Faculty awarded grant to study juvenile justice system education

A team of UW Tacoma Education program faculty members has won a grant to study education in juvenile detention centers in Washington.

Michelle Maike, Director of Community Research and Development, and Greg Benner, Education Professor and Executive Director are one of only three teams nationwide to be awarded the grant from the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency. They will use the nearly $500,000 grant to examine the effectiveness of education in short-term juvenile detention centers, where youths typically stay for less than 30 days.

Currently, curriculum and instructional practices are not standardized among juvenile detention centers in Washington, and some programs struggle to deliver basic educational services. Maike and Benner hope to fully assess the educational practices at all of the state’s 22 juvenile detention centers and eventually develop a program manual to guide educational delivery for all youths in the system. They are teaming up with the state’s juvenile detention centers and the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction’s Institutional Education program for the study.

“Students who succeed in school are less likely to enter the justice system. We know there is a strong inverse relationship between education and criminality,” Maike says. “We want to improve the education for youth staying in these short-term facilities and reduce barriers to reintegrating in traditional education after they leave.”

In the long run, she says, they hope to reduce the rate of youths returning to the juvenile justice system.

Maike and Benner recently established the Applied Research Center for Strong Communities and Schools at UW Tacoma. Their mission is to work with local communities and schools to turn around low-performing schools and help kids succeed.