Blueprints

Goals of the Project 

Through a partnership between NYU Blueprints and the Division of Youth and Family Justice (DYFJ) in New York City (NYC)’s Administration for Children’s Services, the Blueprints Project aims to create a bridge between education and juvenile justice, building equitable opportunities for legal-involved youth to succeed in their educational trajectories, including integration into productive learning environments after suspension or detention. Our approach builds on specific, identified needs within NYC’s public schools and juvenile justice system alongside existing, evidence-informed strategies that can be leveraged to address these needs. Ultimately, the goal of this partnership is to expand opportunities for school completion and success for suspended or legal-involved youth by understanding their experiences within and across the juvenile legal and education systems. 

The Blueprints project involves gathering the perspectives of system staff, caregivers, and system-impacted students. To date, the Blueprints team recruited and interviewed 11 key stakeholders in education, juvenile justice, legal, and advocacy systems across New York City. These stakeholders were identified because of their roles in directly supporting or supervising staff who support young people to navigate school pushout, educational experiences while in juvenile detention or placement facilities, and re-entry and placement in community schools. By interviewing these stakeholders, we aimed to a) uplift key challenges that staff face in navigating these systems to support young peoples’ educational trajectories, b) identify strategies that staff use for navigating these challenges, and c) gather recommendations from staff for changing systems to better support young people across the full spectrum of involvement in the juvenile legal system. Interviews with caregivers and students in New York City are currently being designed and will be conducted in 2024. 

Initial Findings and Dissemination 

We identified a series of key themes based on stakeholders’ interviews: 

1. Staff within these systems recognize the systemic barriers that contribute to school pushout and that make it difficult for students to re-enter schools after leaving juvenile detention or placement facilities. Limited funding, organizational capacity, and difficulty coordinating across multiple systems makes it challenging to implement large-scale, sustainable solutions. Staff often work outside their roles and use their own resources to individually help young people, which exacerbates feelings of frustration, hopelessness, and exhaustion and allows the system to continue malfunctioning.
2.  Schools and juvenile justice facilities often struggle to meet the material and economic needs of students. This can perpetuate pathways towards pushout or prevent re-connection for the most vulnerable students.
3. Re-entering the school system is even more challenging for young people transitioning from detention and placement facilities because of miscommunication and challenges coordinating between the education and juvenile legal systems.
4. Many district leaders and school staff recognize the need for more restorative approaches. However, school discipline policies continue to be largely punitive because it is challenging to fully adopt restorative approaches at scale.

We have presented these findings to several audiences, including ROSES advocates at NYU and the NYU Blueprints Working Group. We will also be sharing information with our interviewees for feedback and continuing to present to research, practice, and policy audiences that support education for system-impacted youth.