Each year, over 10,000 court-involved students from New York City attend custodial schools in jails, detention centers, and secure facilities. Upon release, most are legally entitled- and mandated by the courts- to continue their education. However, data indicate that more than two-thirds of high school age offenders have not historically returned to school upon release. Bureaucratic barriers delay or prevent re-enrollment in community schools for many of these students; programmatic barriers, including a lack of resource-intense educational environments for students with low-level reading skills and alienation from the school community, make it likely that young people who do go back to school will not succeed. This has profound consequences for the children and families of our poorest communities. It also has dramatic fiscal consequences; the cost of detaining a juvenile offender in New York City is $358/day or $130,670 per year while the cost of educating a high school student in New York City is $11,220. These disenfranchised students have never had a unified political voice to advocate for changes within the education and justice systems.

Operated by CASES in collaboration with the Department of Education, the Mayor's Criminal Justice Coordinator, and city and state criminal justice agencies, the School Connection Center (SCC) opened in September 2002 to facilitate and streamline admissions by placing students released from custodial schools into community schools. Due to systemic and bureaucratic barriers, as well as a variety of issues that kept students from wanting to return to their schools of origin, such as school size, gang involvement, and fear of violence, SCC aimed to match students with appropriate schools and give students access to a wider range of schools than they had historically been granted. In its two years of operation, SCC received over 1,000 referrals, provided assessments for nearly 700 students, and placed 500 students in over 100 community schools in the five boroughs of New York City.

SCC has spurred systems change in both the education and criminal justice systems. By holding the custodial and community schools accountable and monitoring their responses to students' needs, the SCC's work has altered the custodial schools' transition planning process and the community schools' admissions of court-involved students. In the fall of 2004, the Department of Education, in its new admissions initiative, adopted much of the program model established by SCC and implemented a new high school enrollment practice for students not assigned to schools in the high school application process. Permanent Borough Enrollment Centers have since opened. These sites are able to register students in appropriate high schools and efficiently serve families who require school placement assistance.

Since the School Connection Center model has become institutionalized by the Department of Education, continuing SCC program operations is no longer necessary. At CASES, we are honored by our role in this large-scale reform and continue to identify opportunities to improve educational outcomes for court-involved youth.