Resources

Tens of thousands of students in the U.S. are attending school behind bars. Juvenile justice education fails many of them, resulting in a double punishment for youth: the punitive experience of incarceration for their alleged offense and the potentially catastrophic disruptions of their educational pathway. A review of current state policies shows that there is much to improve.

In too many conversations about how to meet young people’s needs, one voice is critically missing: those most impacted. If communities want to equitably serve young people, problem solving must start with the young people and families who are experiencing the issue, as outlined in this Designing From the Margins Toolkit.

Just like Bellwether’s approach to working with different communities, our logic model is not static. Our work is collaborative, tailored to meet each community’s unique needs and context. 

Calculating both the cost of the current system across multiple disruptions that young people might face and the cost of a hypothetical system in which the first intervention works.

Based on Bellwether's calculation, such a system could free up more than $1.5 trillion over the lifetimes of the cohort of youth currently served by care agencies. That is roughly $612,000 per person currently...

This resource estimates that as many as 3 million of the most educationally marginalized students in the country last experienced any formal education — virtual or in-person — in March 2020.

This resource summarizes results from a survey of leaders in education, social service agencies, nonprofits, and the juvenile justice system, asking them to share how they used their time differently due to the pandemic.

This case study focuses on addressing agency fragmentation within El Dorado County, California.

This document includes specific recommendations on how to support students who are engaged with systems of care, such as the foster care system and health and human services.

This report describes a tool- Continuity Counts Services - that can serve as an example of a resource that will streamline access to student records for the right people and empower students to advocate for themselves.

This resource makes the case that the education system can serve as an effective through-line for the children and youth experiencing traumatic life experiences by using two key levers for change: continuity of people and continuity of information.

This brief describes how policy practitioners can use human-centered design methods to create better education policies because they are informed by the people whose lives will be most affected by them.