| Spring 2006 |
Volume 12 No.1
|
| Introducing
Community Service Learning |
| Spring 2006 |
Volume 12 No.1
|
| Introducing
Community Service Learning |
|
Project
Profiles: Two
Youth Court Community Service-Learning Projects
Two diverse youth courts, one in New York City and one in rural Placer County, California, have thoroughly integrated school-based learning components into their community-service programs. Each profile offers its own unique view of how best to put the "learning" into court-mandated community service. Newcastle, California In 1991, Placer County’s presiding juvenile court judge and chief probation officer determined that (1) a teen court might divert traffic from the overloaded juvenile-justice agency and that (2) prevention and rehabilitation components might reduce juvenile recidivism rates in the rapidly growing county. The school district’s superintendent, also anticipating the county’s growth, volunteered to help launch the project. They formed a policy team comprising the heads of the juvenile court and probation departments, the county school superintendent, and the director of health and human services. They hired Karen Green as the program director. Green, a long-time educator with a background in youth counseling, could create a peer court learning component. “The policy team understood from the beginning,” Green explained, “that teaching, learning, and crime prevention would play an integral part in reducing juvenile recidivism rates.” They decided to introduce a juvenile law curriculum into local classrooms. Knowing that the highest probation rates among juveniles are to be found among high school sophomores, they chose to target freshmen. With the support of the superintendent of schools, they placed the curriculum in the county’s health classes, a freshman-year requirement, reasoning that juvenile crime was a health issue. Forty students and their teachers worked closely with Director Green, law enforcement officers, the district attorney, and county’s public defenders to design the Placer County Peer Court’s first juvenile-law curriculum. Components included:
Community service is one of Placer County’s most popular sentencing options. Peer court jurors and staff work together to place young offenders in community service (1) in their own community, thus creating a direct link between young offenders, their service, and the community they harmed; (2) that is linked to their interests; and (3) where defendants can clearly see the benefits of their service efforts. As part of their community-service sentence, defendants are ordered to serve on a peer court jury. Many continue on as peer court volunteers. To reinforce the learning component of community service, Placer County Teen Court developed the Youth Enrichment Corps (YEC). In YEC, Peer court mentors, volunteers, and defendants meet every Wednesday to explore community problems and review suggestions for addressing these areas with projects. As in school-based service learning, YEC operates on the theory that community-service projects should be youth-identified to maximize youth interest and participation and help ensure the community service is completed. YEC follows a standard service-learning framework for dealing with project suggestions. First, they explore the community to identify its needs or problems. Next, they choose and research problem they wish to work on, often relying on outside experts such as environmental or social-service practitioners to provide them with information about the causes and effects of the problem and who—if anyone—is addressing it. Next they identify options to deal with the problem and plan and implement a community service-learning project to address it. YEC is an ongoing program so participants are able to apply the experience they gained on prior projects to new ones. For example, YEC choose to clean up a network of neglected nature trails that connect three Placer County schools. Rather than attempt to make the cleanup a one-day project, experienced peer court volunteers suggested that they make it a longer project. They contacted the schools involved, the Lions Club and an involved citizens organization to help them implement an extended cleanup and repair of the trail, its fences and bridges, and the immediate environment surrounding it. Karen Green cultivates many ongoing partnerships with organizations that provide service opportunities for Peer Court defendants. “It hasn’t been a hard sell, finding active partnerships with local groups,” she says. “Most people are open to recognizing that these kids can be positively influenced through community service.” Members of partnering organizations receive orientation about Peer Court and are quick to recognize that they aren’t dealing with criminals. Most young defendants are amazed at how caring the mentors are at the locations where they are “sentenced” to perform community service. “They talk and listen to the youngsters,” Green says, “and it has a big effect on them.” Can community service learning work outside of youth courts? Placer County Peer Court Director Karen Green has proof it is possible. The probation department approached us and asked if they could refer some defendants from juvenile court into the peer-court community-service program. There are real problems with this, Green explained. Kids on formal probation are deeper into the system. There are travel restrictions on them. We did, however, have success with kids who are in the custody of juvenile court schools. We began our work with these young offenders in the classroom by asking “If you could have talked to yourself five years ago, what would have kept you from ending up here?” In answering the question, the defendants shared stories about how they landed in the juvenile justice system, and were able to reflect on their experience and behavior. Their stories
were so powerful that we decided to organize
them into presentation to benefit
at-risk youngsters, Green
continued. We taught the kids how to create power point
presentations, had
them work on their public-speaking skills and broke them into teams of
four.
They began working with a local school district delivering hour-long
interactive programs that address truancy, substance abuse, and family
and
other issues. The challenge was great,” Green added, “but these
kids,
serious juvenile offenders, created effective presentations that were
appropriate for kids who often spoke English as a second language and
were
enrolled in Title One schools where poverty was a real community issue.
The
project has been a success.”
Placer County Peer Court’s community service-learning efforts have paid off. “Recidivism rates from the peer court have never been more than 3 percent at the highest,” Green says. “We track our Peer Court defendants until they are 18 and we are notified if they become involved with other branches of the juvenile court system. She describes the Placer County Peer Court as “a joyful project to work on because of the collaboration between all the member agencies and their commitment to integrate learning into mandated community service. The schools accepted the courts and young people get to see first hand the importance of having citizens—even young citizens—participate in government and the community.”
Harlem
Youth Justice Center
The Harlem Youth Court handles low-level cases including truancy, shoplifting, and public drinking. Youth Court cases are presided over by a jury of peers—teenagers from the neighborhood who have been trained to perform the roles of judge, jury and attorneys. Typical sanctions include community service, anger-management workshops, and letters of apology. Ninety four percent of the court’s mandated participants complete their sanctions and more than 50 percent continue their involvement with the court. This active youth court is sponsored by the Center for Court Innovation, a youth-leadership program developed in partnership the New York State Unified Court System and the Fund for the City of New York.According to Ray Barbieri, Project Director at the Center, “youth participants are not just mandated offenders. Many are voluntary participants, a mix, really, with no distinctions made between defendants and volunteers.” Service projects are designed to allow high levels of youth participation and decision making with participants working with facilitators to choose the issues they wish to address. Projects are usually long-term (two to four months); many are ongoing. In a typical project, the first weeks are devoted to identifying a topic participants wish to address, such as environmental justice or neighborhood pollution. These long-term and ongoing projects often generate ongoing, sustainable partnerships between the Court and local schools, businesses, and faith-based organizations. More than half the mandated youth who participate in the Court’s community-service projects stay on to volunteer—often with their families —to see the project through to completion and often participate in the planning and implementation of other community-service projects. The program has made a strong commitment to research and evaluation, collecting data on each participant and each of the projects. They keep extensive case management files and collect data from partnering organizations on the effectiveness of each project. Finally, they debrief each project involving mandated youth, volunteers, partnering organizations, and group and individual victims. Because each project develops its own set of goals, they can then revisit them to determine the success of a project. The recidivism rate among participants in the Court’s community service projects is currently at 13.7 percent, significantly lower than the national average. Completion rate for community-service sanctions runs at 94 percent. What do the directors in charge of the Center’s community service-learning projects say about their success? “These kids have been punished left and right,” says Director Barbieri. “Beating them over the head with a vest and a garbage bag won’t help them at all. They are highly compliant with the requirements of the Court because of the high level of ownership they acquire about their projects. That is the best way to give back to the community.” Danielle Sered, a Program associate at the center says, “These kids have one thing in common. They tend not to be engaged elsewhere. None of them would ever volunteer to participate in a community-service project on their own. They are way too alienated. However,” Sered continues, “as they participate in a project’s design and implementation, they see that they aren’t participating in just their own rehabilitation. They are altering the role they played in the community that got them there in the first place.” |
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