Building a “Prison-to-School Pipeline” in Philadelphia and Beyond: Identifying and measuring outcomes of an effective prison-to-school pipeline

Leah Brogan, Angela Pollard, & Naomi Goldstein

​This is the final post in our Spencer Foundation Building a “Prison-to-School Pipeline” series on the JJR&R Lab website.
 
Juvenile justice stakeholder participants at the “Prison-to-School Pipeline” convening, hosted by the Juvenile Justice Research and Reform (JJR&R) Lab and sponsored by the Spencer Foundation, generated solutions their agencies could quickly enact to address obstacles to successfully reintegrating youth into schools following confinement in juvenile detention or post-adjudication placement facilities. They particularly emphasized addressing “low-hanging fruit”—those obstacles they could quickly and easily address.

These practitioners, policy advocates, and researchers then identified important outcomes they would hope to see if they built and implemented an effective prison-to-school pipeline and potential methods of measuring these outcomes over time. They recommended:

• Frequently surveying youth across the school district regarding their social and emotional well-being throughout the transition process;
• Creating a single, comprehensive data repository linking data from relevant child-serving agencies to better assess long-term outcomes and to do so more holistically (e.g., integrating academic, human services, and juvenile justice data);
• Disseminating quality assurance questionnaires to youth and families to capture their voices and experiences navigating the prison-to-school pipeline;
• Continuing multi-agency, stakeholder engagement with community members to develop and implement a prison-to-school pipeline and recognizing stakeholder attendance and contributions at community meetings; and
• Creating a cross-departmental performance management system to integrate related school reintegration and support services that are often siloed in practice.

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Research specifically addressing the school re-entry process for youth returning from confinement is limited.[1] Research-practice partnerships established through this convening can stimulate richer investigation into the gaps of the prison-to-school pipeline.
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Through a community-based, participatory-action research lens, researchers in attendance actively listened to practitioners’ ideas regarding where improvement is needed in the prison-to-school pipeline and then collaboratively generated methods of measuring relevant outcomes for youth, systems, and communities. Although much work remains to be done, this convening stimulated diverse inter-agency collaboration to translate stakeholder concerns into actionable strategies to measure some key outcomes to evaluate efforts to facilitate school re-entry, engagement, and graduation for youth returning from confinement.


[1] Snodgrass Rangel, V., Hein, S., Rotramel, C., & Marquez, B. (2020). A researcher-practitioner agenda for studying and supporting youth reentering school after involvement in the juvenile justice system. Educational Researcher, 49(3), 212-219. Doi: 10.3102/0013189X20909822