Inadequacies in Education for CA’s Incarcerated Kids…Alt. Public Defenders for LA’s Juvie Defendants…Missing: Childcare for Foster Families…and a San Diego Reentry Job Center

REPORT FINDS DISPARITIES AND FAILURES IN EDUCATION SYSTEMS THAT SERVE KIDS IN PROBATION CAMPS ACROSS CALIFORNIA

Juvenile court schools, which provide public education to kids in California’s county probation-run camps, are failing to provide locked-up students with a quality education in accordance with state and federal laws, according to a report by the Youth Law Center, a national public interest law firm in San Francisco.

The report found that some court schools struggled to get incarcerated kids into class and keep them there, leading to alarmingly high truancy and suspension rates during the 2013-2014 school year. In comparison, some schools reported no truancy or suspensions during the same time period. Los Angeles court schools ranked among the highest for suspension rates, and a large percentage of those suspensions were for willful defiance (a catchall term for most anything that can pass as disruptive behavior).

Eight of Los Angeles County’s court schools had suspension rates at or above 50%, compared to the state average of 10%. And while LA was suspending already locked-up kids left and right, there were plenty of other court schools serving incarcerated youth in other counties that did not suspend anyone.

“Fundamentally, court schools evince a crisis of low expectations,” explained Jennifer Rodriguez, Youth Law Center’s Executive Director. “In myriad ways, instead of giving youth cause for hope and the resources and supports to realize their full potential, the system too often primes them for a downward trajectory.”

Another serious problem is that the kids, who must learn from worksheets rather than stimulating class discussions and lectures, often don’t improve their math and reading skills. In fact, some kids’ proficiency levels were even found to have declined under this system. And when researchers analyzed data from the 2013-2014 school year, they found kids leaving the juvenile justice system struggled to re-enroll in local schools, and without support, often dropped out.

LA County’s court schools had a dropout rate of 30%. Some counties, like Alameda, Fresno, Sacramento, and Marin had dropout rates double that of Los Angeles.

(Note: These numbers may have improved during the last school year thanks to a bill that went into effect January 1, 2015, which is supposed to address this issue by ensuring kids exiting detention facilities are immediately enrolled in school.)

The report points to several promising education reform-minded programs, including the Roads to Success Academy, which is being expanded to all of LA’s juvenile probation camps. RTSA uses project-based learning, focuses on keeping kids a path to higher education, and coordinates with probation staff to minimize interruptions to the kids’ education. LA’s program was inspired, in part, by Washington DC’s Maya Angelou Academy. The DC program uses the Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support (PBIS) model, rather than harsh classroom discipline, and focuses on kids’ transition back into their communities, providing supportive services to kids for 90 days after their release.

“These programs show us there is so much more our youth can achieve and very real possibilities for supporting them in reaching their goals,” said Maria Ramiu, YLC’s Managing Director. “We should not give up so easily on the promise our juvenile justice system makes to these youth for their future.”

The report points out that more data must be collected on locked up young Californians, the quality of the education they receive, and their post-incarceration outcomes.

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LA TIMES EDITORIAL BOARD CALLS ON LA COUNTY TO USE ALTERNATE PUBLIC DEFENDERS—RATHER THAN FLAT-FEE PRIVATE ATTORNEYS—TO REPRESENT INDIGENT YOUTH

Last week, LA County CEO Sachi Hamai released a report illuminating serious inequalities in representation for low-income juveniles who are represented by private panel attorneys, rather than attorneys from the county’s Public Defender’s Office, when there is a conflict of interest. (Read about the specific problems with the panel attorney system in our previous post: here.)

A motion the LA County Board of Supervisors are slated to consider today (Tuesday) would direct the CEO and County Counsel to look into a number of possible reforms to the way poor juveniles are represented in Los Angeles, including the creation of an oversight unit for panel attorneys run by the LA County Bar Association, elimination of the problematic flat-fee structure for panel attorneys, merging the Public Defender’s Office with the Alternate Public Defender’s Office, and increasing use of alternate public defenders in juvenile cases.

Currently, only Lancaster uses alternate public defenders for juvenile defense when public defenders are unavailable or have a conflict of interest. Panel attorneys are used less often under this structure, which is similar to the way adult indigent defense is set up in LA County.

In advance of the board’s consideration of the motion, an LA Times editorial calls for the Alternate Public Defender model, which is already successfully used for adults (and for kids in Lancaster), to be extended to juvenile defendants. Here’s a clip:

Los Angeles County created the first-ever Public Defender’s Office more than a century ago to provide indigent defendants with high-quality, salaried lawyers who are part of an office that can pool resources, keep up with trends and training and create efficiencies by sharing caseloads.

But the public defender often has a conflict of interest. Consider, for example, when two people are accused of stealing a bike. Each might blame the other for the crime, so they can’t have the same lawyer. One gets the public defender. For many years, the second one got a private lawyer from a county-approved panel, who was paid by the hour and — county officials argued — had too little incentive to keep costs down.

In the 1990s, when the county was effectively broke, supervisors needed to save money and considered — but rejected — converting from an hourly rate to a flat rate for conflict lawyers in adult cases because of the opposite incentive: Flat fees encouraged attorneys to gather up as many cases as possible and perform as little work on each of them as possible. Even to people who don’t care about criminal defendants, it should be clear that unconstitutionally inadequate assistance of counsel would wind up costing county taxpayers more than it saved due to reversals and liability lawsuits.

For adult defendants, the county’s solution was to create a second, separate public defender’s office: the Alternate Public Defender, whose legal work over more than two decades has been widely lauded for cost effectiveness and high quality. Its reputation among L.A. judges and lawyers is superb. It’s a model county department.

But, back in the 1990s, the Board of Supervisors went a different way with defendants under age 18. For their lawyers, the board said, a flat fee of less than $300 per case — and all the perverse incentives that went with it — was just fine, even though adequate defense often requires many weeks of work.

The fee, which has inched up over the years, has yielded results that should have been predictable. More juvenile defendants represented by those flat-fee panel lawyers get sentenced to “camps” — juvenile jails — than their counterparts represented by the public defender. That means a higher cost to taxpayers, who foot the bill for each of those jailed teenagers, even though the outcomes (criminal recidivism, homelessness, employment) are far better for those whose sentences are served in community and school settings.

The county’s contracts with these attorneys expire Oct. 31, and the board simply must ensure that the current unconscionable system of defense is not renewed.

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LIMITED ACCESS TO CHILD CARE MEANS FEWER FOSTER PARENTS FOR CALIFORNIA FOSTER KIDS IN NEED OF LOVING HOMES

Over the last ten years, the number of people applying to become foster parents has dropped by a whopping 50%. Part of the problem, says LA County Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, is the state’s backlogged and underfunded subsidized child care system. The lack of available childcare has proven a substantial barrier to finding foster families to care for the county’s most vulnerable population. Many would-be foster parents can’t get around the fact that they have to go to work, and thus, would need someone to watch their foster children while they were away.

Two-thirds of foster family agencies that participated in a 2015 survey reported that an absence of childcare options kept potential foster parents from applying, and more than two-thirds of current foster parents said the childcare issues kept them from accepting kids.

Supervisor Kuehl has put forth a statewide budget proposal to reinvest $31 million into childcare for the foster parents. The proposed millions would fund six-month emergency childcare vouchers for foster parents caring for babies and toddlers. Kuehl’s budget proposal would also make trauma-informed training available to childcare providers.

The Chronicle of Social Change’s Jeremy Loudenback has more on the issue. Here’s how it opens:

As the state struggles to provide enough foster homes, California advocates and policymakers say one major challenge has been a lack of childcare for foster parents.

For first-time foster parents Irene Barraza and Amy Saucier of Oakland, adding a new child to their home forced them to come up with creative solutions to balancing childcare with work.

One evening last July, only weeks after becoming certified as foster parents, Barraza and Saucier got the call they had been waiting for. Could they take in a three-day old baby girl, an Alameda County social worker asked.

An hour later, after a last-minute dash to Walmart to pick up a car seat, formula, diapers and a set of onesies, the couple returned home from the county’s assessment center with their new daughter.

Even after adjusting to the all-hours demands of a new baby, childcare has proven the most difficult challenge for Barraza, 39, and Saucier, 38. For a while, they juggled sick days, parental leave and help from friends.

Because it’s a publicly subsidized childcare system that is already underfunded and at constant capacity, one thing that has not been available to them is a slot with providers like Early Head Start.

“The last couple weeks that I was off of work I was very stressed out,” Saucier said. “We knew [the girl] was going to go back to her grandparents soon, but we didn’t have a definitive date, and I knew I had to get back to work without childcare.”

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http://vimeo.com/160168434

EMPLOYMENT CENTER OPENS DOORS FOR SAN DIEGANS EXITING JAIL

In the months leading up to their release from jail, inmates at San Diego’s East Mesa Reentry Facility attend job readiness and life skills classes, participate in practice interviews, and learn vital computer skills at the facility’s newly opened job center.

The employment center also connects participants with housing and substance abuse treatment, provides bus passes, and holds job fairs for the soon-to-be-released inmates.

The center was created with federal funding as part of the Reentry Works San Diego program, a partnership between San Diego Workforce Partnership, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department, the county’s Probation Department, and the non-profit Second Chance.

Nadine Ono at CA FWD has more on the job center. Here’s a clip:

The job center is funded by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Linking to Employment Activities Pre-release (LEAP) initiative, which funds jail-based employment centers in 20 communities across the country with the goal of reducing recidivism.

SDWP enlisted the services of Second Chance as the on-site service provider. Second Chance is a non-profit that helps people transform their lives through programs that provide job readiness and life skills training along with job placement, mental health and prisoner re-entry services, relapse prevention and sober-living housing for adults and youth in need.

Before opening the center, Second Chance held focus groups within the reentry facility to find out how to best serve the population. As a result, the career center has a computer lab with career pathway information and employment resources. Participants will also receive case management services, attend workshops and have access to business attire for inmates to wear during mock interviews with their peers and actual interviews at employer job fairs within the facility.

“I think the workforce partnership really reflects a philosophy in meeting people where they are and not expecting that our hardest-to-reach customers are always going to come through the doors of our job centers, but really targeting our job training programs to meet individuals most in need, like the justice-involved, where they’re at, so we can see more successful outcomes,” said [SDWP’s Director of Adult Programs Andrew] Picard.