Prioritizing the Education of Justice-Involved Youth

How do we ensure students in carceral settings are prepared to re-integrate successfully into traditional classroom environments?

Students in carceral settings are overwhelmingly Black and Latinx youth that have experienced poverty. They are more likely to have special educational needs, have been in foster care, or have experienced homelessness. They are among those with the highest need for academic services and support.

California’s ‘Road to Success Academies’ (RTSAs) utilize a model of educational delivery designed to more deeply engage students in carceral settings. The approach features project-based learning based on themes selected to address both academic and social-emotional needs in order to help students successfully return to classrooms in their communities upon release.

In 2017, we partnered with the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s Juvenile Court System and the Probation Department to gauge what’s working—and what’s not—within RTSA through the eyes of the students themselves and the larger school site community.Our 2022 report, Centering Care & Engagement: Understanding Implementation of the Road to Success Academies (RTSA) in Los Angeles County Juvenile Court Schools examines the implementation of the RTSA educational model in order to answer the question of whether this model lives up to its promise in terms of student engagement and helping to address these students’ wide-ranging academic needs.