse effect on performing your job,” he said.

That’s where mistakes are made on the staff’s end, he said. The union continues to await the result of for the return to traditional 7-hour shifts.

Robinson also called for a way to hold detainees, especially the older ones, responsible for their actions, and charged assaults have been an ongoing threat to staff.

According to the Mayor’s Management Report, rates of violence between detainees resulting in injuries across all types of juvenile detention have held steady since 2020, dropping slightly from .35 to .34 per 100 youth.

Attacks on staff by youth causing injury dropped from .30 in 2019 and 2020  to .27 incidents per 100 detainees as well, according to the MMR.

Weapon recovery rates did go up from .22 to .25, as did that of illegal substances from .07 to .14.

The report did not include use of force by staff on children. But last year a federal monitor overseeing city jails Horizon for ongoing “hyper-confrontational conduct” by ACS staff and stated that “the culture of disorder at [Horizon] must be transformed.”

A by the federal monitor on both Horizon and Crossroads is expected by the end of the year.

Reality Check

Marisa Kaufman, an ACS spokesperson, told THE CITY that the agency has been “aggressively recruiting, hiring and training multiple classes of [Youth Development Specialists” to address the staffing issue.

It is also “working to better align the preservice training that YDS receive before they are assigned to a facility to ensure it reflects the full reality of the environment,” as well as providing emotional and mental health support.

The agency is also working with embedded consultants from the National Partnership for Juvenile Services to “help [ACS] improve practice and ensure an even safer environment for youth and staff,” Kaufman explained.

She also added  that “In-person programming occurred throughout the month of September,” that outside service providers were at detention facilities “every day,” providing a variety of programs such as gardening, drama club, urban farming and more, in addition to in-house programming.

But Lisa Salvatore, head of the juvenile defense practice at Brooklyn Defender Services, said the reality for teens behind bars is a different story.

“There is a big difference between ACS’s policies and the lived experiences of young people who are in detention,” she said. “What the young people we represent tell us is that they crave programs and education but are not getting enough of what they need to thrive.”

THE CITY is an independent, nonprofit news outlet dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people of New York.