Education Advocacy for Systems-Involved Youth

Young people impacted by the foster care and juvenile justice systems experience disrupted education, frequent transitions and lack of support to address those disruptions. Their K-12 educational opportunities – including those opportunities for normalcy and mentorship – are often woefully inadequate. Systems-involved students not only experience disconnection from their families; they are often separated from their school communities as a result of their involvement with child welfare and juvenile justice. This separation too frequently leads to disjointed and inadequate school experiences and results in foster youth having abysmal educational outcomes. 

In recognition of the unique needs of systems-involved youth in school, YLC works with lawyers, advocates and community based organizations to support educational stability and success for systems-involved young people. In California, YLC works directly with attorneys at California legal aid offices, public defender and dependency counsel organizations, to support their work on behalf of systems-impacted youth, including a particular focus on youth with disabilities entitled to additional supports through the public education system. 

YLC is also working in specific California counties to improve educational outcomes for youth. We are currently providing advocacy and legal support to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline in middle schools in the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), with the goal of utilizing K-12 education advocacy to reduce the number of young people funneled into the county’s juvenile delinquency system.

Additionally, when the San Mateo County Office of Education (SMCOE) announced their innovative multi-year exploration to redesign its Gateway County Community School, the Youth Law Center partnered with the Law and Policy Lab at Stanford Law School to develop a proposal to transform Gateway through leveraging relationships with local community colleges. California’s county community schools, also known as alternative schools, are K-12 schools run by local county offices of education serving students who have been expelled from their local public schools, have attendance or behavioral issues, are experiencing homelessness, are impacted by the juvenile justice system, or are not attending any school. Academic outcomes for students attending county school programs have historically been quite poor, and the long term impacts of attending these schools on students are difficult to capture because the mobility of the students and their families make data collection challenging. Many of these alternative schools also play a significant part in the school to prison pipeline, and are long overdue for a significant overhaul. Read more