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THE EXPERIENCE OF RECEIVING SPECIAL EDUCATION
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Vincent James Dean

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2105 cJCTRC/DateDandd-pJS

THE EXPERIENCE OF RECEIVING SPECIAL EDUCATION SERVICES IN A
JUVENILE DETENTION FACILITY

By

Vincent James Dean

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PI-HLOSOPHY
Department of Educational Administration

2005

ABSTRACT

THE EXPERIENCE OF RECEIVING SPECIAL EDUCATION SERVICES IN A
JUVENILE DETENTION FACILITY

By
Vincent James Dean

The experience of receiving special education services within a juvenile detention
facility was investigated. Interviews conducted with six students and six staff members
were analyzed along with record reviews and observations. The results indicated that
while special education services look different in the detention facility visited, the
experience was a positive one in regard to emphasis on education, developing
relationships with adults, and meeting health and safety needs of students.
Recommendations included developing stronger, more efﬁcient means of communication

and improving assessment practices.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank everyone who played a role in the completion of this dissertation.
In particular my committee chair and advisor Dr. Christopher Dunbar for his efforts on
this project, and committee members Dr. Kaagan, Dr. Smith, and Dr. Baker for their
guidance and expertise. I would also like to thank my parents, the Guthrie-Nelkie and
Colligan clans, and the many friends I have made through the Holt Public Schools
system. This was a lengthy journey and the support, fun, and patience you exhibited

made its conclusion possible.

iii

CHAPTER

I.

II.

111.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ................................................................. 6
Purpose of Study ................................................................ 6
Statement of the Problem ...................................................... 7
Participant and Site Selection ................................................. 8
Methodology and Theoretical Perspective ................................. 10
Signiﬁcance of Study ......................................................... 11
Summary ........................................................................ 11
Chapter Contents .............................................................. 12
Acronyms and Abbreviations ................................................ 14

REVIEW OF LITERATURE ................................................... 15

History of Juvenile Adjudication and Education in the United States. 1 5

Due Process and Adjudication ............................................... 18
Characteristics of Juvenile Delinquents .................................... 21
Special Education Within the Juvenile Justice System ................... 25
Consideration of Disability ................................................... 27
Treatment and Recidivism ................. ‘ .................................. 30
Recent Research on Delinquents with Disabilities ........................ 33
Summary ........................................................................ 35
METHODOLOGY ............................................................... 36

Research Questions ............................................................ 36
Methodological Rationale and Paradigm .................................. 37

iv

Theoretical Perspective .................................................... 43

Data Collection ............................................................. 46
Data Analysis ............................................................... 52
Bracketing ................................................................... 52
Summary ..................................................................... 55
IV. RESEARCH SITE AND PARTICIPANT DESCRIPTION ............. 56
The Research Site ........................................................... 57
Programs and Services .................................................... 62
Observations ................................................................ 71
Staff Participants ............................................................ 79
Student Participants ........................................................ 82
V. RESULTS ....................................................................... 96

Theme 1: The experience of being at Camp Haven was
designed to be educational to prevent recidivism. . . . . .96

Theme 2: Students at Haven experienced more academic
success than they did at the public school from which
they came ............................................................ 103

Theme 3: Special education looked different at Haven
than in local school districts ....................................... 109

Theme 4: The trappings of special education meant little to the
juveniles at Haven .................................................... 115

Theme 5: Students at Haven had many of their basic needs
met in new ways ..................................................... l 19

Theme 6: Even though students were placed with a group of
individuals with similar circumstances, they remained
isolated in many ways ............................................... 122

Additional Results ......................................................... 124

Locus of Control .......................................................... 126

VI. DISCUSSION ................................................................ 129

Review of Research Objectives ........................................ 129

Lessons Learned .......................................................... 13]

Lessons Congruent with the Literature ................................ 133

Lessons Divergent from the Literature ................................ 135

Contribution to the Literature ........................................... 140

Recommendations for Improving Services ........................... 142
Directions for Future Research ......................................... 148
Summation ................................................................. 149
REFERENCES ........................................................................ 151

vi

Chapter I
Introduction
Purpose

The purpose of the present study was to answer questions regarding the
educational experiences of juvenile delinquents who had been identiﬁed as disabled
within the context of a detention facility. Speciﬁcally, I was interested in determining:
What were the experiences of special education eligible youths in a juvenile detention
facility, and what consideration had been given to individual disabilities?

Following this question a list of narrower ones were developed, that were
intended to form interview protocols used to seek an understanding of this phenomenon.
Interview responses were supplemented with observations, reviewing the literature, and
examinations of records. The list was as follows:

0 To what did incarcerated juveniles attribute their current status/situation?

0 Did due process rights and protections under IDEA 1997 clash with the
idea of placing students in a facility without consideration of disability?

0 How proﬁciently were disabled, incarcerated youth able to discuss the
implications of their disabling condition?

0 What data was available that documented the impact for students who had
served time in a detention facility?

0 How was special education at a detention facility different ﬁom that in a
public school?

0 How adequately were special education service needs addressed in a

detention facility?

o What programs and services were available, and what were the treatment
foci in the hopes of preventing recidivism?

o What did having a disability and trying to get an education mean in a
detention facility?

The purpose of the study was to ﬁnd these answers by exploring what the
experiences of adjudicated juveniles with disabilities were, primarily within the
environment of a classroom in a juvenile detention facility. Interviewing students and
staff at the facility was the primary means of data collection. Gathering information
directly from the participants of the experience provided accounts that have been largely
overlooked in the literature, as noted by the President’s report ﬁ'orn the National Council
on Disability’s (NCD) submitted in 2003, a document further explored in the review of
literature.

In the state of Michigan, many youths who have committed a crime are placed in
a detention facility that is responsible for continuing their education; with sentences of
variable duration. Within Angel County, the primary placement meeting those needs is
Camp Haven, which houses the Woods School. The names of the county, facility, and the
school have been changed for purposes of conﬁdentiality. This institution has forty-eight
beds, and a full complement of teachers, support personnel, and administrators.
Statement of Problem

The study examined the situation of youths classiﬁed as both juvenile delinquent
and disabled who received special education services in a detention facility. Research has
strongly suggested that juvenile detention facilities often do not have adequate

assessment practices, treatment programs, or personnel who are appropriately trained

(Howell and Wolford 2002; Garﬁnkel et. al., 1997). This lack of proper resources may
make recidivism more likely, and appropriate, individualized services based on the
juvenile’s disability difﬁth to provide. The deﬁnition provided by the federal Juvenile
Delinquency Act of 1974 to describe these minors states, “A juvenile delinquent is a
person under the age of eighteen who commits an act that would be a violation of United
States law if committed by an adult” (Martin, 2002, p. 79). Students with disabilities are
over-represented within the juvenile justice system and delinquent population. For the
purpose of this study, having a disability meant that the youth had been found eligible for
special education services under the federal Individual’s with Disabilities Education Act
(IDEA).

Leone, et al., (1995) found that as many as 70% of conﬁned youth may have some
form of disabling condition. Manifested disorders include learning and emotional
disabilities, attention deﬁcit disorder, depression, and cognitive impairment.
Additionally, these conditions often presented with a high degree of co-morbidity, further
handicapping many juvenile offenders. Due to the co-morbid aspect, a relatively high
number of these youths were eligible for services under more than one IDEA
classiﬁcation. For these students, the lack of appropriate staff training and resources had
even more serious ramiﬁcations.

Participant and Site Selection

I became well acquainted with a special education teacher at Camp Haven, a
juvenile detention facility that houses juveniles from urban areas around the state in
addition to Angel County. Over the past four years, we have had numerous conversations

regarding the challenges and joys inherent in her position. From these discussions, I

learned that half of the beds in the facility are reserved for delinquents who come from
the same county where I have been a practicing school psychologist for the past four
years. I chose this facility for several other reasons. I was highly interested in educational
programming for students with signiﬁcantly disabling conditions. A key component of
this is the application of proper assessment techniques to students in order to accurately
identify their unique challenges, and also to guide their educational and mental health
services. Through my school psychologist training and other areas of research interest, I
considered assessment to be an area of personal expertise. Another reason was that I am
quite familiar with the delivery of special education services to students in the public
school systems of this county, and was intrigued by the idea that they might be quite
different in the setting of a detention facility.

I was interested in getting a picture from several perspectives of what it meant to
have a disability and be a juvenile delinquent. My primary participants were six
juveniles with a variety of disabilities, but I also sought an understanding of the
experiences and perceptions of staff, including counselors, teachers, administrators, and
officers of the court. This provided me with a wide array of perspectives that I explored
and compared in detail during the data analysis phase of the study. The facility itself had
forty-eight beds, and had always been ﬁlled to capacity or nearly so since opening. Half
of the students were sentenced to short-term incarceration of not more than ninety
calendar days, and the long-term sentences ranged ﬁom eight to possibly more than
eighteen months in duration. The age of the delinquents ranged from twelve to eighteen.

They had been placed in the facility for offences ranging from assault to truancy. The

special education classroom that was the fulcrum of this study contained both short and
long-term students throughout each day.
Methodology and Theoretical Perspective

I intended to explore my research questions through the use of a qualitative
research design, which has become an increasingly acceptable means of inquiry in the
ﬁeld of special education (Bogdan & Lutﬁyya, 1996). I utilized a psychological
phenomenological approach, through interviews, observations, and reviews of
documentation as my tools of inquiry. This method allowed me to interpret and draw
conclusions about the experiences of disabled juvenile delinquents.

Viewing any research experience through a theoretical lens was an important
means of guiding the inquiry, in that it provided a lexicon with which to describe what
was observed. For this study, I chose to apply a social learning perspective from the ﬁeld
of psychological personality development. This theory dealt with what factors
individuals, in their interactions with other people and their environment, attributed
positive or negative events. I believed that this theory would assist in shedding light on
the experiences of these youths and staff in a manner and with a language that had not
previously been applied to this population.

This theoretical perspective applied within a qualitative paradigm helped address
some areas of need identiﬁed by the NCD report, and some areas which, based on my
review of the literature, I believed the report did not call for strongly enough. The authors
of this document called for a signiﬁcant increase in the amount of research in this ﬁeld,
but appeared to primarily address policy, law, and programming factors. These things

Were critical in developing a consistent, useful infrastructure for disabled youths, but I

was interested in looking at more intra-personal factors. I believed examining the
experiences of students and practitioners could provide useful information in developing
more comprehensive policy initiatives, in that it could provide guidance for the types of
guidelines might ﬁnd acceptance at the level of the individual.
Signiﬁcance of Study

The proposed study was designed to provide insight into the experiences of
adjudicated youths with disabilities in a way that had not been addressed in the research
literature. Using the gathered data, I attempted to understand what it meant to have a
disability which signiﬁcantly impacts one’s capacity to learn, and be sentenced to a
facility for juvenile delinquents. From this inquiry, I learned how well informed students
are regarding their condition and circumstances. For example, most were unable to
express what impact their disability might have on their progress in school.
Summary

In the present study, I interviewed six students and six staff members in a juvenile
detention facility. The students were selected based on variety of disability and duration
of sentence to provide as wide an array of student experience as possible. The students
were observed in their primary classroom, and in other daily interactions within the
facility. The interview data was transcribed, coded, analyzed, and triangulated with
observations and reviews of student records. Common themes and experiences were

described, as well as ﬁndings that are divergent from previously discovered patterns.

Chapter Contents

In Chapter II, a brief history of how the juvenile justice system in the United
States came to look as it does today is presented. This history was developed with some
consideration of how education has been incorporated into the remediation of
delinquency. The second component discussed some of the important due process issues
involved with delinquent adjudication, and how those rights are presently observed. The
next section discussed characteristics which have been found to serve as predictors or risk
factors for at-risk youth. Two subsections of this heading dealt with prevalence of
disabled youth and to a lesser extent minority youth, as they were both groups of
juveniles who have been signiﬁcantly over-represented.

These pieces were followed by information regarding how education has been
delivered in the juvenile justice system. Next, a summary of how important consideration
of disability is for disabled youth is followed by a look at treatment strategies and
' recommendations from the literature on how to reduce recidivism were presented. The
last section provided some details into the current state of the research on disabled
juvenile delinquents and concludes with a brief summary.

In Chapter III, I discussed further how I explored my research questions
through the use of a qualitative research design. In the following pages, I elucidated
further why this methodology was chosen. First, I described the speciﬁc qualitative
perspective I have selected, phenomenology. Next, I described how social attribution
theory provided a ﬁ'arnework by which the research questions were developed into a

means of collecting data and guiding my analysis. This was followed by a section

providing speciﬁc information about what data was collected and by what manner. I
concluded this section by describing how the data was analyzed.

Chapter IV consisted of a detailed description of the research site and participants.
I began with describing Camp Haven and the Woods School, as giving the reader a rich
depiction of the environment of the participants is called for by the chosen methodology.
That was followed by a section describing the primary programs and services available at
the facility. The third section is a narrative presentation of observations within the
classroom. Next is a brief overview of the staff interviewees, where I described them for
the reader to further understand the experience of the students at Haven. The ﬁnal portion
of Chapter IV was an introduction to the six student interviewees. I included information
taken from their school and court records, all of which was found on-site.

In Chapter V I presented the results gleaned from analysis of the data. The data
was organized into six themes based on what I believed were important aspects of the
educational experience of these juveniles. The themes included what I learned about the
design of Haven’s programming, how special education is structured in the facility, and
how students there had certain needs met that most public school children took for
granted.

Finally, Chapter VI consists of the culmination of the study. The ﬁrst section
reviewed my goals for the study. Second, I described what I learned and how this meshed
with the literature presented in Chapter II. These lessons are followed by
recommendations for providing services to this population based on what I learned, and
directions for future research. Below, I have included a list of acronyms that commonly

appear throughout the following chapters.

Acronyms/Abbreviations

Special Education

MET-Multidisciplinary Evaluation Team
[BF-Individualized Education Plan
CI—Cognitively Impaired

EI-Emotionally Impaired

LD-Learning Disabled

SLI-Speech and Language Impaired
OHI-Otherwise Health Impaired
IDEA-Individuals with Disabilities Education Act

Staff Interviewees
Classroom Teacher-CT
School Principal-SP
School Social Worker-SW
Probation Ofﬁcer-PO
Family Counselor-F C
Residential Director-RD

Interviewer
Vince Dean-VD

START-STabilization, Assessment, Reintegration, and Treatment
LABS-Learning, Accepting, Building, Sharing (Camp behavior management level
system)

Chapter [I
Literature Review
History of Juvenile Adjudication and Education in the US.

Juvenile delinquency has been a phenomena present in our society since its
inception. In Colonial America, education and apprenticeship systems were the main
tools used to control delinquency (Clement, 1993). Olson-Raymer (1993) noted that
starting in the 1600’s Puritanical ideas (strong, moral adult examples, punishment for
transgressions, responsibility for one’s actions) guiding the roles held by families,
religion, and communities for the raising of children played a key role in how the juvenile
justice system was developed in this country. Little changed until the 1820’s, when some
cities on the eastern coast of the United States established institutions to combat the rising
tide of delinquency that accompanied an inﬂux of immigrant and rural young people
seeking employment. These places were often built, “in anticipation of an increase in
juvenile delinquency rather than in response to already existing juvenile crime” (Clement,
p. 463). They often served children who had no other place to live in addition to juveniles
who had committed a crime. This development also marked a shift from punishment and
sentencing for juveniles as if they were adults towards, “. . .recognizing the special needs
of youths to be saved and reformed” (Olson-Raymer, p. 493).

Clement also documented an evolution in what these facilities were named
through the 19th century: “First, United States asylums for juvenile delinquents were
called houses of refuge, then reform schools, training schools, vocational or industrial

schools, and eventually, just schools” (p. 469). Krisberg (1996) reported that by 1876

10

there were ﬁfty-one reform schools nationwide, and they continued to spread quickly,
albeit signiﬁcantly slower through the South.

The student population was different in these reform schools as opposed to the
public school system. The adjudicated youths were typically older, described as resistant
to instruction, attended these schools for a shorter period of time than they would have
attended a public school, and had a greater emphasis placed on learning a trade as
opposed to reading and writing. The students in reform schools spent the better part of
each day working for contractors and were not paid. A few changes occurred near the end
of the 19th century. As the demand for labor (in particular farm workers) declined with
the rise of industrialization and wage labor, juveniles remained in the institutions longer,
vocational programs were improved, and most youths were sent home to their families
aﬁer being released (Clement, 1993).

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, in 183 8, established that individual states had
the right to take children from their families and place them in institutions (Granello &
Hanna, 2003). In 1899, Illinois became the ﬁrst state to design and implement statutes
which differentiated how the criminal justice system would deal with minors as opposed
to adults (Martin, 2002). This system was designed to be less formal than adult justice
operations and meet the needs of j uveniles from a treatment perspective as opposed to a
punitive one designed around delivering and enforcing punishment. The goal of all early
juvenile justice systems was to create a paternalistic atmosphere, where everyone
involved was working to help each child (Williams, 1999). Another interesting concept

was the idea that the length of sentence would be open-ended in order to allow state

11

ofﬁcials who knew and worked with the delinquent to decide when they were ready for
release (Olson-Raymer, 1993).

The federal government passed the Juvenile Delinquency Act of 1974 in an effort
to meet the needs of minors who committed crimes. The Act provided a working
deﬁnition to describe these minors, stating, “A juvenile delinquent is a person under the
age of eighteen who commits an act that would be a violation of United States law if
committed by an adult” (Martin, 2002, p. 79). It also established the Ofﬁce of Juvenile
Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) to oversee delinquency regulations,
recommend alternatives to incarceration, and establish standards for promoting the
consistent administration of juvenile justice nationwide (Olson-Raymer, 1993). This
organization has supported research into best practices for remanded juveniles, including
those with disabilities.

In the 1980’s, despite a large increase in expenditures on juvenile justice and
reform efforts, it became increasingly evident that juvenile crime rates and recidivism
were not abating. Since then, the juvenile justice system has become increasingly
punitive and more concerned with protecting the public, and less emphasis has been
placed on rehabilitation (Krisberg, 1996; Sullivan, 1996; Olson-Raymer, 1993); Krisberg
noted that in 1995 alone, over 700 bills were introduced in state legislature to transfer
more juvenile delinquents to adult prisons, and Sullivan wrote that a societal demand has
emerged, in response to juvenile crime, for more secure juvenile facilities.

Another fairly recent development that has impacted how juvenile offenders are
treated has been the implementation of zero tolerance policies. These are designed to be

one method of providing a safe school environment by perpetuating an atmosphere where

12

violence of any sort is not endured by staff or students. There is some concern in the
literature, however, regarding the impact that such unbending strategies may have on a
student’s rights under the Constitution of the United States (Ratner v. Loudoun County
Public Schools, 2001). Speciﬁcally, the concept of due process under the law and
potential violation of this protection has come under scrutiny as examples of students
being removed from school begin to mount (Martin, 2001).

Presently, over 125,000 juveniles are in custody and serving time in almost 3,500
correctional facilities in the US. (Snyder, 1998). In 1993, nearly one-third of arrests for
major crimes had a juvenile participant (U .S. Department of Education, 1994). In 1997,
this equated to 2,838,000 juvenile arrests, or just over 9% of the US. population whose
age falls between 10 and 17 (Osher, et al., 2002). The facilities housing these youths
range from day-treatrnent to settings very much like adult prisons and may be publicly or
privately owned and operated.

Due Process and Adjudication

Special education students do not fall under the same discipline guidelines as
students without disabilities. These students have certain federal due process protections
that should supercede zero tolerance policies and other discipline practices; however,
some students still end up in detention facilities with little or no consideration of their
disability. The line where educational protections for special education students falls in
the adjudication process is not clear.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the US. Constitution guarantees equal protection
and due process under the law; however, this guarantee has not always been provided to

juveniles. Williams (1999) noted that the result of rean from the development of

13

the traditional, adversarial legal proceedings of adult courts led to juveniles having fewer
legal rights. Olson-Raymer (1993) documented three court cases between 1905 and 1964
establishing that juveniles were not entitled to the same constitutional due process
protections or procedural safeguards as adults who were on trial for criminal offenses.
This was changed in 1967, and through two subsequent cases in 1970 and 1974, when the
U. S. Supreme Court ruled that juveniles should have Fourteenth Amendment and Bill of
Rights protections. These rights, previously not held by delinquents include: (1) Notice
provided to juveniles and parents of speciﬁc charges; (2) the right to counsel; (3)
protection against self-incrimination; (4) the right to confront and cross-examine a
witness; (5) protection from double jeopardy; (6) and the idea that a classiﬁcation of
delinquency must come from proof beyond a reasonable doubt as opposed to the lesser
burden of a preponderance of evidence.

Some zero tolerance opponents argue that these types of broad policies do not
allow for consideration of the unique circumstances involved in each apparent violation
(Ratner v. Loudoun County Public Schools, 2001). This argument may be particularly
salient in Michigan, as the zero tolerance policies in this state contain no provisions for
the guarantee of due process (Polakow-Suransky, 1999). Since zero tolerance practices
differ by location, it is likely that the due process protections vary as well. The literature
appears to contain signiﬁcantly fewer resources that include a consideration of due
process in the context of zero tolerance. Many scholars who broach the topic of due
process are concerned with special education rather than school violence.

Authors who have addressed the legal issues involved with zero-tolerance policies

noted that there are many levels of security involved in the school setting, including zero

14

tolerance, and that school districts may need a signiﬁcant amount of guidance in
formulating legally correct policies (Yell & Rozalski, 2000). More philosophical authors
have contended that the idea of justice itself is not well served ﬁom zero tolerance
policies, as it removes the concept of having the punishment ﬁtting the crime (Kauffrnan
& Brigham, 2000). They further stated, “Zero tolerance is often implemented clumsily,
vindictively, and with horrendous results that undermine social justice” (p. 277).

Types of research on due process seem to be somewhat more limited. The
literature contains some articles that look at how courts have interpreted and applied zero
tolerance in the context of school violence Zirkel, 1999; Zirkel & Gluckman, 1997).
Others have explored the dilemma in how schools, while legally obligated to provide a
safe educational environment, may tread on students’ constitutional rights of ﬁ'ee
expression, searches and seizures, and due process (McCarthy & Webb, 2000). At the
time of the present literature search, there appeared to be no references that included any
sort of quantitative analysis of due process protection policies across states or local
agencies.

Garﬁnkel et al. (1997) noted that under the 1997 re-authorization of the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that, “. . .in any instance the provision
of special education and related services to eligible children with disabilities requires the
ﬁrll implementation of all substantive and procedural requirements set forth in IDEA” (p.
41). This statement suggests that any discipline procedures conducted with disabled
students should contain full consideration of the disability. Burrell and Warboys (2000)

wrote that releasing a juvenile from custody might in some cases be appropriate to

15

maintain the delivery of appropriate special education services. Many detention facilities
may not be able to meet the needs of a signiﬁcant portion of their population.

The literature cited above is useful in exploring what research problems exist
between due process rights, adjudication, and examples such as zero tolerance policy.
Some authors seem to agree that while zero tolerance may tread on constitutional rights,
it is a necessary evil for maintaining a safe school environment. The problem is that there
is little research exploring the after-effects of the lack of due process for students who
have been adjudicated. A qualitative analysis based on interviews of students who have
been placed in a detention setting could shed some light on their feelings of self-efﬁcacy
after going through that type of experience, for example. If practices such as zero
tolerance policies could be shown to have serious long-term, detrimental effects, then
support for modifying them to better secure individual rights could be mustered.
Characteristics of Juvenile Delinquents

Scott, Nelson, and Liaupsin (2001) conducted a manner of qualitative meta-
analysis where they summarized and compared interview data from other studies dealing
with administrators, teachers and students. They concluded that violent behavior can
many times be traced to academic failure, and recommend that any school violence
prevention efforts contain a push for more effective instruction. Natalucci-Persichetti
(1996) summarized several well-documented characteristics of juveniles likely to commit
violent offenses. These factors included (1) less attachment to parents, teachers, and
school; (2) higher likelihood of having delinquent peers; (3) more likely to live in
hpoverished areas with higher rates of crime; (4) more likely to engage in physical

ﬁghting, and (5) at greater risk for experiencing childhood abuse and neglect.

l6

Bullying, or engaging in the victimizing of others, has also been identiﬁed as a
risk factor for many juvenile offenders (Palmer & Farmer, 2002). Herrera and
McCloskey (2001) found that children who were exposed to marital violence were at a
signiﬁcantly higher risk for later referral to juvenile court. Johnson (1999) wrote that
characteristics of juveniles sentenced in public facilities include low academic skill, come
from racially isolated areas, and have a learning or mental disability. Archwamety and
Katsiyannis (2000) also noted the correlation between low academic achievement and
delinquency, in addition to substance abuse and early pregnancy.

Morrison and D’Incau (1997) have looked at the individual characteristics of
students who have been expelled from school based on zero-tolerance policies. They
found that most students who were expelled had not demonstrated a pattern of behavior
that would generally be considered dangerous, and that a higher than expected percentage
of the cases were students who had been identiﬁed as eligible for special education
services. label and Nigro (2001) examined the scores of 130 adjudicated adolescents in
reading, language, and math, and found that students who had a special education
designation generally scored lower. Vavrus and Cole (2002) looked at teacher
suspensions based on zero-tolerance policies and concluded that removing students is
often a very subjective decision. They further stated that subtle gender and racial
interaction provides a context for student discipline that practices like zero-tolerance
cannot adequately address.

Huizinga, Loeber, Thornberry, and Cothern (2000) presented the results from a
study called the Program of Research on Causes and Correlates of Delinquency. They

suggested that while problems in school, drug use, and mental health status are

17

signiﬁcant risk factors, many serious delinquent offenders have not had a history of
serious drug use or persistent school and mental health challenges. The authors suggest
that treatment foci should be individualized to the unique needs of offenders. Two
speciﬁc sub-groups appear to be particularly over-represented in the juvenile justice
system. These categories are youth with disabilities and those of minority status.
Prevalence of Disabilities

In the United States, the number of school-age students classiﬁed as disabled is
approximately 9% (U .S. Department of Education, 2000). This percentage is dramatically
higher within the population of children classiﬁed as juvenile delinquent. While there is
some variability in the literature regarding the percentage of adjudicated youth who have
disabilities, all agree that it is substantially higher than within the public school system.
The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (2000) has estimated that between 50% and 75% of
youth in detention facilities have serious mental health problems. Leone, et al., (1995)
found that as many as 70% of conﬁned youth may have a disability. Rogers, Pumariega,
and Cuffe (2001) found in their study of 240 court-involved youth that 69% of
incarcerated youth and 96% of juveniles who were referred by a court for mental health
evaluation met criteria for a psychiatric diagnosis.

The results of a national survey of state agencies and both public and private
detention facilities conducted by Quinn, Rutherford, & Leone (2001) suggested that 32%
of youth in the juvenile court system have a disability. In addition, juveniles with
emotional or learning disabilities were more likely to be placed in adult or juvenile
correction facilities than peers without disabilities. Most respondents to the survey

indicated that they were prepared to identify youth with disabilities. These authors

18

suggested that disabled youth, “. . .may be more vulnerable to involvement in the juvenile
or criminal justice system when poorly developed reasoning ability, inappropriate affect,
and inattention are misinterpreted by professionals as hostility, lack of cooperation, and
other inappropriate responses” (p. 4).

The most prevalent types of disabilities that comprise this over-representation are
emotional impairments or disturbances, attention deﬁcit hyperactivity disorder, learning
disabilities, and mild cognitive impairment (Rutherford, Bullis, Anderson, & Griller,
2000). These students may have challenges understanding social cues and rules, with
impulse control, and regulating their emotional responses or behavior. With the current
trend away from rehabilitation towards increasingly punitive sentencing, youth with
disabilities may be at higher risk now than ever before.

Minority Status .

While juveniles of minority status are not the focus of this paper, some parallels
can be drawn between them and children with disabilities. Incarcerated minority youth
have a signiﬁcantly higher literature base from which to draw, which may be of
assistance when considering how best to serve other groups who are disproportionately
represented in the juvenile justice system. Poe—Yamagata and Jones (2000) suggested that
minority over-representation in the juvenile system appears to be a result of actions early
in the system, such as arrests. For example, Aﬁican-American youth were over-
represented in records for 26 out of 29 crime classiﬁcations kept by the Federal Bureau of

Investigations. Additionally, more minority youth are incarcerated after court

proceedings than Caucasian offenders.

l9

Rogers, Pumariega, and Cuffe (2001) noted that Caucasian youth were referred
for mental health evaluation and services signiﬁcantly more often then were African-
American juveniles. Taking the above information into account, minority youth who have
a disabling condition may be at a substantially higher risk for juvenile incarceration than
their peers. This combination of risk factors is supported by other research in special
education, which suggests that minority students are more likely to receive a special
education classiﬁcation in the ﬁrst place.

Special Education Within the Juvenile Justice System

Johnson (1999) wrote that while education is not a speciﬁed, constitutional right,
the court system has consistently ruled that in states where compulsory school attendance
is the law, incarcerated juveniles must have educational programming available. Quinn,
Rutherford, & Leone (2001) found in their survey that 84% of youth in short-term
facilities were involved in an education program as opposed to 48% of juveniles in long-
term facilities, and only 29% of youth who have been sentenced to adult prisons.

Garﬁnkel et.al., (1997) noted that the Ofﬁce of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention (OJJ DP) has found that most juvenile detention facilities do not provide the
necessary health or mental health services that they are required to supply by IDEA,
Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and state laws. Federal law
continues to deﬁne special education as specially designed instruction, at no cost to the
parents, to meet the unique needs of a child with a disability (Pub. L. No. 105-17 § 602,
111 Stat. 45-46, 1997). Disabled youth are entitled to special instruction and any related
services which are needed for the student to beneﬁt from it. This problem is further

compounded by Quinn, Rutherford, & Leone’s ﬁnding that only 17% of the teaching

20

staff in the facilities who responded to their survey were fully certiﬁed special education
teachers. Counseling and speech and language services were the most commonly offered
types of individualized service.

Howell and Wolford (2002) described a few common practices regarding the
delivery of special education services in detention facilities. They found that areas where
signiﬁcant improvement was needed included using instructional time to provide a
variety of opportunities to learn, evaluations of student progress that did not match
consequent instruction, teachers and other staff did not have adequate supervision or
support, and not enough classroom time being provided to meet the goals of the IEP.

There have been some efforts to improve the quality of education within this
system. Brooks and White (1999), in conjunction with the National Juvenile Detention
Association (NJDA) and the OJJDP, developed a curriculum for training staff working in
detention facilities. It was designed to help teachers identify the needs of their students, to
improve behavior management skills, and to promote the development of students’ social
skills. Muse (2001) examined the beneﬁts of teaching to individual learning styles in
residential facilities for delinquents, but did not ﬁnd that this type of instructional
differentiation had signiﬁcant beneﬁts.

Larson and Turner (2002) noted that at least one state (Nebraska) has developed a
speciﬁc plan to address the needs of students with developmental disabilities, including
signiﬁcant transition, community, and due process considerations. Recommendations
included individualized, team planning as a best-practice approach to meeting all of a
disabled student’s needs, including academics. However, a variable which complicates

the resources available to support such detailed supports is how these institutions receive

21

funding. Rutherford, Bullis, Anderson, and Griller-Clark (2002) found that funding for
special education services is generally tied directly to the number of students classiﬁed as
disabled. Without comprehensive evaluation systems in place to correctly identify all
eligible students, enough resources might not be available to support necessary
educational programming.

Other educational best practices include setting high expectations for student
performance, strengthening the role of families in the education process, improving the
quality of professional development, and spending more resources on teaching and
learning opportunities and less on paperwork (Howell & Wolford, 2002). The instruction
of students with disabilities requires a detailed understanding of the cognitive and
affective challenges faced by these students. A key component to designing effective
instruction must be appropriate assessment, that includes measuring the child’s strengths
as well as weaknesses (Osher, et al., 2002), and determining speciﬁc academic skill and
transition needs (Rutherford, Bullis, Anderson, & Griller-Clark, 2002).

Consideration of Disability

Public school students identiﬁed as having disabilities, which by deﬁnition means
they are unable to make academic progress in the general education curriculum without
special education support, fall under different discipline rules. If the student commits an
infraction that would, through a zero tolerance policy for example, result in automatic
expulsion for a non-disabled student, the district is required to engage in a review
process. This manifestation review involves convening a team of school staff and parents

to determine whether or not the inﬁaction was a manifestation of the student’s disability.

22

If it is determined that the offence is a manifestation, then the student stays put,
and appropriate interventions are plotted out. If the team ﬁnds that the event is not a
manifestation, the district may remove the student from the school setting but must
continue to provide for the student’s academic needs to enable the student to make
progress towards academic and/or behavioral goals. This protection, which is written into
the Individuals with Disabilities Act (IDEA), is presently interpreted as extending to the
student only when on school grounds. Several authors have called for a consideration of
disability throughout the adjudication process regardless of how the student’s case ends
up in the juvenile justice system (Burrell & Warboys, 2000; Osher, et al., 2002; Howell
& Wolford, 2002).

All students are entitled to a Free Appropriate Public Education (FAPE). IDEA
and other special education laws and procedures are designed to make sure that students
with disabilities are not denied FAPE due to some mental or physical condition. There
have been some instances where failing to consider a disability has been ruled to be
illegal. In a US. Supreme Court case in 1966, Kent v. United States, three mental health
professionals found a juvenile to have serious mental disturbance. A juvenile court judge
did not hold a hearing into the youth’s mental state and had his trial moved to adult court.
The Supreme Court ruled that not having a hearing violated his constitutional rights
(Olson-Raymer, 1993).

Katner (2000) recommended a full exploration of a student’s school history
during the adjudication process to determine if there are any mental health factors that
would be relevant to his or her defense. Burrell and Warboys (2000), in a document

published by the OJJDP, wrote that knowledge about a juvenile’s disability may be

23

helpful in deciding to proceed with formal delinquency proceedings, in guiding
investigations and defense strategy, in directing intervention, “. . .and it is essential to
arriving at a disposition that will both meet the youth’s rehabilitative needs and comply
with IDEA requirements” (p. 1). In addition, facilities are required to evaluate any
students suspected of having a disability.

The Local Education Agency (LEA), which serves the area where the detention
facility is located, or another agency designated by the State Education Agency (SEA)
bear the responsibility of implementing special education programs and services for
students with disabilities who are incarcerated as delinquents (Garﬁnkel et. a1, 1997).
These authors also identiﬁed several needs within the juvenile justice system that are
speciﬁc to students with disabilities. Important factors are disseminating information
about individuals’ disabilities and their impact to court personnel; a consistent disability
evaluation system or criteria; effective collaboration among service agencies and
families; consideration of gender, race, mental health, disability, and culture; a means of
evaluating long-term outcomes for both recidivism and transition success; comprehensive
community aftercare programs; transition planning; and a comprehensive plan for
evaluation and treatment for ﬁrst-time offenders.

Michigan special education laws provide guidelines for providing educational
services to students who have been placed in juvenile detention facilities. They require
services to commence within ﬁve calendar days after admission, and all special education
teachers to be certiﬁed to teach students with emotional impairments. They do not

address entrance criteria, IDEA protections, or manifestation considerations.

24

Treatment and Recidivism

There is a substantial amount of literature examining the treatment outcomes for
adjudicated youth. Burrell and Warboys (2000) noted that recidivism has been clearly
reduced and employment prospects have been positively impacted by providing
educational services within juvenile correctional facilities, and emphasized that meeting a
student’s special education needs is very important in maximizing the potential beneﬁts
of any services delivered. Granello and Hanna (2003) reported that the research
regarding students with disabilities served within the juvenile justice system has been
calling for a multi-systernic, ecological approach that involves the courts, families, and
other social and community systems. However, they noted that currently most juveniles
receive a minimum of basic counseling efforts, much less a cohesive multi-faceted effort,
that appears to be resulting in these minors ending up in prison as adults. This idea is
supported by Katsiyannis and Archwamety (1999), who determined that while improving
the academic skills of delinquents had a positive effect on recidivism, there are many
other co-morbid factors that needed to be addressed.

Larson and Turner (2002) noted that many disabled, court-involved youths are
likely to have deﬁcits in social skills and a variety of other conditions that may make
intervention difﬁcult. They identiﬁed eight effective interventions which include: (1)
individual juvenile planning; (2) skill-based interventions (including counseling, social
skills training, academic and vocational interventions, and life skills/multimodal
approaches; (3) medical interventions (including medication and substance abuse
treatment); (4) behavioral systems; (5) family involvement; (6) the use of individualized

transition planning (such as wrap-around planning and supports); (7) effective stafﬁng;

25

and (8) the ongoing assessment of program effectiveness (p. 1). There exists some
support for this type of comprehensive service delivery, which should give those working
with these youths some cause for optimism. The Coalition for Juvenile Justice (2000)
suggested that intensive mental health support, including working to rebuild the family
structures of delinquent youths, may reduce recidivism by as much as 80%.

As a preventative strategy in public schools, Hanson (2002) advocated for the
teaching of our legal system, referred to as law-related education. Various activities could
be included, such as mock trials or bringing in police officers or other volunteers to talk
with students. The goal of this intervention is to reduce delinquency by encouraging
students to think about their rights, responsibilities, and privileges in a democracy.
Williamson (2000) described how a law-related education program adopted into the state
of Kentucky’s court system has been evaluated positively by school and alternative
education locations. The focus of the program is on building skills regarding social
norms, providing opportunities for positive reinforcement, and allowing students to
practice what they have learned in real situations.

Nessel, P. A. (2002) described how youth courts can promote law-related
education in a realistic setting with real consequences. These courts involved using
juveniles to sentence other juveniles after a judge has determined guilt. Sentences often
range from community service time to apologizing to victims. In 1991 , there were 50 of
these courts across 14 states, numbers which grew to 850 youth courts in 46 states and
the District of Columbia in 2002. The most common model involved having an adult act
as judge for purposes of clarifying legal terminology and facilitating procedures, with

peers acting as defense and prosecuting attorneys, jurors, bailiffs, and clerks. In 1998 the

26

OJJDP ﬁrnded a study of national youth courts, the results of which indicated that they
had a positive effect on participating juveniles.

Some authors have examined how remediating language deﬁcits may have some
positive utility for this population. Mclin (2002) studied the ability of violent juvenile
offenders to describe and manage their emotional state in different social contexts with a
quantitative instrument, as this has been found to be an important construct to assess for
guiding treatment. Smith and Griffin (2002) attempted to teach incarcerated students
with learning disabilities strategies designed to improve their conversational skills. The
results of their study indicated that this type of instruction may have positive beneﬁts,
such as helping the individual to keep from escalating situations where the typical
response could be aggression.

Other interventions have included such practices as outdoor adventure therapy
(Bruyere, 2002) and other ways of using recreation as a means of promoting group and
community involvement to facilitate communication with families and improve self-
conﬁdence (Howard and Peniston, 2002). These treatment strategies attempt to reach the
goal of being ecological by considering the many, unique factors involved with each
delinquent.

Recidivism rates for youth remanded into custody are quite high. Osher, et a1.
(2002) reported that approximately 46% of males and 27% of females will recidivate.
Archwamety and Katsiyannis (2000) found that delinquents who participated in remedial
academic programs while incarcerated were twice as likely to be recidivists or violate
their parole. This suggests that delinquents classiﬁed as disabled may be signiﬁcantly

more likely to be repeat offenders.

27

A signiﬁcant portion of these youths have difficulty re-integrating into their
communities and families. An important component for treatment that is speciﬁc to
delinquents identiﬁed as special education eligible under IDEA is the transition
component of the Individualized Educational Program (IEP). Transition planning, to
ensure a smooth re-integration of the student back into the LEA after the completion of a
sentence, should begin well ahead of a release date and should include the ecological
considerations mentioned above (Garfmkel, et.al, 1997; Larson & Turner, 2002;
Rutherford, Bullis, Anderson, & Griller-Clark, 2002).

Recent Research on Delinquents with Disabilities

In May of 2003, the National Council on Disability (NCD) presented a report to
the President, President Pro Tempore of the US. Senate, and Speaker of the US. House
of Representatives regarding the state of research on disabled youth within the juvenile
justice system. Major ﬁndings of the report are not unexpected and show: (1) current and
proposed legislation will not meet the research calls for greater emphasis on prevention
and early intervention; (2) a lack of resources and training regarding disabilities in the
juvenile justice system increases the challenges of consistent implementation of disability
laws; (3) the gap between needs and services appears to be signiﬁcantly higher in
juvenile detention facilities than in public schools, and documentation of the extent of
these gaps is sparse or non-existent; (4) there is evidence to suggest that policies such as
zero-tolerance and public school failures to adequately implement special education laws,
such as IDEA, have led to an increase in the number of juveniles with disabilities in the

justice system.

28

Additional ﬁndings from the NCD that are equally viable as those noted above
included: (1) record-keeping regarding funding, expenditures, and service provision for
disabled youth are inadequate; (2) prevention and early-intervention efforts are not
widespread, despite research evidence which suggests that these efforts may be the only
effective way to reduce disabled youth involvement in the juvenile justice system; (3)
racial and ethnic minority youth are over-represented both in the juvenile justice system
and within groups classiﬁed as disabled, but little specialized programming to meet these
students’ needs is being provided; (4) some intervention strategies are becoming popular,
such as positive behavioral support, alternative education programs, and youth courts, but
they generally focus on treating behavioral problems. The authors of the NCD report
observed, “Researchers have not systematically identiﬁed and assessed interventions or
practices that focus primarily on youth with disabilities who are at risk of delinquency or
are involved in the juvenile justice system. As a result, there remains little scientiﬁc basis
for recommending speciﬁc programs for these you ” (p.6).

The NCD also made several recommendations regarding research, which included
studying exactly how many youth with different disabilities are at some stage in the
juvenile justice system, examining how well special education and disability laws are
complied with, and determining which interventions are truly the most effective. The
report concluded by noting that there are many unanswered questions about this
population, which range from philosophies regarding the law, what works in helping
these students, and how their rights and needs are addressed. They noted that, “The most
consistent theme emerging from this report’s review and discussions with individuals is

the lack of reliable, accurate, empirically based data on almost every dimension relevant

29

to increasing and improving services for youth with disabilities at risk of entering the
juvenile justice system or already involved in it” (p. 80).
Summary

The result of reviewing and presenting the literature above has'been to
demonstrate that most of the components comprising the present study’s research
question have no concrete answers. The process of adjudication and all that is entailed
within it may not differ at all between disabled and non-disabled youth with any degree
of consistency despite frequent calls for consideration of disability at every stage. While
there are well-documented instances of several kinds of disabilities (learning, mental,
behavioral) being over-represented in the juvenile justice population, less evidence exists
on how this knowledge has translated into disability-speciﬁc treatment and/or educational
strategies. Regarding any ‘best practice’ strategies impacting recidivism, there are some
which have supported veriﬁcation, but again, according to the NCD, nothing that is
widespread or conclusively established, save perhaps, for the beneﬁts of a multi-

systemic, resource intensive, individualized approach to treatment.

30

Chapter III
Methodology
Research Questions
Studying the topic of adjudicated special education youths required a
signiﬁcant amount of narrowing down the scope of what is to be examined. For example,
looking at zero tolerance opened up an entire spectrum of research areas in regards to
school violence and its prevention. Considering constructs like due process and special
education as separate entities, and making sure each research question developed
addressed the overall focus of the study, were ways to begin restricting the ﬁeld of
inquiry. The next step was to try and ask questions to which some degree of resolution
could be attained. The guiding research question I used to frame the rest of the study
reads: What were the experiences of special education eligible youths in a juvenile
detention facility, and what consideration had been given to individual disabilities?
Following this two-pronged question, a list of questions narrower in scope were
developed into a semi-structured interview protocol. I intended to supplement interview
responses with observation, reviewing the literature, and examinations of records.
0 To what do incarcerated juveniles attribute their current status/situation?
0 Do the due process rights and protections under IDEA 1997 clash with
placement of students in a facility without consideration of disability?
0 How proﬁciently are disabled, incarcerated youth able to discuss the
implications of their disabling condition?
0 What data is available that documents the impact for students who have

served time in juvenile detention facilities?

31

o How is special education at a detention facility different from that in a
public school?
0 How adequately are special education service needs addressed in the
detention facility?
0 What programs and services are available and what is the treatment
focused around in the hopes of preventing recidivism?
Methodological Rationale and Paradigm
Phenomenology
The purpose in choosing the qualitative methodology of phenomenology was to
try and discover something tangible about the essence of special education services in a
juvenile detention facility. Does actually having a disability, or simply being labeled as
such, have a signiﬁcant impact on these youth in the context of courtrooms and fences. A
second goal was to discover if the objectives behind legislation passed to protect students
with disabilities, making sure they have educational programming that meets their unique
needs, had come to pass in the lives of these juveniles as they drifted in and out of
incarceration. Garﬁnkel et al. (1997) noted that under the 1997 re-authorization of the
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) that, “. . .in any instance the provision
of special education and related services to eligible children with disabilities requires the
full implementation of all substantive and procedural requirements set forth in IDEA” (p.
41). This statement suggested that discipline procedures, adjudication processes, or
transitions from the facility back to the local school district with disabled juvenile
delinquents should contain full consideration of the disability and due process

protections.

32

I sought to understand whether there existed a common essence to the experiences
of the youths, which superceded their many differences, including severity of disability
and criminal offense. There was little research that explored the after-effects of lack of
due process for students who had been adjudicated. The National Council on Disability’s
report on the current state of knowledge regarding disabled, incarcerated youths noted
that there was not much information about what variables contributed to disabled students
ending up in the juvenile justice system. The report also called for more research about
how these young people were perceived by law enforcement and court personnel in terms
of understanding the impact of different disabilities. One means of gathering this
information was ﬁ‘orn the mouths of the disabled youths themselves. Exploring
consistencies within the common experiences of them and the staff who served them
must not be overlooked as part of the inquiry into what may be done to improve the
operations of the systems involved in this ﬁeld.

A qualitative, psychological- phenomenological analysis based on the experiences
of students who have been placed in a detention setting and the staff charged with their
care could shed some light on feelings of self-efﬁcacy from being involved with that type
of experience. If practices such as adjudication without proper consideration of disability
could be shown to have serious long-term, detrimental effects then support for modifying
them to better secure individual rights and more appropriate educational services could be
mustered. In the next section I described some tenets of phenomenology as a school of
inquiry, and then illustrated the speciﬁc methodological requirements of psychological

phenomenology.

33

Moustakis (1994) noted that phenomenological inquiry was typically involved
with describing an experience. He wrote that the phenomenological researcher was trying
to ﬁgure out what a given experience means for a participant in that environment, who
was able to supply a detailed account of the phenomena. The cornerstone of
phenomenology was the philosophical perspective that all knowledge and all deﬁnitions
of reality were products of our subjective experience. A key difference between
phenomenology and more traditional quantitative inquiry was that the latter dealt with
studying the environment (realism), and the former accepted that there was no evidence
to support the existence of anything in the environment other than our personal,
subjective experience of it (idealism). Moustakis wrote, “The issue of idealism versus
realism is resolved through phenomenological methods in which the meanings and
essences of phenomena are derived, not presupposed or assumed” (p. 46).

The application of this was supported by van Kaam (1969) who commented that,
“Relevant research is that which explores, describes, and empirically tests human
behavior while preserving a ‘lived’ relationship with it in the reality of life” (p. 26-27).
My thought processes regarding the proposed study became centered on this type of
perspective. The idea of having a lived relationship with the object of study, in its natural
context, was the key. The complex, ethereal nature of so much that humans experience
demands description from within the sphere of reality provided by a given time and
place. This was essential if any common understanding was to emerge about a
phenomenon.

“The phenomenologist views what people say and do as a product of how people

deﬁne their world” (Bogdan & Lutﬁyya, 1996, p. 229). The idea of searching for the

34

essence of a phenomenon appeals to this researcher on a level that was professionally
primal. That is, I thought that the methodology’s mandate of acknowledging, discussing,
and framing one’s own experiences and context then attempting to look at some event
with those things in mind as a partially separate entity, provided the researcher with a
chance at cutting through some degree of the schematic quagmire of our training and
experience. The researcher engaged in self-reﬂection as data were collected, regarding
how what was being revealed about the phenomena under investigation was impacting
his or her personal schema. Merriam (1998) wrote that the job of the phenomenological
researcher was to portray the essence or fundamental structure of an experience. An
underlying assumption to this perspective was that all shared experiences had an essence
that could be identiﬁed and described.

An important part of getting to the essence of what may be going on in the lives
of the individuals living and working in juvenile detention facilities involved spending
time talking to actual, incarcerated students with disabilities about what having a
condition which makes learning challenging meant to them. As noted in the National
Council on Disabilities (N CD) report on the state of research within the ﬁeld, “Rarely are
self-reported data or longitudinal designs employed, approaches that would provide a
better research foundation for specifying the relationship between disability and
delinquency and how some youth with disabilities enter the juvenile justice system”
(2003, p. 34). Spradley (1979) articulated a point that supported the use of directly
asking individuals what their experiences were. While discussing the conduction of
ethnographic studies, another qualitative methodology, he noted that learning ﬁorn

peeple, as opposed to about them, involved being able to describe the subject’s reality in

35

their own terms. This description could then be applied to the researcher’s theoretical
perspective.

Van Kaam (1966) provided some rationale for using a phenomenological
perspective when there is a weak research foundation in a given area of inquiry. He
described how one of the goals of employing a phenomenological perspective was to
describe and classify phenomena. “Research performed in this way is pre-empirical, pre-
experimental, and pre-statistical; it is experiential and qualitative. It sets the stage for
more accurate empirical investigations by lessoning the risk of a premature selection of
methods and categories” (van Kaarn, 1966, p. 295). He also wrote how phenomenological
inquiry complemented quantitative methods in the early stages of exploration in a given
ﬁeld by having the phenomena of interest be the center of study as opposed to a single,
more restrictive methodology.

An important concept in phenomenological inquiry was bracketing. Moustakis
(1994) described a key part of the phenomenological researcher’s viewpoint, which was
to refrain from making suppositions based on personal knowledge and experience. The
idea behind this was to permit the researcher to identify and describe personal
assumptions and experiences that would lead to an inability to view the phenomenon in a
way that is as unsullied and raw. Merriam (1998) wrote that the goal of bracketing was
to temporarily suspend beliefs about a certain topic, so that they did not interfere with,

“. . . seeing or intuiting the elements or structure of a phenomenon” (p. 16). An example
of one personal assmnption I attempted to extricate from my research was in regards to
the intent of the legislation passed for students with disabilities. I believed that the laws

governing the education of disabled students, in particular the IDEA of 1997, were

36

passed with ideological good intentions. In order to view the interaction of these laws
with the context of the participants in a manner consistent with phenomenology, I needed
to take the interplay of the law and their lives as I found it, as opposed to crafting
questions or looking for evidence of my presuppositions about the intent of the law. The
last portion of this chapter contained the bracketing I articulated before beginning the
research.
Phenomenological Psychology

At Duquesne University in the 1960’s and 70’s a group of faculty, primarily
within the psychology department, began applying the principals of phenomenology to
psychological research. One of the primary engineers of this marriage of perspective,
Amedeo Giorgi, listed several reasons for this development. Giorgi (1985) noted that
traditional psychological methods, while advanced in their quantitative methods, did not
provide adequate explanations for complex human experiences. A descriptive
methodology was required, in order to answer questions of why a given phenomena
occurs, as opposed to quantitative measurements such as frequency or intensity.
Traditional psychology also did not allow for the expression and exploration of a given
circumstance as it was lived and experienced by those moving within that context.

Wertz (1985) also described the problem with over-reliance on quantitative
methods and noted, “The outcome is that human sciences, lacking their own methods,
have fallen out of contact with their subject matter, and thus their rightful status as truly
rigorous science is in jeopardy” (p. 159). My training and experiences as a school
psychologist have led me to similar conclusions. The experiences of people cannot be

studied in a meaningful manner without proper consideration of their ecology. The

37

perspectives and schemas which they have developed were critical in understanding why
they existed in their given status and how their circumstances might be changed.

As it developed, phenomenological psychology was applied to social, clinical,
and experimental research. Through this, it was appropriate to utilize a theory ﬁ'om
social psychology for the present study. Attribution theory, described in the following
section, provided much of the language used in analyzing the data, and describing
emergent themes of the experiences shared by the participants.

Theoretical Perspective

DeCompte and Preissle (1993) wrote that, “Theories are statements about how
things are connected” (p. 1 18). This simple, but poignant deﬁnition ﬁt well with research
conducted through a qualitative perspective. These authors noted that when looking at
individual instances or experiences, the role of theory was not to assist in facilitating
generalization in terms of prediction for future cases of the same phenomenon. Rather,
theory in qualitative research could help investigators discover themes or actions which
might apply to similar cases under different circumstances. Viewing an experience
through a theoretical lens serves additional purposes. Creswell and Miller (2000) noted
that in qualitative inquiry a lens equated to a point of view by which the researcher
established the validity of the study. It also provided the researcher with a frame of
reference and a lexicon with which to describe the phenomena being examined.

My disciplinary perspective was somewhat diverse, as I was serious about both
looking at things as a psychologist, and also as someone interested in examining things
from an educational administration perspective. In my thinking about the population I

was to study and the types of questions to ask, I continually returned to psychological

38

theories of personality development. In particular, the social learning perspective ﬁrst
deﬁned by Julian Rotter in the 1960’s. Ryckman (1993) articulated the basic tenet of this
theory as human learning and behavior acquisition occurring through experiences with
other people. This school of thought ﬂowed well with constructivism and qualitative
inquiry, and because of this was ideally suited for exploration through phenomenological
psychology. I believed that when describing the experiences I observed, I would be able
to pair these ideas from social psychology with my own perspective as a special
education professional, which would lead to a description other special education
practitioners would ﬁnd useful and familiar.

Part of social learning theory dealt with the tendency of people to attribute
causality to events or situations in which they found themselves. This has been termed
locus of control and was described as people’s attributions being to either internal or
external factors. Internal factors included such constructs as motivation, intelligence, and
practiced skill, while external factors could be chance, fate, or other the actions of other
people. (Ryckman 1993; Rotter 1966). For example, if my dog died of unknown causes,
did I attribute that to my inherent, poor animal care skills, or did I think it was because he
contracted some extrinsic illness, over which I could have had no possible control? This
theory was applied to the present study in the exploration of different experiences and
perspectives of inmates and employees regarding how they felt about the delivery of
special education services. An example of this was developing some interview questions
designed to assess student understanding of their disability to determine if they attributed

their current circumstances to it rather than being placed there by the legal system.

39

An interest in locus of control (often used interchangeably in the literature as
attribution or attribution theory) and social learning theory could be found in the research
examining at-risk youth and juvenile delinquents. Glaser, et. al (2001) explored
differences between parents and delinquents who each completed a quantitative measure
rating the youth’s behavior. Fifty-one parent/child pairs completed the scale, and the
results indicated that parents were more likely to attribute their child’s behavior to
individual, inherent traits. Miller, Fitch, and Marshall (2003) compared locus of control
variables between 234 high school and middle school regular and alternative education
students using a formal instrument. The alternative education student’s scores indicated
that their locus of control was signiﬁcantly more external. Many of these students had
chronic behavior and/or attendance problems.

Locus of control has also been a topic of inquiry with students who have
disabilities. Tabassam and Grainger (2002) examined attribution characteristics of 172
elementary school students, of which 86 had been diagnosed as either Learning Disabled
(LD) or as having both LD and Attention Deﬁcit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). The
students with disabilities scored signiﬁcantly lower than non-disabled peers on measures
of academic self-concept, self-efﬁcacy, and attributional style. Speciﬁcally regarding
attribution, the disabled students had signiﬁcantly more negative scores, which meant
that they were more likely to attribute academic successes to external causes, and view
accomplishment as unstable and only applicable to one instance.

This theoretical perspective had utility for another reason: To look at student
rights and determine whether their disabilities were considered when placing them into a

detention center. However, I desired to spend the bulk of my research time studying

4O

people’s experiences not poring over court documents. Employing this type of theory was
a more manageable project, and still allowed for themes in the data regarding disability
consideration to emerge.

An example of one potential theme I thought I would ﬁnd based on my public
school experience was that many of the students I talked with would not be able to
concretely discuss what their disability means for them. I have found that most
conversations regarding the impact that the disabling condition has for the student, do not
include the student until relatively late in their K-12 experience. This problem was
paired with the lack of training on school disability categories in many court systems
noted by Garﬁnkel et.al, 1997. From this information, it did not seem that it would be
difﬁcult to demonstrate that throughout the court placement and other legal proceedings,
the ramiﬁcations of the disabling condition were neither presented nor discussed.

A study examining the variables described above would make a contribution to
the literature on disabled juvenile delinquents. The gathering of poignant, qualitative
data, directly from this population and the professionals who serve them had been sparse
at best. As agencies like the NCD attempted to move the federal government towards
positive programming and procedural steps, their efforts would beneﬁt from having some
recorded, personal experiences to help guide policy development.

Data Collection
Method

The ﬁarnework that seemed most appropriate for the type of exploration into this

issue was a case study model. More speciﬁcally, the case in question will be a special

education classroom in a juvenile detention facility. The plan was to utilize semi-

41

structured interviews to gather some of the data, combined with observations in the
classroom and reviews of comprehensive student records, which should include special
education evaluations, Individualized Educational Program (IEP) forms,
background/family information, and documentation of court proceedings. This design
seemed to ﬁt the main goal of the study, which was to expand the types of information
gathered on this population, as noted in the NCD report. The positive and negative effects
on students could potentially vary quite widely, and a case study allowed for a more in-
depth look at these from the perspective of the students and adults serving them. The case
study will be limited to the classroom at the facility. Any comparative statements made
between my own experiences and those observed at Haven are reﬂective and not to be
construed as indicative of a comparative case analysis between public school experiences
and those at the detention facility.
Participants

In the selection of participants, the best match for the research questions was to
purposefully choose a variety of people who had experience with providing special
education services in this setting. Information was gathered ﬁ'om six adjudicated students
who had active IEPs and were assigned to a special education certiﬁed teacher.
Consideration was given to the percentage of the student’s day that they spent with that
staff member. For example, I selected students whose basic skills were low enough to
warrant placement in that setting for much of the day, and others who had more advanced
skills and were mainly with other teachers.

Another major difference between the students was the length of their sentence

based on the severity of their offending behavior. Half of the students were considered

42

short-term and were from Angel County. These students were sentenced to no more than
90 calendar days and typically arrived at the facility for violating truancy policies of local
districts. The other half of the students were long-term, and these youths had sentences
ranging from 8 to 18 months, with an average of 14 months. These juveniles had
committed more serious crimes that included such things as weapons or drug violations.
They came from across the state, mainly from urban areas such as Grand Rapids, Benton
Harbor, and Detroit. Obtaining as wide a variety as possible within the psychological
phenomenological framework was important as the greater the degree of variation within
the subject pool, the better chance the researcher had of seeing what essential components
existed across the phenomenon shared by the participants (Giorgi, 1985).

The other primary interviewees were the classroom teacher, the building
administrator, school social worker, family counselor, probation ofﬁcer, and director of
the residential component of Haven. The juveniles asked to participate in this. study
would need to be eligible for special education services and have current Individualized
Educational Plans (IEPs) documenting their need for service. The services for all the
students took place within the same classroom, with the same special education teacher.
Variables that made each respondent unique in regards to their experiences in the facility
included length of sentence, disability classiﬁcation, amount of special education services
listed, and what types of ancillary services (social work, speech and language, etc.) they
received.

Triangulation
An important concept in qualitative data collection mentioned by Yin (1994) was

the gathering of information from multiple sources. Merriam (1998) referred to this as

43

‘triangulation’, and noted that it was important when seeking to establish some reliability
and validity in gathering qualitative data. This was supported by Creswell and Miller
(2000) who wrote that, “Triangulation is a validity procedure where researchers search
for convergence among multiple and different sources of information to form themes or
categories in a study” (p. 126). Anfara, Brown, and Mangione (2002) wrote that
triangulation of data through sources such as interview responses, analysis of
documentation, and observation serves to reduce bias which may be present in only one
data source and could signiﬁcantly improve the validity and reliability of the collected
data.

Denzin and Lincoln (2000) noted that the issue of inadequate reliability and
validity in traditional positivist terms has been a consistent criticism of qualitative
research, which should be addressed. However, they noted that while triangulation was
an effort by the researcher to understand the object of study in more depth, it was more
accurately described as an alternative to traditional means of securing improved
validation. “The combination of multiple methods, empirical materials, perspectives and
observers in a single study is best understood, then, as a strategy that adds rigor, breadth,
and depth to any investigation” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998, p. 4). Since validity in the
traditional, quantitative sense often did not ﬁnd a home in qualitative research, an
alternative means of establishing the credibility of the inquiry must be used.

In the present study, information from the literature to establish the rationale and
what is already known about the topic was a source of information, but not data. Semi-
structured interview responses were the primary source of data, but there were others

beneﬁcial to the study. Documents that contained a record of the procedures used to carry

44

out the adjudication and describing the student’s disabilities were useful, as they shed
light on how the process differed across settings, and were official notations of how a
student’s rights (i.e. due process) were considered. The third line of the triangle was
observations within the classroom at the detention facility. The following sections contain
details regarding how these three sources of data were collected.
Interviews

Yin (1994) provided a great deal of guidance with regard to skills that
interviewers should possess or develop and in the construction of interviews, such as the
ones required for the present study. The focused interview method made the most sense
for probing the effects felt by students. Yin noted that this method was useful for
corroborating certain facts or assumptions that the researcher might have. Along these
lines, I planned to use the method to assist in the bracketing and separating of my own
assumptions from the experience I will study, which was a requirement of
phenomenological inquiry. The interviews were semi-structured, and had open-ended
questions designed around the research questions.

Most of the interviews with students and staff took place within the Woods
School or the administration building at Camp Haven. The interview with the school
social worker was at her home and the meeting with the probation ofﬁcer was at the
county courthouse. The staff was interviewed ﬁrst, in conjunction with three weeks
observing in the classroom, before spending time individually with the students. The
initial interviews were completed in approximately forty-ﬁve minutes. Follow-up
interviews were conducted with two students, the classroom teacher, the residential

director, and the building principal, and took approximately ten minutes each. Follow-up

45

interviews would have been conducted with more of the students, but they had been
released from the facility soon after initial data collection.
Observations

Three school weeks observing in the special education classroom and
interviewing staff before interviewing students. This provided an opportunity to interact
with many of the juveniles and assisted in selecting the ones I thought might provide
signiﬁcant insight into their experiences. One of the main variables looked for was the
student’s ability to advocate for themselves, such as how well they seek help when faced
with a difﬁcult academic task. I knew that some of the students would be pulled from the
class at times to spend time with a special education provider such as the school social
worker. I wanted to ﬁnd out how receptive these students were to those services, and if
they could express their feelings on whether they thought the interventions were needed.
Record Reviews

The examination of the student’s records took place after I had spent four days in
the classroom. The records of all the students who were eligible for special education
services in the facility were perused, and initial selection involved ﬁnding juveniles
whose sentences would likely last through the duration of the observation and interview
periods. From the record reviews, the selection was made of three short and three long
term juveniles, representing as wide an array of disabilities as possible. As noted above,
seeking as diverse a group of participants as possible was important, as a greater degree
of variation across subjects enhanced the researcher’s ability to observe what essential

components existed in the context of the phenomenon (Giorgi, 1985).

46

This enabled the gathering of data on students who have had signiﬁcantly
different experiences both in terms of severity of crime and therefore criminal
proceedings, and severity of academic challenge. I looked for details on how early the
juveniles were identiﬁed as having a disability, the comprehensiveness of their
evaluations, and the subsequent appropriateness of their Individualized Educational Plans
(IEPs).

Data Analysis

The interviews were transcribed in preparation for further analysis. The
transcripts were coded ntunerically and by pseudonym in order to identify the responses
from each participant. Giorgi (1985) described the four essential stages to analyzing
interview and observation data in the psychological phenomenological method. The steps
are described as follows:

1) The researcher reads the entire set of transcripts or description of observations

with the goal of getting a general sense of the whole response.

2) After obtaining a sense of the whole, the researcher reads through the
documentation again with the goal of discriminating ‘meaning units’ with a
psychological perspective in mind, focusing on the phenomena that was the
focus of the research.

3) After establishing the meaning units, the researcher rephrases and expresses
them with psychological language and insight, continually emphasizing the
phenomena being researched.

4) Finally, the researcher synthesizes the meaning units with their altered

language into a consistent account of the participant’s experiences.

47

Bracketing

As noted above, bracketing involved the development of a list of assumptions that

the researcher needed to put aside, to have a chance of viewing the phenomena of

incarcerated youths receiving special education services with a degree of objectivity. The

task was to deﬁne personal beliefs and assumptions about this type of experience so that

they would not interfere with the researcher’s ability to determine the essence of the

phenomena (Merriam, 1998). The assumptions comprising this list came from my

background and experiences, as well as several conversations with the classroom teacher.

After generating the following list, I reviewed it prior to conducting interviews and

analyzing the data.

1)

2)

3)

I was raised in a strict, nurturing home environment with consistent discipline and
a strong religious background. From this, I assumed that the juveniles at Haven
had been lacking in these respects, therefore many of their problems were caused
by environmental concerns.

From my work as a school psychologist, I believed that many students with
behavior problems receive a special education label, even though little
intervention has been attempted to correct their behavior. I suspected this was the
case for many of the students at Haven.

I believed that special education, when correctly implemented by proper
assessment and instruction, could remediate academic and behavioral deﬁcits in
students like the ones at Haven. This in my mind was the promise of special
education that the legislators and parents who developed and passed these laws,

believed was possible.

48

4)

5)

6)

7)

8)

9)

I believed that with a special education population of approximately ﬁfty percent,
compared to the county average of fourteen percent, a detention facility could not
possibly meet the special education service needs documented by evaluation
teams in local districts based on what I knew about the number and type of staff
working there.

I believed the disabled youths’ right to specialized instruction could not be
guaranteed given the high percentage of students with special education needs and
the huge range of academic skills they exhibited.

I believed there was a serious lack of communication between local districts and
Haven regarding the transition needs of the youths as they entered and exited, that
impacted the likelihood of success in the program.

I believed that the Woods School staff should have a great degree of input
regarding when a student was ready to be released from the program, as they
would have the best idea of how the student was faring regarding his skills
necessary to be successful in a public school.

I believed that the court personnel would have very little knowledge about special
education, and that consideration of disability would be a low priority in the
adjudication process.

I believed that the students would be organized into tight cliques, either based on
academic level, where they came from, or what type of offence they had
committed. I thought that these cliques would have a substantial impact on
students’ experiences, as social groups are a major deﬁning force of a public

school experience.

49

10)I believed that most students would attribute their situation to external factors that
they had no signiﬁcant degree of control over. I thought most of them would feel
as if they had been put in Haven by someone or some thing, as opposed to being
there as a result of their own choices.
11) I believed that education and success at the Woods School was a low priority for
these students and that they would be posturing for social status and not very
interested in the academic components of the program.
12)] believed that a student’s sentence was static. I thought once the adjudication
process had been completed and a sentence determined that the student would be
released upon a certain date, as opposed to being ready for release as determined
by a team at the facility.
Summary

The purpose of this study was to help illuminate some of the experiences of
juvenile delinquents with disabilities, who have part of their educational experience
within the conﬁnes of a detention facility. The research with youths in this ﬁeld had not
adequately addressed their unique educational needs. The plan was to help remedy this
by exploring their experiences through the qualitative methodology of phenomenology
paired with a theoretical perspective gleaned from social psychology. The hope was that
results from this study would be valuable in policy development and curriculum

considerations for incarcerated disabled youths.

50

Chapter IV
Research Site and Participant Description
“Qualitative researchers believe that rich descriptions of the social world are
valuable” (Denzin & Lincoln, 1998, p. 10). Towards this end, the following chapter was
designed to provide the reader with a depiction of the research site and participants. It
was focused on describing the place where these juveniles with disabilities spend their
sentences, the staff charged with their care and education, and the students themselves.
The goal of this was to assist the reader in understanding the experiences of these
juveniles and staff members in order to equip them with the necessary tools to understand
the challenges involved with their education and rehabilitation.

The following data were gathered across a ten week period with the chapter

organized into the following portions.

1. A physical description of Camp Haven and the Woods School.

2. A section outlining the program structure and services of Haven.

3. Observations made while in the facility, primarily within one of the
classrooms. The observations are presented in a narrative format of what I saw
happening over the course of a typical day. The noted topics, teaching styles,
personnel involved in the classroom, and other information, are included in
the one day snapshot as they are representative of common occurrences
throughout the observation period. Other observations will be presented in the
ﬁfth chapter as evidence in support of themes.

4. An introduction to each of the staff interviewees. The descriptions are

provided to enhance the reader’s understanding of the professional experience

51

and physical characteristics of the staff which are responsible for the
juveniles.

5. Introduction to the six students. To familiarize the reader with some of the
familial and educational experiences of these juveniles, Summaries of their
records are included. All records used to compile the information in this
chapter were held by the Woods. For the majority of these students, this was
all the documentation ever received on them by the professionals at Camp
Haven.

The Research Site
The Layout of Camp Haven

Camp Haven was located about a mile from a tiny town with only one intersection
large enough to warrant a blinking yellow caution light. Off one of the county roads
leading from the town was the camp, near a small lake. It bordered many acres of forest
and several old farms. The driveway was paved but unadomed with painted lines, and
barely wide enough for oncoming vehicles to pass each other. Its full length was about
half a mile, winding from the county road to the parking lot adjoining the school
building. The campus was picturesque, with large trees, lawns, and wildﬂowers.

On the left-hand side of the drive, near the lake, there were four cabins. These
cabins now served family members who came for weekend visits, but used to be where
the juveniles lived. A few yards down from these cabins was the administrative office
building. It was a two-story brick structure with the second ﬂoor at ground level and a
walk-out lower ﬂoor which could be accessed from a sidewalk along one side. Directly

across from the administration building was one of the houses for short-term students.

52

Farther down the drive, the school was on the left with the other short term house facing
it across the road. The road ended in a circle drive, where the two long term houses were
located. A parking lot adjoined the circle drive, and at one end was a large maintenance
shed where three full-time maintenance staff worked. Many of these buildings were
named after signiﬁcant ﬁnancial contributors to the camp.
The Woods School

This was a single story brick building with gray doors that had been painted over
many times. The doors bore several dents and the paint on the frames was chipped. The
principal remarked that this damage were due to the doors being punched, kicked, and
slammed almost daily. Upon entering, a familiar odor was encountered, the smell of
generic pine cleaner and old metal. A slight mustiness that reminded me of a building I
had worked in that needed to be closed due to mold also struck me. One wing smelled
distinctly of new paint and carpet glue, as it had been recently remodeled. The lighting in
most of the building was dull from the gray cinderblock walls, but in the remodeled wing
with freshly painted white walls, it was signiﬁcantly brighter. There was a small gym on
one side of the building, which had two basketball hoops and a newly installed
rubberized composite ﬂoor. Along the halls were several display cases featuring student
work. This was mainly artwork, and colorful representations of goals. One was a poster
with several students names presented with each letter representing a word. A student
named Mike had written Mature, Intelligent, Kind, Excellent worker.

As I entered the building, there were two sets of twenty-six metal lockers, one on
each side of the main entrance. The lockers were taupe colored, and were in a battered

condition similar to the doors. Outside the gym entrance was the graphics classroom, an

53

elective course where students learned graphic design using computers. This classroom
and the gym comprised one direction from the main entrance. Going the other way, the
ﬁrst classroom I encountered was the homeroom for one of the long-term houses, whose
teacher primarily taught language arts throughout the day. Next to this room was a
display case featuring student point sheets, showing how students were progressing in the
behavioral system which, during the school day, was based on preparation, respect,
independence, daily clean-up, and effort. Across from the case was a storage closet ﬁlled
with ﬁle cabinets, construction paper, old computers, and remnants of past 4-H projects.

Next to the storage room was the main ofﬁce, a place stuffed with paper,
machines, and ﬁle cabinets. The building secretary worked alone here, and her station
reminded me of the ﬁrst office I had been assigned to in a school. It had doubled as the
changing room for referees, and the audio/visual equipment storage room. Across from
the ofﬁce was a room where the teacher taught earth science, math, and a few vocational
skills. In this classroom students had the opportunity to learn how to change oil, rotate
tires, and ﬁx lawn equipment. The back wall of the classroom was largely comprised of a
large bay door where vehicles could be brought in. In the past, this vocational classroom
had been used to teach students woodworking and automotive repair, but due to state
curriculum requirements and safety, this aspect of the program was discontinued.

Across the hall from the old vocational classroom and next to the office were the
only bathrooms in the school, with the exception of those in the gym. The bathrooms
were painted in a faded pink, and many of the ﬁxtures were rusty. There was some
grafﬁti, and the soap had been removed from the boy’s bathroom after several incidences

of inappropriate use. At the end of this hallway was the other homeroom for long-term

54

students. The lower level language arts students were taught here, and this class
contained a full kitchen. This room served as the staff lounge, where staff meetings were
held. It had never served as an official home economics room, but students had some
opportunities to cook and work on 4-H projects.

The intersecting hall contained another entrance to the gym on the left and to the
right there were more classrooms. The ﬁrst room was a short-term homeroom, where the
teacher primarily taught social skills, reproductive health, language arts, substance abuse,
and one basic skills math class. Past this classroom was where Michelle taught, a
description of which can be found in the observation section below. Next was the
resource room, where students went if they were having trouble in the regular classroom,
and where meetings such as IEPs were held. The ancillary staff, such as social workers
and psychologists, typically met with students in the resource room. The room was
slightly larger than most of the classrooms, with a big square table and several chairs.
Along one wall was a row of couches, often covered with newspapers discarded from
students or residential staff. After the resource room was the principal’s office, which
comprised the end of the hall, and was the last room in the school. The principal’s ofﬁce
was small, and the walls were covered in ﬁshing paraphernalia and family pictures. There
was just enough room for his ﬁle cabinets, desk, and a computer cart.

The Residential Staﬁr Administration Building

A tour of the administration building revealed a small library, several offices and
cubicles, and a couple of conference rooms. Student artwork was displayed along with
framed newspaper articles featuring Haven. The employees who had ofﬁces here

included the chief administrator for the camp, the residential director, the supervisors of

55

the residential staff, and the family counselors. Their dress code ranged from jacket and
tie for the chief administrator, to jean shorts and t-shirts for the residential supervisors.
There were three female secretarial staff, two with desks near the front entrance. At the
back of this building, on the side closest to the school, was the cafeteria where the
students ate all their meals. The cafeteria/kitchen was reached by short sidewalks that
lead to the lower ﬂoor.
Inside One of the Houses

The “houses” were the four buildings that each housed twelve students at Haven.
After school one day, Michelle took the student teacher and I on a tour of one of the
houses. The building reminded me of a large cabin from the outside, and appeared to be
well maintained. Inside, there was a large central room, surrounded by six small
bedrooms. Each bedroom was equipped with two bunks, two desks, and a dresser, all
made of pine. After the bedrooms, there was a room with a couch and recliner, a
television and pool table, and the washer and dryer were near the front entrance. Each
house had a residential staff person who stayed all night. Each house had a staff office
surrounded by plexi-glass windows, a metal door, and a locker. Each house had a
bathroom set up like a locker room, with two entrances, four sinks, a large shower area
with several heads, two urinals, and three toilets. A distinct smell of mine was evident as
one approached within several yards of the bathroom. All the walls in the house were

cement blocks painted off-white.

56

Programs and Services

When students arrived at Haven they were given two manuals, one describing the
overall residential expectations, and one outlining the school component. The mission
statement in the residential manual read as follows:

The YOUTH OPPORTUNITY CAMP is a unique residential care placement that

exists to provide opportunities that engage young men and their families in

strengthening relationships through guidance, self-awareness and the

identiﬁcation of resources necessary to return them to their community as

productive citizens.
The manual went on to describe how long the students would be there, what the staff
hoped to get ﬁom families or guardians, discipline requirements, case reviews, the
behavioral level system, privileges, program opportunities (4-H, counseling, etc.), school
requirements, rules for dining, recreation, personal hygiene, and family visitation. It also
described the no smoking policy, rules for behavior in camp vehicles, and telephone
privileges.

The school student handbook opened with a list of the staff, then had a description
of the vision for the students to become lifelong learners, adequate communicators, users
of information technology, self-directed achievers, and good citizens. The manual
described how students could earn credit towards graduation at his home school, how
grades would be assigned and reported, behavioral expectations, and rules regarding
attire, personal belongings, lockers, supplies, and moving through the building. An
example of the last topic was that there would be no using the bathroom during class

changes at the end of each hour, only teacher-signed passes could be used, and only three

students could be in the bathroom at any given time.

57

Short Term vs. Long Term

Half of the students were sentenced to short-term incarceration of not more than
ninety calendar days, and long-term sentences ranged from eight to eighteen months.
Whether they were short or long-term depended on what offence had been committed and
from where they came. Delinquents had been placed in Haven for offences ranging ﬁom
aggravated assault to truancy. All of the short-term students were local, which meant that
they came from somewhere in the county where Haven was located. Nearly all of the
long-term students came from urban areas in Michigan, such as Grand Rapids, Benton
Harbor, and Detroit. The short-term students were all part of the Stabilization,
Assessment, Reintegration, and Treatment (START) program. At the time this study was
conducted, The START program was in its fourth year, and was designed to be an
intensive experience for students, lasting no more than three months.

Both short and long term students had structured sets of activities they went
through. These included group experiences to teach them skills like anger management
and how to avoid substance abuse, access appropriate recreation, and learn basic
behaviors which are important to exhibit while employed. A key difference between the
two programs was that for short term kids, what they experienced and how long they
would be there was more clearly deﬁned during the entrance process. The focus was on
intensive rehabilitation and family/ guardian involvement. Also, the school staff seemed
to have more input on whether or not the short term kids were ready for reintegration into
the community and their local schools.

It seemed as though sentences for the long-term students were undeﬁned, and

they would remain at Haven until they completed the goals of the program, primarily as

58

determined by the residential staff and probation officer. This was complicated by the
fact that for at least half of the long term students who were at Haven while I was there,
parental rights had been terminated. Some of these youths would stay at Haven, perhaps
even past the completion of their goals, until an appropriate placement could be found.
Behavioral System-LABS

The residential component of Camp Haven had a behavioral level system that was
also applied during the school day. The acronym LABS stood for Learning, Accepting,
Building, and Sharing, from lowest to highest in terms of responsibilities and privileges
earned. Youths were required to have a card with them at all times that told what level
they were on and what their personal goals were. The residential staff manual noted that
there was a wide degree of latitude on what privileges could be earned or revoked
depending on a kid’s movement up or down in the system. Some things were required for
all students in the program and could not be revoked, such as opportunities for recreation,
family contact, and participation in certain clubs or groups. The hourly wage students
earned was also impacted; for example, those at the Learning level earned a dollar an
hour, while students at Sharing earned three dollars and ﬁfty cents. Students were
informed that raising their level occurred through an ‘adj ustrnent committee’ who would
meet and decide if the youth’s effort was sufficient to warrant an upgrade, or if problem
behaviors would result in loss of a level. Students or staff were allowed to call these
meetings.

At the beginning of each school day, students were given a yellow sheet of paper
to take with them to each class. The paper had a section for each class, where teachers

awarded up to ﬁve points, one each for being Prepared, Respectful, Independent, Daily

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Clean-up, and Effort (PRIDE). The total points earned from these daily sheets were
tallied weekly and displayed in the hallway near the main office. This tally system was
primarily used by the school staff to plan rewards and monitor student progress. Students
also needed to record homework assigned from each class, and get each teacher
signatures at the end of the hour.

The students were keenly aware of this system, and many of their conversations
with each other and with staff revolved around what level they were on, and what they
needed to do to advance. For most of them gaining a level appeared to be something they
actively sought to do. Other students rarely spoke of it, or did not seem to care what level
they were on. The following two excerpts are from students who described what the
LABS system meant to them.

BOBBY: The levels are called LABS, learning, accepting, building, and sharing.
Learning is the entry level you basically don’t really get to do too much in the
houses, can’t play pool, you basically just sit around and play board games and
get to know people. Accepting you get to play pool, board games, and you get to
stay up ‘til 10:30 on the weekends. Learning, you go to uh bed at ten. Building,
you get to play pool, computer, play station, and you get to go to other

houses. . .and building shows maturity basically. And sharing is the last step, if
you’re on sharing usually you’re about to leave.

VD: Ok. How do you get from one level to the other?

BOBBY: Signatures.

VD: And where do those come from?

BOBBY: Around and get the staff signatures that you, like the teachers
signatures that you have, the staff signatures that work in your house.

VD: What do those signatures mean?

BOBBY: That staff thinks that you’re ready to make your level.

VD: Ok. Do you have to get signatures from everyone that you work with?
BOBBY: Yeah, all the staff that work in your house.

DEVON: If you’re on building or sharing you can play PS2.

VD: So those are the two highest levels?

DEVON: Yes. Building and sharing can do anything, practically.

VD: Ok.

DEVON: They can get on the computer. Accepting can play pool, watch TV, if

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you have to write a letter you can manage to get on the computer. Learning you
can’t do nothing, unless staff says that they can.

VD: Ok. So they have to mostly stay in their rooms and. . .?

DEVON: Yeah.

VD: Do homework or whatever?

DEVON: They don’t have to stay in their rooms, they can come out, but they
can’t do nothing, without permission.

The behavioral system did not seem to be a determining factor in whether or not a
student was released, as one student noted in this excerpt.

VD: Do you know how much longer you’ll be here? How does that work?

ARNOLD: I got to stay here until I complete all my goals.

VD: How long do you think that might take you?

ARNOLD: Not much longer. I’m almost done with them.

VD: Well, that’s good. Do you have to be like at the highest level.. .before you

can go, or does that not matter as much?

ARNOLD: It doesn’t really matter. I can be on, I can be on learning and still

leave, if all my goals are complete.

VD: How long have you been here, did you say?

ARNOLD: A year and almost two months.
Groups

Students at Haven participated in groups to fulﬁll part of their rehabilitation
requirements. The groups included substance abuse awareness, moral reasoning, anger
control, and social skills. All of the students were involved in at least two groups, with
some attending all four each week. Students were regularly assigned homework that was
typically a scenario for them to think and write a paragraph about. Homework from the
problem-solving group, for example, might have been reading about a kid facing peer
pressure to take drugs, then writing a paragraph describing what could be done to avoid
or resolve the situation.

The following piece of transcript came from the interview with one of the
language impaired students, describing the groups in which he was involved. The

student’s reference to ‘skillstreaming’ was familiar to me as an off the shelf curriculum

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designed to teach social skills that I have found in several of the public schools I have
worked in or visited.

VD: I was going to ask you what kind of uh groups do they have you going to?
DEVON: (pause) That...I do not have any groups.

VD: You don’t have like anger control or moral reasoning?

DEVON: Oh, in the houses?

VD: Yeah, those kinds of groups.

DEVON: Oh, yeah, anger control, moral reasoning, skillstreaming, uh. . .problem
solving.

VD: Do you do each group once a week or how often?

DEVON: Once a week.

VD: Ok. Tell me about like, the anger control, what do you do in that?
DEVON: There we like bring up situations, and like we do role plays and stuff
like that.

VD: What about the moral reasoning?

DEVON: Moral, moral reasoning. . .like do papers and stuff. We have homework
for each group.

VD: How long does it take you to do the homework?

DEVON: How long?...Like, the homework is due by the next week.

VD: Ok. So you have a whole week to do the homework for each group.
DEVON: Yeah.

VD: Ok. What’s skillstreaming?

DEVON: Skillstreaming. . .there’s one staff for each group. So there’s only four,
four staff that ms the groups...and...has some...skills.

VD: What do you do in skillstreaming?

DEVON: Skillstreaming, we like, we have a point system. . .like. .. let’s say
that. . .you get all your points for the six weeks that we do the group. . .the people
that got their points can either go off camp, go to the movies, go out to eat, go to
the zoo, anything. People that didn’t get all their points for the six weeks. . .they
stay back in camp.

VD: Ok. So in skillstreaming you talk about those kinds of points and stuff?
DEVON: We talk about problems. . . just like problem solving.

VD: Problem solving, ok. And what was the other group? You said there were
four groups.

DEVON: Problem solving skills.

VD: Problem solving was the last one, do you work on the same kinds of stuff?
DEVON: Yeah.

VD: Alright.

DEVON: That’s different.

VD: Do you think those groups are helping you, or they’re just not helping?
DEVON: Yeah they’re helping.

VD: Are they? Can you give me an example of when the stuff you learned in

those groups helped you?

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DEVON: I learned that if...here you go, here’s one of the stories that. .I ain’t
going to tell the whole story but I’m just going to tell bits and pieces. I
VD: That’s ﬁne.

DEVON: Urn, it’s called. ..Jim’s problem, problem. ..and uh. ..in the
story...Jim’s like, Jim’s friend is like... going on uh, AWOL, and like...uh, his
friend is trying to talk him in to AWOLing with him but.. .Jim says no, and they
got like questions at the end of the

story. . . like should he do it, yes he do it, no should he not, shouldn’t be, no
should he do it.

Two other students also spoke about their experiences with the groups, and
whether or not they had found them useful.

BOBBY: So usually after dinner we have the possibility of having a group, so we
could have anger control. . .skillstrearning, all this other. ..

VD: Tell me about the skillstreaming, what you learn in those? Or what do you
do in those?

BOBBY: You learn steps to control your anger, like different situations that you
have to control your anger in, and then moral reasoning is, moral reasoning like
basically teaches how to reason morally. . .to ﬁgure out what’s going to ttun out
better for you in the long run.

VD: Can you give me an example of what kinds of things you learn in that moral
reasoning class or what was something that you, what was something you guys
talked about in that group?

BOBBY: Alright one of the problems that we talked about there, in there was this
guy. . .it was his birthday coming up, one of his friends stole a radio and they
didn’t know, he didn’t know whose the radio was or if it was stolen or whatever,
and then one of his other friends came up to him saying that his radio was stolen
and what it looked like, and it was all what should he do, should he tell him, or
should he keep it, and all these other questions.

VD: When you’re answering those questions do you take turns or do you just. . .?
BOBBY: We all answer them and then see who got what answers.

VD: Ok. What kind of groups and stuff do they have you do in here?
ARNOLD: Anger control, moral reasoning. . .and. ..anger replacement.

VD: So three groups?

ARNOLD: Uh huh.

VD: What do you do in the anger control group?

ARNOLD: We write about what, like right know we’re working on the three
ABC’s of anger. ABC’s, urn...what lead up to it, what did I do, and what was the
outcome.

VD: Ok. Is that helpful for you?

ARNOLD: Sometimes it is.

VD: And the second group is a moral reasoning group?

ARNOLD: Yeah.

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VD: What do you do in there, what do you talk about in there?

ARNOLD: Just like. . .usually we watch about the news and stuff. And we talked
about biracial relationships is it right or wrong, and we watched a movie about it.
And, basically we talk about, it’s like should you do this, or should you do that.
VD: Is that helpful or...?

ARNOLD: It. . .sometimes it is.

VD: Can you give me an example of when that has helped you out?

ARNOLD: Like. ..there’s a, that came, that came a point, that came a time, like a
few weeks ago, I was playing pool and I got hit in the eye with a pool ball. I
picked up a cue ball, no I picked up a pool ball and I was about to throw it at him
but I decided not to.

School Programs and Services
As adjudicated youths entered Haven, they were assessed at the school.
The teacher consultant, a special education teacher with graduate course work in
assessment, gave them an achievement battery to place them into groups based on their
reading and math skills. There were ﬁve of these academic groups, and placement in
them was the primary factor in determining what classes the student was scheduled in
throughout the day. The school curriculum manual deﬁned this placement as being,
“. . .based on their academic functioning level, not on speciﬁc grade levels” (p.2).
Different State of Michigan curriculum benchmarks were applied to each of the ﬁve
groups. For example, Group One students were functioning above grade level in most
academic areas and were working towards high school benchmarks, while the curriculum
for Group Five students was based on early elementary school benchmarks. The
following excerpt was one student’s response when asked about the testing process.
BOBBY: Well they, test you to see where you’re placed at like, what kind of
work they can give you. Like mine was 16.9 [standardized grade equivalent],
which is like the last year of college or something, and. . .last, last three weeks of
college or something like that, I don’t know, and that was mine, and it goes down
from there. You can’t get high, any higher then that.

VD: So do they do like reading, and math, and. ..?
BOBBY: Yeah, they do it in reading and math and that’s it.

VD: You mentioned that you were placed in certain groups because of that

testing; tell me about what those groups mean, academic groups.

BOBBY: You have group one, which is the highest group, group two second

highest, group three, kind of in the middle, group four is like, yeah group four and

ﬁve are the kids that would be in special ed. because they learn slower then
everybody else.

Even within the ﬁve academic groups, there was a high degree of variability in
each class, even though the average number of students was ten. Each group of twelve
students, divided by house, started their day with a homeroom. These homeroom teachers
were responsible for monitoring the academic growth of their twelve students, and wrote
case reviews at the end of each term, summarizing that student’s progress and areas of
continued concern. The homeroom teachers each taught something during this ﬁrst hour
that meets State of Michigan social studies curriculum goals. The teachers had a high
degree of variability in terms of what they did to meet these goals, as some taught very
traditional social studies classes utilizing maps and studying countries, while others
discussed sex education and substance abuse. The school curriculum was based on the
State of Michigan’s Content Standards and Benchmarks. The curriculum was focused
around four core subject areas: English, Mathematics, Science/Health Education, and
Life Management/Career and Employability Skills. Social Studies was also taught each
term and had been added when the state began assessing this area with the MEAP.
Electives were also offered, and consisted of courses in Technology, Physical Education,
Graphics, School Maintenance, and Food Service.

Other needs of the students, such as dental, medical, and grooming were handled
exclusively through the residential staff. For special education students, Michelle said

that having a current IEP and substantive records on an eligible student as he entered

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Highﬁelds was helpful, as the documentation sometimes noted needs that could then be
met more expediently.

Observations

A Day in the Classroom

I arrived at the classroom at 8:00, and needed to be let in the building by a
teacher. He showed me where Michelle’s classroom was, and after a few minutes she
arrived. A student teacher and the para-professional came soon after, and all the
building’s staff appeared to be present by 8:30. Michelle showed me the desk where she
suggested I sit, and started to organize her lesson plans as I unpacked my materials. She
noted that there would be four adults in the room that day including herself, a student
teacher, a para-professional, and me. She would have a male para-professional in the
morning and a female in the afternoon.

Against one wall of the classroom was a long table with four computers. Along
the opposing wall were two teacher’s desks, one for Michelle, and one shared by the
para-professionals. At the ffont of the room was a large dry-erase board, a bookshelf, ﬁle
cabinet, and overhead projector. Facing the board were twelve desks arranged in three
rows. A large television, VCR, and radio stood on a cupboard in one corner. The walls
had a few artwork prints, and a couple bulletin boards. One featured some motivational
pictures and words, such as a photo of a mountain hiker with the word ‘Perseverance’
above it. Another had black and white photos of celebrities such as Ghandi, Martin
Luther King, Jr., and Amelia Earhart, with captions indicating their contributions. The
walls were white, and the carpet was blue. This room had been recently re-modeled along

with a couple others.

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Michelle showed me her attendance book that documented how every week at
least one student entered or left the program. She remarked that this was typical each
term, and that it potentially made for some funding issues in terms of accounting for how
ﬁrll the program was. She noted that the same group started and ended their day in her
classroom. We discussed programming, and she commented that they had no school
social work or school psychological services available for the summer term. The social
worker had been laid off at the end of the regular school year, and the coverage for Haven
had not yet been worked out through the ISD. In terms of speech therapy, she said that
she has seen students taken for speech therapy twice in the six years she has taught here.
She told me about the regular contact she had with the parents of the short-term kids. She
saw them in bi-monthly evening meetings where they discussed progress, goals, and
home situations.

The students arrived at 8:45, and were escorted ﬁom breakfast in another
building. There were twelve of them, and all were wearing unadomed green polo or
sweat shirts. I asked about this, and she noted that green signiﬁed the students were from
Elrond, one of the short-term houses. At the end of the day, I asked her about the dress
code. Michelle told me that there didn’t used to be one, but they were forced to develop a
code for the short-term students a couple years ago. There was a local gang called the
“Gear Mob” who required its members to steal clothes from one of the malls. Michelle
asked one of the students if the “Mob” still existed and he replied that they did. He then
appraised what Michelle, the student teacher, and I were wearing and noted that none of
us would make it in the gang. Michelle said that both of the short term houses had a dress

code, one green and the other gray, because of the gang’s inﬂuence. The long-term

67

students had not had signiﬁcant problems over clothes, so they were allowed to wear
whatever they brought from home as long as it was appropriate.

As the students ﬁled in, Michelle recognized a new one. After introductions, she
learned that he had arrived the previous Friday, and his green shirt told her that he was
assigned to Elrond. Another adult who appeared to be accompanying them came in and
sat down, staying in the class for the ﬁrst thirty minutes. This man was one of the
residential staff, whose job it was to accompany students as they moved between
buildings and activities during the day and to monitor them in the houses. Several
students grabbed newspapers from a stack on a desk in the front row. Racially, the class
appeared to be half Caucasian and half African-American. There was a moderate amount
of talking, but they settled down as Michelle went to the front of the class. I was
introduced as an MSU student who worked in Holt schools. One student had questions
about exactly where in Holt I worked, as he used to live there. Michelle then introduced
her student teacher to the class and proceeded to explain the point sheet system to the
new student. She talked about how the sheets documented points, progress towards goals,
and whether or not the student had homework.

During this introduction, the new student cursed at two other boys. Michelle gave
him a verbal reminder that we don’t swear in school, and he did not repeat the offense.
Following this, the students went around the room and read their personal goals aloud to
the class. The order in which they went was determined by one of the students whom
Michelle called on. Referring to the house they came ﬁom, she called out a room and
bunk number. The student who slept at those coordinates was asked to call on each

person in turn to read aloud his goals for the day. After each student was called on, the

68

leader called on the adults to ask what their goal for the day was. I was a bit surprised by
this, and when it was my turn, I said I hoped to learn what going to school was like here.

Some of the students were difficult to understand because of their articulation, but
all of them had the same list of goals. They were as follows: “Complete my
assignments”; “Accept responsibility for my actions”; “Be respectful to myself and
others”; “Arrive prepared”; and “Interact with peers positively.” Following the goal
reading, the students stood for the pledge of allegiance which came over the building
intercom. Next, they watched the “Today” show taped from NBC by Michelle earlier in
the morning. They did not watch all of it, but saw the world news stories, which took
about ten minutes. This was followed by a Geography lesson where the students looked
at several different types of maps. Michelle explained that this was the typical routine for
the homeroom hour.

When the second hour class came in, the student teacher and I were introduced
again. It was a completely new group of eight students. After telling them who I was, one
student came up to me and said, “You’s a scientist, lookin’ at how bad kids learn.” He
then laughed and took his seat, seeming to be in good spirits. During the instruction time
the students seemed to be focused. After about thirty-ﬁve minutes they had some free
time and discussed their situations. They talked about court dates, when they would be
released, and visitations. The third hour class was math. The students entered in an
orderly manner and participated well. Michelle kept a fairly rapid pace and most of the
students appeared to care about keeping up as they hunched over their notes and looked
at the board. Near the end of this class, one of the residential staff members came in,

lined the students up, and took them to lunch.

69

I walked over to the cafeteria with Michelle and we arrived before the students.
Each class came in with a residential staff member, sat down at a table, and then went to
the lunch line after they had said grace. She and I went through the lunch line ahead of
the students, then went back to the school and ate with the rest of the staff. The teachers
brieﬂy discussed which students had incidents in the morning, which ones might be
problematic in the afternoon, and ones that had recently entered or exited the program.

After lunch, two hours of instruction remained. The ﬁrst class was another math
section, where the kids were learning some basic algebra material. It took noticeably
longer for the students to settle down, and a couple students interrupted frequently.
Halfway through the hour, a student from another class barged into the room followed by
the school principal and two of the residential staff. The student said that the staff
members were threatening him and that he did not want to be restrained. After a couple
minutes, the adults were able to lead him out without physical contact. The rest of the
class continued to work, making few comments. They worked on multiplication and basic
algebra skills before being allowed to work on 4-H projects that would be displayed in
the upcoming county fair. Later, I learned that the student who had come into the class
inappropriately was a special education student who had refused to take his medication
for the past ﬁve days.

Some of the students watched a Disney movie while the others worked on their
math homework or 4-H projects. There was more conversation about court dates, and
three students compared how much time they had spent in boot camp. Other topics
included music, sports, and tattoos. There was some minor physical contact between the

kids, but it appeared to be playful and did not require teacher intervention. One student

70

who was sitting near me told me, “Make sure you stay off meth, ‘cause it costs too much
and detox is bad.” He did not seem to be looking for a response as he immediately turned
and joined the boot camp conversation.

For the last hour of the day, the students watched a ﬁlm about wildlife in Alaska.
They made lots of commentary, but it was generally appropriate and they seemed
interested. After the ﬁhn, some students from another class came back and the ﬁrst hour
homeroom group was reconstituted. They had their point sheets checked by Michelle, and
two residential staff joined the class for the last few minutes. During this time, the
students wrote down and submitted their answers to a trivia question Michelle had posted
ﬁrst hour. Following this, they went around the room again reading their goals aloud and
telling whether or not they had met them for the day. If they commented that they had not
met a goal, one of the residential staff asked them why and what they could do better
tomorrow. The students also reported if they had been assigned homework. After this
recitation, Michelle went through and read positive comments from the point sheets. She
explained to the new student that if all the homeroom students earned all possible points
for a whole day, they would get a free day. After this, all students who had submitted
correct answers to the trivia question received a piece of candy. Finally, the students were
lined up and accompanied the residential staff to a recreation activity, and their school
day was over.
Residential Staﬁr Meeting

These meetings are held every week and do not include the school staff, unless
there is a pressing behavioral concern which seems to be occurring primarily in the

school setting. The meeting I attended was for the staff of the same house for which

71

Michelle was the lead teacher. I chose this meeting as I would be familiar with most of
the residential staff who were present, and with all of the students they would be
discussing. The house supervisor called the meeting to order about half an hour past its
scheduled start time. They had been waiting for the family counselor and probation
officer to arrive, but these men were hung up in court and no one was sure when they
would be able to come. Those people who were present at the beginning included seven
staff members who worked directly with the students, the supervisor, and me. The
meeting lasted approximately one hour, and the family counselor arrived for the second
half. The probation officer decided not to come to the meeting, and sent a message saying
he would touch base with the staff members later that week.

The residential supervisor led the group in talking about the students in the house.
The meeting was informal, and each staff member was asked if they had any students in
particular they wanted to bring up, or any problematic interactions between students that
they felt the group needed to address. One staff member talked about how a new student
had come in the previous day and the ﬁrst thing he said was, “Who runs this house?”
None of the other students replied, so the new one said, “Well, I’ll run it then.” The staff
people commented that they would need to watch him and seemed to think that he would
be butting heads with a couple other students before long. They discussed another student
who had left the program that week, including what he would be doing for the rest of the
summer, where he would be attending school, and if he would be involved in sports.

A third student they discussed was going to be allowed to attend football practice
at the school he would be attending once he was released. Since he would not be released

until after the start of football season, they were talking about how they would be getting

72

him to practice. The district was about eight miles from Camp Haven, and there was
uncertainty about how they would transport him, especially if there were two practices a
day in the late summer. There seemed to be no question as to whether the student would
be participating, only how they would be facilitating it.

After these conversations, they discussed scheduling for the next month, and
which groups were scheduled to be rim and facilitated by whom. For example, they
determined who would be running the substance abuse group for the next two weeks. At
this point the family counselor arrived and updated the staff on the court case he had just
come ﬁ'om. They asked for his input on the student situations described above, and he
mentioned that he would be meeting with all the students and then be able to update the
staff. He talked about students on medication, and noted that this house had the fewest
students currently medicated, which constituted three of the twelve juveniles. Following
the counselor’s input, the meeting adjourned, with a few staffers remaining to see if they
could switch days in the schedule among themselves.

Overall, the meeting did not seem to be scripted or organized, although one of the
overnight staffers commented that this one was unusually well attended. They followed
no format for discussing students, and one loosely kept notes which were to be added to a
running record kept by the house supervisor. The staff seemed comfortable with each
other, and joked throughout the meeting. They appeared to range in age fi'om mid-
twenties to past ﬁfty. Of the seven staff that had direct, daily contact with the juveniles,
ﬁve were African-American. Two of the staff were African-American women, who

struck me as particularly vocal about which students were trouble.

73

Daily Schedule

I asked the students to describe what a typical day was like for them. The
following response was representative. As the student spoke, he rattled off the times and
activities quickly, as did almost all the students who conversed with me. I noted how
readily they could recite their schedules. As I worked with public school students as a
psychologist trying to determine their need for services, I often asked them to tell me
what classes they have, and who their teachers were. I am amazed at how long it takes
them to express to me where they are each hour of the day, and who was instructing
them. The students at Haven had this information almost instantly at their command.

BOBBY: Weekdays are really, really structured. . .not really structured to where
it’s like boot camp or anything but we all know what we got to do and so we do
that. And then the weekends, are kind of relaxed, we don’t do as much.

VD: Ok, take me through just the schedule of the day.

BOBBY: Uh. . .seven o’clock wake up, seven thirty details, eight o’clock

uh. . .breakfast. . .round eight thirty eight forty-ﬁve school, um school until eleven
forty-ﬁve lunch, lunch until eleven thirty or twelve thirty, eleven thirty
somewhere around that... then uh, school until two forty-ﬁve, two forty-ﬁve you
get back to the house, you do shift change, shift change is where they change the
staff, and uh. . .round three ﬁfteen you have a cabin meeting talk about what’s
going to happen in a day, between three ﬁfteen and ﬁve o’clock you can either
have work session, go outside, or you can stay in the house play pool, video
games, whatever, uh. . .ﬁve o’clock dinner, around ﬁve thirty details again, we got
to clean up the house again from when we messed it up. Uh, throughout the week
we have different groups. So usually after dinner we have the possibility of
having a group, so we could have anger control. . .skillstreaming, all this other...

Staff Participants
The School Principal

The school principal was a Caucasian male about ﬁve foot eight, with a medium
build and a shock of dark, but graying hair. He displayed a lot of energy and was quick to
laugh, which could be heard ﬁom a fair distance away. He always seemed eager to talk,

and I rarely saw him not engaged in conversation with a staff member or student. He

74

would tell me that he had been involved in education for nearly thirty years, the last
twelve as principal of this building. Prior to taking over the principalship he had been a
special education teacher at Haven. When interacting with students he appeared to have
no reservations about confronting them about behavior deemed inappropriate, and would
often do so in view of other students. For the most part, he spoke to students where he
found them, but for the more serious behavioral offences, he would speak with them in
the resource room or his office. He knew every student by name, and seemed to have an
easy manner with all of the staff. My interview with him took place in his office within
the school building.
The Residential Director

This African-American man probably would have stood six foot six, but typically
walked slightly stooped over, and appeared to be around ﬁfty years old. He had the build
of a former basketball player with long arms and hands that enveloped most other peoples
in a handshake. He wore a beard, glasses, and a Kufu, which was a small round hat made
out of cloth with a colorful pattern. He was soft-spoken, and seemed to be moving
slightly slower than those around him. I did not observe him interacting with any of the
youths, but with the staff, he spoke with an easy manner and dry laugh. He had been
working at this facility for quite a few years, ﬁrst as a residential staff person, then a
supervisor, and ﬁnally as the director of the residential portion of Camp Haven. We
spoke in his office at the residential staff administration building.
The Classroom Teacher

This Caucasian woman was attractive, in her early thirties, about ﬁve foot six, and

quite slender of build. She had reﬁned features and light brown, shoulder-length curly

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hair. With a ready laugh and direct manner, she seemed to connect easily with all of the
students. Her walk struck me as purposeful, and it was rare to see her without a beverage
nearby. She was quick to use sarcasm with students and staff, but in my presence it was
always playful and taken well by others. Watching her, I learned that the students could
expect ﬂexibility in terms of teaching style and lesson planning, but expectations were
consistently high and wavered little. The students respected her opinion and sought it on
matters ranging from personal hygiene to test-taking. The present school year was her
sixth teaching in the Woods School. Our main interview conversation took place in her
classroom after school one afternoon.
The Family Counselor

Constantly joking with students and staff alike, this Caucasian man was stocky
and approximately ﬁve foot seven. He appeared to be in his early ﬁfties and had been
doing this job for eighteen years. Before being the counselor, he had worked for the ISD
as a para-educator at Haven. His voice carried notably and he seemed to be perpetually
conversing with someone, to the point that if he was in your building, you were likely to
know it. He had a cubicle at the residential administration building where he sometimes
saw students, but mainly be was over at the school during the day. He informed students
about when their court dates were coming up, family members who might be coming to
visit, and concerns that had been brought to him by teachers and residential staff about
their progress. My interview with him took place in a conference room at the residential

administration building.

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The School Social Worker

This young, Caucasian woman was in her late twenties, attractive, about ﬁve foot
six, and of average build. She had dark brown, shoulder length straight hair and an easy
smile. She was soft-spoken and somewhat hesitant to speak with me as she wasn’t sure
she had much to contribute based on how her role had been deﬁned. She had been laid off
only a few weeks before sitting down with me for the interview but had found another job
closer to her home. The interview was conducted in her home, with her baby daughter
present.

The Probation Oﬁ‘icer

This Caucasian gentleman appeared to be in his mid-ﬁfties, with thinning white
hair and an average build; he stood at about ﬁve foot ten. His clothes were slightly
rumpled every time I saw him, and he was usually moving from place to place at a near
run. He spoke as quickly as he moved and stood quite close to those with whom he
conversed. I observed him speaking with students in hallways, classrooms, and lunch
tables. His eye contact was ﬂeeting, and he gave the impression that when he was
listening to you, he wanted you to ﬁnish so he could continue his thoughts. His office was
twenty-ﬁve miles ﬁ'om Haven at the county court house and was where he spoke with me
at length. He had been working in the juvenile justice system for twenty-seven years, and
his official designation was senior juvenile court officer.
Student Participants

The following excerpt is ﬁom the interview with the school principal (SP) where
he described the makeup of the student body in terms of how many students typically

have special education labels.

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SP: For a number of years we averaged 17 out of 48 students; we averaged 17 to
22 special ed students a year. This past year we peaked at 37 out of 48, which can
make things busy. Most of the disabilities that our represented are easily your EI,
LD, and Cognitively Impaired mildly, some moderate. We have had a couple of
students over the years that ﬁt into the old Trainable range which would be

your. . . they’ve got the new ones now what is it mosey, not quite down to that was
moderately impaired...

VD: CI levels.

SP: Yeah, but not quite there, they just tested in that range, you know you’re
talking IQ’s you know 2%.

VD: In the 50’s?

SP: Yeah, and a lot of those kids tested that way but they had some street smarts
too, so it was kind of interesting to watch them function because you did see the
inability to function socially.

VD: Right.

SP: But, there was this facade that was created that was probably a lot of splinter
skills developed over the years, social splinter skills if you will, to survive. So but
we haven’t had any kids that have been really solidly, solidly in that range, so
most of it is El, LD, and the Cognitively Impaired.

The teacher whose classroom I spent time observing in gave me a list of all the
students who were at Haven during the term I was there. All forty-eight beds were full,
and the list showed that 26 of them were eligible for special education, 18 were not, and 4
had records that had not arrived, so their status was unknown. The breakdown of
juveniles by disability classiﬁcation was as follows, with several students having multiple
labels:

Learning Disabled (LD)-4

Cognitively Impaired (CI)—4

Emotionally Impaired (ED-13

E1 and CL]

EI and LD-l

EI and Speech and Language Impaired (SLI)-1
El and Otherwise Health Impaired (OHI)-l
EI, LD, and SLI—l.

I asked if the list was typical for the population she served at any given time, and
she remarked that it was very rare to have any kids with Cl and/or SLI. From this pool, I

selected the following six students, and assigned each a pseudonym.

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Billy

The ﬁrst student I interviewed had incomplete school records. I went to the
building secretary to ﬁnd what the Woods School and Haven had been sent, and was told
that all they had was some special education paperwork and some court placement
documents. Billy, age 15, attended a local school district and was involved in the short-
term program. The district where he was most recently going to school was the sixth he
had attended. The ﬁrst page when I opened up the ﬁle was known as a “face sheet” to the
staff. It listed his name, had a black and white picture, noted that he was bi-racial, and
listed any identifying marks on his body. Court documents in his ﬁle noted that his ﬁrst
offence was breaking and entering in 2002. This was followed by a string of arrests and
tickets issued for disturbing the peace, probation violation, retail ﬁaud, minor in
possession-alcohol, creating a disturbance, and petty theft. A school social worker’s
report noted that he was court placed at Haven for “incorrigible school behaviors”.
Billy’s father had recently been released from prison after serving fourteen years on drug
charges. Billy was in a ﬁght with his mother’s boyﬁiend, removed by Child Protective
Services, and placed with his father before coming to Haven. The court documentation
also indicated that Billy had been diagnosed as having Attention Deﬁcit Hyperactivity
Disorder (ADHD) and an “Anger Disorder.”

There were also assessment results from an evaluation Billy had completed before
being sent to Haven. The testing was part of the triennial cycle that all special education
students receive as part of their services under federal and state law. The purpose of the
testing is for program evaluation and to determine if the student continues to be eligible

for services. Intelligence (IQ) testing noted that Billy’s overall score was below average.

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Academic testing indicated that his skills in reading, math, and writing were consistent
with his IQ scores. A social/emotional assessment indicated that hyperactivity,
aggression, and attention problems were areas of clinical signiﬁcance.

Billy’s only other documentation sent by either the court or his local school
district was a copy of the Individualized Educational Plan (IEP) that had been completed
upon his placement in Haven. It was attended by Billy, his mother, a general education
teacher, a special education teacher, the Woods principal, the school social worker, a
school psychologist, and the teacher consultant. It noted that his disability was Emotional
Impairment (El). Speciﬁc areas of concern that fell under the El classiﬁcation included a
documented inability to build and maintain relationships, and displaying inappropriate
behaviors and feelings under normal circumstances. The participants wrote that Billy had
used foul language excessively, threatened and fought with others, and “failed to respond
rationally to stressful situations.” The IEP listed some of Billy’s future goals, which
included owning a home, owning a lawn-care business, and getting a high school
diploma. It also noted that he enjoys hunting and ﬁshing.

The IEP had a section about transition activities and services in which he would
be participating at Haven that would help him when he returned to the community. These
activities included how he would have opportunities to earn money at Haven, volunteer at
a center for grade school students with severe disabilities, attend substance abuse
sessions, and attend academic classes at Woods. His speciﬁc IEP goals were involved
with helping him express frustration appropriately, use available staff support, ignore
negative peers, accept responsibility for his actions, be truthful about his behaviors, and

exhibit leadership skills. Under the section describing services provided, the IEP

8O

committee wrote “Basic Classroom Program” and “Secondary EI”, and wrote that he
would be attending this program for 27.5 hours per week at the Woods school.
Dave

The second student I interviewed had records similar to the ﬁrst in terms of
volume. Dave, a sixteen year-old Caucasian, had court papers documenting a series of
juvenile offences starting in 2000. His list included assault, resisting and obstructing a
police officer, having an unregistered bicycle, minor in possession-alcohol, curfew
violations, and last, home invasion and larceny, the offences for which he was sent to
Haven. The documentation included a reference to his being removed fi'om home for not
being, “controlled by parents and gotten to school on a regular basis.” Incidents of
substance abuse, gang-related activity, and concerns that he was subject to physical abuse
were also noted. Dave has a diagnosis of ADHD, and at one time took Ritalin to combat
the symptoms but had not taken it for a few years. His court papers indicated a history
of parental substance abuse, depression, and anxiety.

His entrance IEP was in the ﬁle, and the meeting where it was crafted was
attended by him, a parent, the teacher consultant, general education teacher, special
education teacher, and the Woods principal. His areas of eligibility for special education
included a Learning Disability (LD) in basic reading skills and a secondary label of El. It
was noted that Dave enjoyed working on cars and construction and would like to go to
college and play football.

The transition activities and services section noted how he could earn money
while at Haven, participate in volunteer activities in the disabled children’s center, attend

substance abuse prevention group, and attend class ﬁve periods per day. His goals

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included reading skill development, completing assignments on time, ignoring negative
peers, seeking adult guidance to help resolve issues or when angry. His services section
listed the Basic EI classroom program for 27.5 hours per week.

There was evaluation data present from testing that had been completed in 2002.
These records indicated that Dave also qualiﬁed for special education services as a
student with a Speech and Language lrnpairment (SLI) and had qualiﬁed in this area for
several years. The speech and language pathologist who tested him wrote, “It is
recommended that Dave continue to receive speech and language services for a severe
oral language impairment.” Attached to the IEP described above was a sheet completed
by the Multidisciplinary Evaluation Team (MET) that documented the SLI, but the IEP
itself contained no speech and/or language goals, services, or mention of eligibility.

Other data noted from the 2002 evaluation included intelligence test scores in the
low average range and achievement scores in reading and math which ranged from below
average to low average. The reports indicated a brother who was also classiﬁed as EI, and
that there had been concern regarding Dave’s behaviors since he entered school in
kindergarten.
Joe

The records for Joe included his entire cumulative ﬁle that had been sent by the
district he was attending prior to being sent to Haven. Joe had special education records
indicating that he had been receiving services since age three or four under the Pre-
Primary Impaired (PPI) classiﬁcation due to speech and language deﬁcits. He was of
Native American descent and had changed schools four times. Good attendance was

noted in elementary school, but became dramatically worse after he entered middle

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school in grade six. When I met him, Joe was sixteen years old, and was going through
the short-term program at Haven for the second time.

His court papers spoke of assault and battery, and assault with a dangerous
weapon, and noted that the incidents involved conﬂicts within his family. He was
suspended several times from school for ﬁghting. He was diagnosed with ADHD at age
six, and medication was discontinued after a short while, as the side effects were thought
to be worse than the symptoms of the disorder. Joe also went through counseling, but
sessions were discontinued due to ﬁnancial concerns. Joe was born prematurely and had
not seen his biological mother for many years.

Earlier this year an assessment had been completed and noted that Joe had
average reading scores, but below average writing and math scores. His current eligibility
consisted of a primary classiﬁcation of El and a secondary label of SLI. Reports ﬁ'om the
evaluators indicated that there was a long history of involvement ﬁ'om Child Protective
Services, and that his parents lost custody for a time when he was in elementary school.
These reports noted that Joe’s IQ scores were in the well below average range and that
several years ago he was evaluated to determine if he had Autism, but this diagnosis was
not made. Joe had been sent to the Angel County Youth Home about six times before his
initial detainment at Haven.

His IEP was attended by himself, a parent, the teacher consultant, a special
education teacher, the Woods principal, and the school social worker. The EI and SL1
classiﬁcations were noted in the eligibility section. The documentation of speech
impairment contained statements on how it impacted his performance and requires,

“continuous and frequent services from a speech and language pathologist.” Other areas

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of difficulty included his struggles with making ﬁiends, managing anger towards bullies,
and accepting directions from adults. The services and activities section listed how Joe
would accept responsibility for laundry, learn to maintain his hygiene, earn money
working in the kitchen or doing lawn care, volunteer at the disabled children’s center
twice per month, attend substance abuse sessions, and earn credit towards his high school
diploma. His services were categorized as Basic El Classroom for 27.5 hours per week,
and speech and language pathologist services one to two times per week for twenty
minutes.

His speciﬁc goal pages listed the means by which he would improve his speech
and language development, articulation, develop positive interpersonal relationships,
identify positive peers to interact with, ignore negative peers, speak to adults respectfully,
and “accept ‘no’ the ﬁrst time.”

Arnold

Arnold had a few school records, several court documents, and some materials
from foster care placements. This amalgamation displayed slightly more information than
most of the students had. Arnold was an African-American sixteen year-old, of average
height, an athletic build, and a very dark complexion. He had bright eyes and a quiet
demeanor, but staff warned me that he had some history of violence. He had been at
Haven for just over a year and had been sent there for assaulting staff and peers at a
residential program in another county. The ﬁrst piece of documentation encountered in
his ﬁle, after the face sheet, was a letter from the counselor at his prior placement. It
noted that Arnold had been in “managed care” since he was two months old. Since that

time, he had been placed in twenty-one different foster homes, and no members of any of

84

those families had any desire to be involved with him currently. The letter also indicated
that no biological family members were involved.

Court documents noted that Amold’s offences included assault and battery and
aggravated assault. Notes about his family were included and showed that both parents
were in prison, his mother for second degree murder and his father for weapon and drug
charges. Old interviews with him indicated that he believed he had three maternal half
sisters, but he did not know the whereabouts of any and only knew the last name of one.
The court had ordered psycho-therapy and anger management repeatedly, and listed the
reasons as “emotional concerns” and possible abuse. Amold’s records indicated that he
has been eligible for special education since at least 2000, but it was not clear if that was
his date of initial eligibility.

Amold’s special education documentation included evaluation results which
showed his IQ to be in the low average range. Tests of his academic achievement showed
that his reading skills were average, with math skills considerably lower. His most recent
IEP was attended by the special education teacher, principal, and teacher consultant of
the Woods School. His eligibility classiﬁcation was El, and his services were listed as
“Basic El Program, 27.5 hours per week”. His interests were noted to include being a
narrator and rapping. At that time, he was unsure where he wanted to live as an adult, or
What he would like to do after high school. His Present Level of Educational Performance
(PLEP) noted that he was at grade level in everything except math, but when he became
upset he did not stay on task or complete assignments. Concerns included his tendency to
take out his frustration on peers, and verbally provoking and disrupting the classroom. In

the transition section of the IEP, it noted that he would have an opportunity to explore

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career options. His goals included math skill improvement, peer relationships, and
anger/behavior control.
Devon

“Devon’s” records were far from complete, and mainly consisted of
documentation that had been generated after he had arrived at Haven with a few court
papers and old school paperwork. He had been there since September of 2003, just shy of
one year. Sparse court documentation noted that parental rights had been terminated, he
had been in foster care, and he had committed his ﬁrst offence in 2000. His offences
included assaulting family members and probation violation, and there was conﬁrmation
that he had been physically and sexually abused and abandoned. Other concerns included
a history of bed wetting, temper tantrums, ﬁghting at school, hearing voices and talking
to himself, biting, and swearing at others. There was a note that his parents had a history
of serious substance abuse that had resulted in three foster home placements. Devon had
been placed on medication for mood swings and anger, but it was not clear how long he
had been taking them, and how consistent his medical care had been regarding this issue.

Devon was fourteen and Caucasian, with blond hair and gray eyes. He was tall for
his age, pushing ﬁve foot ten, and was of average build. His smile was quick, but his eye
contact shifted regularly, which sent mixed signals about how comfortable he was
speaking with me. Several times while we were talking, he did not seem to understand
the questions, as his answers were sometimes wildly off topic.

His special education records displayed some inconsistency between those of

school and court. In his most recent evaluation, which had occurred since he had come to

Haven, the team recommended eligibility under the El classiﬁcation only. His court

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documentation noted that his special education eligibility was LD. His school papers
showed that the school team involved in his most recent IEP, which had taken place at
Haven, found that E1 was the primary classiﬁcation with LD being secondary. Evaluation
data showed his overall IQ was in the below average range, but he had signiﬁcantly
stronger non-verbal skills as opposed to verbal abilities. His achievement testing showed
that he was well below average across the board in reading and math.

His most recent IEP was attended by the teacher consultant, special education
teacher, principal, school social worker, and school psychologist, all of whom served the
Woods school. Eligibility was listed as EI primary and LD secondary. His interests
included bowling, hunting, ﬁshing, and building things. They asked about future
employment, and Devon responded that he was interested in becoming either a clerk or a
security guard. Strengths for him were listed as being a good reader and friendly. His
needs were noted to be a structured environment, social skill training, math support, and
organizational skills. His PLEP noted that counseling and possible social work support to
assist with peer relationships were concerns. His goals were designed to help him learn to
form good peer relationships, and his services included the basic El program 27.5 hours
per week. The transition section described how he would be earning money by working
in the kitchen and while doing lawn care, and how he would be attending ﬁve classes
daily. Listed supplementary aids and services were small class size, positive behavioral
SUpports, and extra assistance on assignments as needed.

Bobby
The ﬁnal student, Bobby, had been at Haven since December of 2002. Bobby was

an Aﬁican—American, sixteen year-old with light skin and hair that he wore either as a

87

sizeable afro or in braids extending nearly to his shoulders. Bobby was easily the most
articulate of the students interviewed and was of average height and thin. His teeth were
far from straight, but he smiled readily and seemed to be constantly joking and talking.
His records were signiﬁcantly more complete than average, particularly in regard to
documentation of his special education services, in the form of several old IEPs; he had
been classiﬁed as El since at least 1997.

Court documentation noted that parental rights had been terminated several years
ago because of neglect, making him a ward of the state. He was ﬁrst placed in shelter
care in 1999, and had spent time in a city children’s home and at least one foster home
before coming to Haven. His offense list was short and seemed to include only a charge
of breaking and entering of an occupied dwelling, although he was considered a high risk
as a repeat offender. The court papers noted a history of family substance abuse, selling
drugs, and violence. Bobby himself had been caught using cocaine and alcohol.

Evaluation records indicated that his IQ was in the high average range, and
achievement scores were solidly average compared to other students his age. He had
diagnoses of ADHD, ODD, and Anxiety Disorder-Not Otherwise Speciﬁed. Evaluation
reports documented serious problems with relationships with peers and adults, refusing to
follow directions, difﬁculty controlling emotions, and being disruptive. His most recent
IEP was attended by the teacher consultant, special education teacher, a general education
teacher, and the principal of Woods. His eligibility was noted to be E1, and strengths were
listed as very articulate, helpful, and intelligent. Under the ‘needs’ section, involving
some type of mentor was suggested, as well as concern about seeking out negative peers

and immaturity. The transition portion indicated that Bobby had expressed interest in

88

becoming a writer and earning a doctorate in child psychology, and that he enjoyed
comedy, writing, singing, reading, and writing poetry.

Transition activities and services included having him be responsible for daily
chores and laundry, earn money by working, and attend classes daily. Supplementary aids
and services were listed as small class size and positive behavioral supports. His goals
were designed to assist him with exhibiting appropriate behavior in classrooms,
developing positive relationships with peers and staff, and seeking staff support when
stressful situations arise. His service plan was Basic EI program, 27.5 hours per week.

Getting permission to speak with these young men proved something of a
challenge. For the three short-term juveniles, who came ﬁ'om local schools or
placements, getting parental signatures on the consent forms was easy. In contrast, it took
four weeks for the residential director to track down who had parental rights for the long-
term students. He needed to contact their court case workers and probation officers to
determine whether or not parental rights had been terminated, and who the court had
named as guardian in their stead. As it turned out, he himself was considered their legal
guardian while they were adjudicated to Camp Haven, and he was able to sign the
consent forms. Through this I observed that something which struck me as a basic piece
of information in regard to serving these students, particularly considering all the court
and school paperwork that followed them around, that the solution to this issue was not
already known.

The six students had a great degree of variability in terms of the length of their
sentence. One student had been there for two weeks, while another had been there for just

short of two years. One of the juveniles was at Haven for the second time. Before going

89

to the site and learning more about the population, I had been under the impression that
all of the youths came directly from public school districts after committing a crime
either at school or in the community. From reviewing records and conducting the
interviews with staff and youths, it was evident that only about half came directly from
public schools. The other half came ﬁ'om a variety of placements, including equally or
less secure detention facilities in other counties, group foster homes, and alternative
schools. As I selected the six students whom I would be interviewing, I considered this

variety of sending institutions as well as area of disability and length of sentence.

9O

Chapter V
Results
Several themes emerged from analyzing the collected data. Each of the themes
presented below bears strongly on the educational experiences of the juveniles who are
eligible to receive special education services. Provided in each of the themes are excerpts
from the interview transcripts, and these in turn are presented as examples of the
perceptions and experiences of the participants. These passages are included to allow the
reader to develop a sense of the experiences at Haven from the words of this study’s
participants.

Theme 1: The experience of being at Camp Haven was designed to be
educational to prevent recidivism.

Theme 2: Students at Haven experienced more academic success than they
did at the public school they came from.

Theme 3: Special education looked different at Haven than in local school
districts.

Theme 4: The trappings of special education did not mean much to the juveniles
at Haven.

Theme 5: Students at Haven had many of their basic needs met in
ways they had not before.

Theme 6: Even though students were placed with a group of individuals with
similar circumstances, they remained isolated in many ways.

Theme 1: The experience of being at Camp Haven was designed to be
educational to prevent recidivism.

Everyone at Camp Haven, school and residential staff alike, spoke in a language
common to educators. They all communicated in terms and talked about their goals for
the juveniles, in ways that were common in every school I had worked in. When speaking

about a student’s needs, they talked about what that individual needed to learn and how

91

the program was designed to teach them. Importantly, the focus of Haven seemed to be
on remediation as opposed to punishment, on re-education as opposed to incarceration.
The students afﬁrrned this idea, as they talked about learning social and academic skills
and being expected to perform better than they had in the public schools they came from.
Below is an excerpt ﬁom this researcher’s observation notes that highlights the
philosophy of the school component, which I saw to be true.
OBSERVATIONS: After school one day, the staff met to discuss which students
were having difﬁculty, and to look at the calendar for the rest of the term. The
meeting was fairly informal; there was a bowl of candy and the mood seemed
light. The principal passed out an agenda that contained the mission statement for
the building at the top. It read, “We the staff of Haven School recognize the
unique needs of each student. We are committed to providing a learning
environment, which assures the student successful completion of his
individualized goals in order to prepare him for constructive engagement in the
community.”
Social Skiils
Both the residential and school components recognized that a crucial factor in
preparing the youths to return to their communities was social skill development. The
residential director spoke about how many of the students who entered the camp have
weak interpersonal skills and have never learned to appropriately deal with stress or
manage anger. A key focus of the residential programming that manifested in group
experiences and the camp behavioral system was designed around the need to teach
students these skills. The school staff in the camp did not seem to utilize any separate,
deﬁned social skills curriculum, but endeavored to incorporate the principles the

student’s were learning through their residential treatment plan. This response from the

residential director (RD) highlighted how well the philosophies of the school and

92

residential components matched, although each was primarily concerned with different

things.

RD: I’d say the thing you’re trying to do with the kids in terms of...teaching the
skills that many of the kids are lacking. Whether it be the social thing, or stuff
like problem solving, or moral reasoning, what you’re really trying to teach is the
skill so they become better in terms of how they cope with different things. So
you try and go at things that are going to be issues when they go back to the
community. So even in the groups that you’re running you want the kid to come
up with situations, so if you’re working on certain skill, when might you use this
skill, or can you think of a situation in the community that you might use this
skill. Getting them to role play it here. . .it’s not ofﬁcial, but at least you want to
get them to role play it and as much as you can get them to. . .try and use some of
that here. Hopeﬁilly it’s transferred to the community. When you do send a kid
home he’s going to be confronted with those situations, so part of the groups is
homework, so if a kid does go home and he has an assignment, it goes on to see
how did he handle that situation.

The school principal (SP) spoke of the students needing to learn how to deal

appropriately with authority ﬁgures. In his experience, appropriate community social

skills were not taught in the homes many of these students were raised in, which caused

problems when the students used behavior and language at school or in the community

that was acceptable at home. He recognized that the need for social skill remediation was

at least equal to teaching basic academic skills.

SP: They just can’t function socially very well. They have great difﬁculty
dealing with authority ﬁgures. Sometimes that’s based in reality. (laugh)

They’ve had some difﬁcult times. Our systems don’t work real good for our kids
that are on that edge. Our kids tend to challenge authority. They tend to
challenge the status quo. The other group of them, they don’t have the pragmatic
skills. They’re not taught in the home, i.e., respect. I’ve used that term to mean
more a degree of politeness, if you will. When rough language is used in the
home as a common place occurrence and, you’ll excuse my language, but pass the
fucking potatoes is OK in some of the rooms in some of the homes, but you use
that language in the public school classroom, and you get chastised for it, and then
you get angry because well, that’s what we do at home, what are you talking
about. I didn’t do anything wrong, and you’re just picking on me. So they get
sent out of [the classroom]. I’m creating that scenario, but that happens a lot.

93

Despite the emphasis placed on interpersonal skill development, some students
did not think they were learning much at Haven that would serve them after they returned
to the community. I observed a few of them making ﬁm of the groups they had to
participate in, where they joked about what they would really do if faced with some of
the scenarios they discussed in group. Joe spoke about participating in the groups for
anger control and moral reasoning:

VD: Ok. Do you think that those groups help?

JOE: (deep breath) No.

VD: No. Why is that?

JOE: Because I always get mad.

VD: You just you keep getting mad? What kind of stuff makes you mad?

JOE: I don’t know. Like mad that I’m back here.

VD: That you’re back here?

JOE: You know I could be out there smoking, and um, repairing lawn mowers.

Despite some students being slow to warm up to the program, most eventually
came around and did well according to the staff. I was curious about why they seemed to
be so optimistic about the impact their work was having, and as I reviewed the data, came
to see another piece of the experience these youths were having. The expectations placed
upon them were signiﬁcant, to conform to the behavioral interventions and complete their
school work. The staff displayed a consistency of application and understanding in regard
to what the students were supposed to do and how they were to accomplish assigned
tasks.
High Expectations

Many educators are trained that high expectations are a key component of
classroom management and academic success for students. This idea can be seen easily in

federal legislation, such as the No Child Left Behind act, that holds schools to

eXpectations such as having every student be proﬁcient in math and reading in a

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designated time ﬁame. This principle of high expectations was present both in the school
portion of Haven and the residential. The school principal spoke about the goal of
holding the students to high academic and behavioral expectations and the success he had
observed.

SP: We’re pretty intense. We really put a high focus on or present high standards

for kids. I mean we expect them to perform and it’s the high expectations that we

have. I think kids perform pretty well in this program, mainly because they
believe that expectation and high expectation that, given the opportunity, you
know you’re going to excel, and they do for the most part.

Most of the students were able to articulate behavioral and academic expectations,
both while speaking in interviews and during my observations that led this researcher to
believe that expectations had at some point been clearly deﬁned and were often repeated.
This was different than from similar experiences during interviews with special education
students at a public school. When public school students were asked questions like,
“What kind of notes does your teacher have you take?”, or “What do you need to do to
get an A in math class?”, they were rarely able to relate what the teachers expected from
them, and many had difﬁculty telling to what class they should return to after we had
ﬁnished.

When the family counselor (PC) was asked about preventing recidivism, he gave
a response that spanned this theme and the next. He described how expectations were
individualized based on student skill, and how this lead directly to increased success and

positive self image, the next theme presented in this chapter.

FC: The whole emphasis around school in terms of reinforcing some positive

experiences, I think that’s one of them for a lot of the kids. I’m not saying that

grades are easy to get here, but I think the teachers here tend to measure
individual success for a kid, and he gets graded based on his individual effort not

what the other nine kids may have done in that classroom. Joey getting ten
answers right out of the twenty for him that might be B or C work where, for

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another kid, that wouldn’t even be acceptable at that point. So, I think that there’s
an element of that in terms of trying to reinforce some positive experiences
around school, not lessen the value of education but trying to look at how you
measure that particular kid’s success. I think the behavioral intervention in terms
of, kids out of the classroom here, and/or the teacher or the teacher’s aide going
out of the classroom with that student and meeting with the residential staff, ok
what is it that we need to do to get you back into the classroom. That’s not what
happens in public school environment, you and I both know that. You know,
they’re going to call the parents, you’re out the door, see you in a couple of days
kind of thing. So part of what we’re trying to do is get the kid engaged, you
know, how do you intervene in this kind of situation or problem so it doesn’t
happen again, or how do you intervene differently.
Recreation and Employment Skills
Several of the staff and students spoke about the virtues of recreation and work.
Those staff members who commented on it seemed convinced that teaching students the
skills necessary to seek out and participate in recreation and employment were critical in
preventing recidivism. When students were asked what types of things they needed to
help them be successﬁll and not be re—incarcerated, most spoke of jobs, hobbies, and
sports. There were other prongs of treatment focus aimed at these students regarding the
prevention of recidivism. Strengthening family support, teaching interpersonal skills,
fostering a sense of academic success: Each of these factors were also mentioned by the
staff and were observable in the classroom or in student/staff interaction. The two factors
presented here, recreation and work, seemed to be special because they came across
clearly from both staff and youths.
The residential director described the purpose behind sports and recreation
opportunities which were designed into each student’s day. By having them work they
were able to earn money for restitution or to spend on themselves on shopping trips. He

also discussed how involving the youth with sports could be a vehicle to identify speciﬁc

problems or issues of anger, and then work them out.

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RD: We have recreation, and that’s really when our kids turn some money and
have fun. Also the recreation is used in many ways in terms of dealing with some
of the behavioral issues that kids have. So a lot of this program is centered
around activities, but a lot of time the activities are set up to deal with certain
issues with the kid. So the kid who has a difficult time dealing with the anger or
working together with his peer group, being on the softball team or basketball
team is a positive treatment. So the activity itself helps us work with some of the
issues with the kid. The activities are not just activity for the sake of activity, but
it has a treatment focus behind it all, so a lot of the kids, they’re involved in the
community service projects.

Two student responses to questioning about what types of things they felt they

would require in order to be successful and not return to a facility like Haven are given

below.

VD: What are some of those things that you think you need to be successful?
BILLY: What I got to do to be. . .successful?

VD: Yeah. Like what do you have to do, so you wouldn’t...

BILLY: Get in trouble.

VD: Yeah.

BILLY: Here or out in the community?

VD: After you leave here, well both, tell me both.

BILLY: Um. . .in here I’m improved. When I ﬁrst got here I was bad but I
improved, I listening and following directions and everything. When I leave I just
got to keep doing what I’m doing here. Uh, doing it on the outs, so I won’t get in
trouble. Cuz I’m, I mean I’m ready, I’m going to have a job when I get out.
VD: What kind of work?

BILLY: My dad gots a lawn care business.

VD: So you think that will help you stay out of trouble and stuff?

BILLY: Yeah.

VD: What other kinds of things do you think would help you?

BILLY: Um, play basketball.

VD: Yeah?

BILLY: I’m good in basketball. I’m goin’ to the YMCA with my dad

though. ..the new one and um. . .oh yeah, and we going ﬁshin’.

VD: You like ﬁshing?

BILLY: Yeah.

VD: What kind of ﬁsh do you like to catch?

BILLY: Like we catch bass, um catﬁsh. . .and I catch some big bluegills like the
size of my hand. '

BOBBY: Like go through my list of stuff, of what I think? First things ﬁrst

homework, second thing work, ‘cause I got to get a job, and then any sport that
I’m on and everything else comes after.

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Asked about vocational assessment, the school principal commented that one of
the teachers does testing, which he termed as “exploratory”, and noted that he wished it
could be an ongoing, comprehensive process. Michelle talked about how in the past there
had been a much stronger vocational component to the school portion of Haven. Students
had opportunities to study small engine repair, automotive care, and learn more lawn care
and gardening skills. This was evident from looking at the classroom with the large bay
door that was set up like a workshop.

By focusing on the areas presented in the ﬁrst theme, the staff at Haven sought to
equip the youth with tools they would need to make it in the community. As they
acquired these skills, they often experienced greater accomplishment in the classroom.
This idea comprised the second theme that is presented below.

Theme 2: Students at Haven experienced more academic success than they
did at the public school from which they came.

Staff believed there was a strong connection between the overall design of the
camp programming that included social skill development and high expectations, and
student success. Analysis of the data revealed that this success often manifested in
academic gains. Exit assessment of student skill levels in reading and math revealed that
most gained signiﬁcantly during their time at Haven. This growth contrasted sharply with
the academic success the students had experienced in public school noted in their records.
The classroom teacher (CT) noted issues of self-esteem that she felt were tied to
improved academic performance.

CT: Deﬁnitely I would say every day, every kid’s potential isn’t maximized at

all, but I can say that every day every kid has something to feel really good about.

Both academically and emotionally, whether it’s happening in here or somewhere
else. I think every kid feels important.

98

When asked to describe a typical student at Haven, the family counselor spoke
about the experiences many of them had in public school. His words conﬁrmed what the
student records told me, that many of these youths had known failure in the schools they
attended in their communities. He was an animated and jovial speaker, but during this
portion of the interview he was signiﬁcantly more quiet and serious.

F C: It’s not every kid who comes in here that has signiﬁcant problems with
school. Of the kids that do, I would say almost to a kid, they’ve been identiﬁed as
a special ed. student in the community, probably a hundred percent of them. And
since it’s you and I in the room, a hundred percent of those kids that come out of
Johnson Public School system that are actually special ed. kids, as far as I’m
concerned, I would tell [the superintendent] if she was sitting in this room right
now, that they are being treated as throw away kids by that school system.

The probation officer (PO) echoed the difﬁculties faced by many of these kids,
describing how he thought about special education students, where some of them came
from, and what they might gain from serving time at Haven. He was responding to a
question about what a typical student at the facility looked like.

PO: I’m not going to treat a special ed student the same as I’m going to treat an
honors student who’s committed the same offense. I’m going, in the course of my
investigation, to learn if this kid’s got some special or unique problems. I’m
going to end up talking to special education teachers at whatever school he’s gone
to. I’m going to be made aware by family members that there are some. . .you
know, he doesn’t know any better, or he did this because he gets ﬁ'ustrated; he’s
got a low ﬁ'ustration tolerance. I mean, he loses his temper; he’s hanging out with
the wrong crowd; he won’t take his medications; or there’s a whole, whole series
of things that could be going on with a young man or young lady like that. So,
now. . .that’s not to say that this young man might not be well-suited for the
START program out at Haven also. Maybe because this young man has got some
severe learning disabilities; he refuses to go to school; he hates being labeled
special ed; he hates all of the stigma that goes along with that; he hates being in a
self-contained classroom; he wants to be seen or treated like other kids in the
school and he isn’t. So he starts skipping school, and he starts smoking dope, and
a bunch of that kind of stuff. Ninety days out at the START program might be a
good opportunity for this young man to get back in the classroom and work on a
one-on-one situation, or at least in a small classroom environment, in a situation
where he’s required to be in class every day, on time, coming prepared, and that

99

he’s got some supports in place. And a lot of young men who were severely truant

and who have had a lot of learning disabilities have really had some good

experiences out at Haven, in that educational environment.

Before school one day near the end of the term, the teacher spoke about the
grading process. She noted that this would be a day with more behavioral challenges than
most, where some students would be quite expressive in regard to their grades. Some
would be upset, some exuberant, but most of the kids would be letting us know how they
felt. I found her assessment to be accurate, as at least half the students commented Openly
when she passed out sheets with grades and a record of missing assignments. Several of
the more vocal students came up to her at some point during the hour the grades were
passed out and asked how they affect the report to the probation ofﬁcer or their release.

OBSERVATION: She told me about how grades work, mentioning that every

week she gives them a progress report. She warned me that this would cause

several of the students to be bent out of shape for the whole day. She noted how
she liked seeing them get a little upset because it told her that they care, but

indicated that they would be acting out more than usual. The report contained a

cumulative grade for the term, missing assignments, and the grade earned for each

assignment given up to that point in the term. Michelle told the student teacher
and I that most teachers give these, and that copies are given to the parents when
they come for weekend visits or if they attend a bi-monthly parent meeting.

Michelle also mentioned how nearly all the parents expressed satisfaction with the
progress their child made academically while out at Haven. Many parents seemed more
concerned with how their child was doing in respect to interactions with peers and adults
and were pleasantly surprised when told about the academic success they were
experiencing. Between each student’s entrance and exit process when they were
administered tests of academic achievement, it was common to see signiﬁcant growth.
Below, the school social worker (SW) talked about how she viewed the experiences of

the students she worked with while at Haven.

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VD: Overall, how would you characterize the experience of special ed kids at
Haven in terms of positive or negative?

SW: I like to think, I actually do think that in most of those kid’s cases it’s
probably the most positive experience that they’ve had. Deﬁnitely the most
positive experience that they’ve had in any type of residential, lock-up type of
situation. I know just ﬁ'om when you ask kids during the evaluation process what
their perspective is, most of them even will say that they feel like for the ﬁrst time
that they are reading and are excited about school for the ﬁrst time, because. . .I
mean if you noticed, some of the kids there don’t even know what the honor roll
is when they come there, and before you know it, they’re trying to be on the honor
roll. That’s not your cool thing typically in some of the schools they come from. I
think that they also see adults that truly care about them, and want them to
succeed and want what’s best for them. I can’t really talk about any staff member
there that really isn’t truly invested in those kids. So I would say from my
perspective as an adult working there, as well as ﬁ'om what the kids tell me, that it
is very positive. I mean there’s kids that leave and are still calling, I think part of
that’s due to, “Oh-my-God, I’m out now and I’m scared,” and there’s also been
kids that purposefully screw up and lose their level so they don’t get released
because they want to stay. But I think it is positive. . .I think they do the very best
with what they have there.

The students, for the most part, agreed with the staff perception that more learning
was taking place at Haven than it did in the public schools they had attended. Most of the
students, when asked about differences between going to school at Haven and attending
public school indicated that it was harder but that they learned more. Only one student
indicated that he had access to better learning opportunities in a regular school setting.
The others indicated that they were challenged more and had additional support from the
teachers. The two excerpts below were typical of the responses to questions about what
school was like for them at Haven, and how it differed from their public school
experience.

VD: What does it mean to you to be in special ed.? Like, they

put you in special ed. in public school, what does that mean to you?

BILLY: Well I don’t really like it.

VD: Ok. Tell me why.

BILLY: Cuz you only sit in like one of the class all day ‘cept and I always like to
move around, but in here you get to move around cuz they goin’ to draw

10]

somebody to a school like this; well they already got the school here it’s in [local
town] I’m trying to ﬁgure out what the name is like this school.

VD: Ok.

BILLY: And I got help. Soon as I came here I been, I’m um more respectful to
staff and stuff and not giving no feedback, and listen better and. . .I’m getting good
grades. . .

VD: Good.

BILLY: A’s and B’s

VD: Good.

BILLY: Lucky I’m do good ‘til I get on the outs and go to school.

This student was one with ADHD, and understanding his answers was difﬁcult at
times due to the velocity and disjointedness of his words. From follow-up questions to
the above answer, he expressed that he had been doing better at Haven academically and
was hopeful that he would be able to continue to succeed when he returned to a public
school. The excerpt below highlighted how one student had come to believe that at
Haven he was given access to academic content that he would not have otherwise had.
Answering additional questions, be indicated that he thought he learned more at Haven
because he had to do more there and couldn’t just get by without trying. If he did, then he
wouldn’t be able to leave because his probation ofﬁcer would know he had not been
working hard.

VD: What are some differences between here and public schools? You
mentioned that when you get in trouble there’s differences. What about the stuff
you learn?

ARNOLD: It’s like I think, I think I learn more stuff here than in public schools.
VD: More stuff here?

ARNOLD: Because half the stuff they teach here they’ll probably never teach out
in public schools.

VD: So you think they give you more information here than in public schools?
ARNOLD: Yeah.

VD: Ok. What are a couple of examples of stuff that you learned here that you
don’t think you would have been taught at public schools?

ARNOLD: I probably would have never known how to do algebra. At the public
school they probably would have skipped me right over algebra.

102

Success at Haven was no guarantee of success when students made the transition
back to their local schools as illustrated in a story told below by the principal. Following
the story is a response from the residential director that showed his belief that students
experienced success after being sent to the facility and gives his thoughts on why it did
not necessarily translate when the kids were reincorporated back into their communities.

SP: I’ve talked with superintendents before, I’ve had a call, we had a kid here a
number of years ago that took the bulldozer and ran it into the front end of the
high school. You know it caused a 100,000 dollars worth of damage. I’d talked
to the superintendent about that boy. He did well in our program, I can’t
guarantee his behavior anywhere else, you know, anymore then you can guarantee
the behavior of your school board (laugh). He did well here, and he [the
superintendent] got a chuckle out of that. You know, kids that have had a history
of ﬁghting and stuff, they [the home school staff] want some assurances that he’s
not going to knock somebody out. I said, well, you know I can’t guarantee that
anybody pushed to a certain point’s not going to. .. I said what we’ve seen is that
he is able to use some of tools that we have given him in a problem solving
situation. Whether he uses them in your environment, I can’t guarantee any of
that.

RD: What I’ve found most of the kids. . .the label don’t necessarily ﬁt. I mean,
they’ve been labeled because a lot of the kids didn’t go to school, so when you
don’t go to school you get a label pretty soon. Usually kids are able to do quite
well here. . .they still have some gaps in their learning, but for the ﬁrst time they
are able to slow down, settle down, they’re not getting kicked out of school, and
then they’re getting a lot of the one on one, so a lot of them are able to excel quite
well here. So when they go back to the public schools is where some of the
difﬁculties 1 think kind of resurface because the schools probably are still not
equipped to deal with the youngsters coming back in, and some of the schools
don’t necessarily want them back in there.

A thread that ran through several staff interviews that was touched on in the
excerpt above, wound around the idea that these students were labeled in their local
schools not because of a true disability but because of their behavior. Due to their home
experiences, they either did not or could not conform to regular education expectations so

were labeled in order to give them access to alternative programs and services.

103

Contemplating this staff perception, reviewing the data, and thinking about how special
education looked in the public school settings I have worked in, the next theme emerged.

Theme 3: Special education looked different at Haven than in local school
districts.

Diﬂerence in Residential Staﬁr Perspective

Special education looked different on several different levels. The ﬁrst difference
was one that seemed to come from a ﬁmdarnental difference in perspective. The
residential director spoke of how many students at Haven earn special education labels
because of truancy or behavior problems in public school. The school staff, when
speaking about special education, talked about meeting the needs of the kid based on the
disability. This type of language was familiar to this researcher and what was expected.
For the residential director, family counselor, and probation ofﬁcer, special education
eligibility seemed to be something put on a youth to indicate a behavior problem.
Because of this, the issue of special education eligibility did not seem to be of major
concern as they spoke about serving the juveniles in their care.

Youth treatment plans created by the residential facility did not appear to
incorporate special education considerations. For example, student participation in groups
to combat substance abuse or teach anger management were based solely on whether or
not these had been problem areas for the young man. There did not appear to be an
assessment component that grouped them according to skill level, such as the academic
testing that largely decided what classes a student would attend. This difference in
perspective may also account for why delivery of ancillary services which often
accompany special education eligibility in public schools did not seem to be a pressing

matter.

104

Ancillary Service Delivery

As records were reviewed and interviews conducted, there seemed to be little
evidence of the traditional delivery system for ancillary special education services.
Students did not have scheduled visits from speech and language pathologists or social
workers, though this was expected based on the youths’ disability classiﬁcations and
needs noted in their IEPs. Evaluations and reports were conducted and written as had
been expected, but looking at the IEPs from when the students had arrived at Haven, the
services from ancillary staff were not included. When the school social worker was asked
about her role and what she had observed about the delivery of services at the facility, her
response was recorded in the following excerpt.

VD: First I would like you to tell me about yourself, and your role when you
were out there, what you were asked to do, how you interacted with the kids,
things like that.

SW: Ok, I was just the school social worker when I was there. I actually came in
for evaluation purposes only. I didn’t do direct service, no therapeutic service, no
therapy with the kids at all. So, my job was to go in, and reevaluate them, which
normally took probably two, maybe three days time. Then write up the report and
go to the IEP. That was pretty much it.

VD: Describe special ed. at Camp Haven.

SW: I would say. ..there’s no basic classrooms, there’s no special ed. rooms,
there’s not resource rooms in the traditional sense. I would say it’s more the old-
fashioned kind of. . .working with the students where they’re at. All of the kids
work. . .if modiﬁcations and adaptations are needed it’s done by each teacher in
the classroom and things like that. Direct service, ﬁ'om my perspective, as far as
being written in for social work in the IEP isn’t done, and I think the reason it’s
not done is because a lot of the kids are getting other services through

their. . .substance abuse counselor that comes in, or there’s a lot of support groups
that are done by the personnel through the residential piece.

VD: What about the more ancillary stuff, like you said a lot more of the mental
health things are addressed by other people. What about stuff like speech and
language, or OT (occupational therapy) PT (physical therapy)? How does that all
work?

SW: You know that’s funny. . .this is the ﬁrst time in the three years that I have
been doing evals out there that that’s been an issue. We had an evaluation,
actually two, one for a kid that was. . .really had some speech issues, and some
speech concerns, and because that was obvious, actually then a speech evaluation

105

was requested. In this case he was a short term kid, and we were literally under

the wire because they wanted to get him out of there (Haven). His probation

ofﬁcer wanted to move him back. I think because it (Haven) was full, before we
were done with the evaluation he leﬁ, and so in this case we really didn’t have to
address that. But, in my experience it seems that though that is the concern, that
they go ahead and get the necessary person contractually in from the ISD to do
the evaluation, and then I would assume actually to service. But, there’s been no

OT in my time out there. PT and speech evals, but not direct service.

The difference was echoed by students who were able to tell me about seeing an
adult on a regular basis for assistance with speech and language or behavioral concerns in
public school, but who had not had anyone interact with them in those capacities at
Haven. When I asked them what people worked with them at Haven because they were in
special education, their list included the psychiatrist, probation ofﬁcer, and court assigned
case worker. The only person they did mention that was expected was Michelle, whom a
couple students identiﬁed as a special education teacher. The family counselor spoke
about his understanding of the delivery of ancillary services.

VD: What about ancillary services, the social work or the speech therapy that

might be on an IEP, how does that work?

FC: My understanding is that’s a struggle. It’s not a struggle necessarily in

terms of identifying the need for those sometimes, but because of the limitations

of the resources the intermediate school district has, it’s tough. We have been able
to get that for kids in the past, but it’s not easy because of the time assignments
that those people have with the intermediate school district, but I have seen them
take place for kids.

The overall sense I had about traditional ancillary services from the staff was that
while they would be a nice addition, they weren’t an integral component to Haven’s
treatment plans. As such, neither residential nor school staff made much mention of

working with the ISD or contracting with local school districts to arrange such services.

There was not any frustration about this, as might be expected, just more of a resigned

106

attitude that these kids needed and were getting different experiences that were more
important.
Perspective of the Teacher

The classroom teacher, who was responsible for meeting the student’s IEPs on a
day to day basis, was asked about special education service delivery. In the passage
below, she spoke of her goals for her students, how she sought to meet the needs
identiﬁed by the IEP team, and provided some comparison between her classroom and
what a public school special education situation might hold for them.

VD: Describe special education at Camp Haven.

CT: We’re considered a full—time special education placement. In terms of
special education, I think that we literally, as classroom teachers just look at every
kid uniquely, in their unique ways, and individually, and approach them
differently, address their needs differently, and everything’s just very
individualized. I do my best to create a structure that will resemble your typical
middle school or high school general education classroom because I believe the
majority of the students will return to full time general education, if not full time,
then general education with resource support, or team-taught classes, but then
there are your students where it would resemble a far different environment
within the school, where kids literally are getting one on one support the entire
hour. However, based on my belief, I want them to develop many independent
work skills. I want them to be able to sit in a seat and identify that they do not
need help. And with our long term kids, I can often wait four to six weeks before I
see those skills start to develop. And the students identify that it is my [the
student’s] job to ask for help. However, at no point do I ever let a kid just fall ﬂat
on their face and fail week after week after week. To describe special education,
I. . .that’s a good question, considering how much background I have in special
education, but it’s literally that, just providing every kid with what they need
individually.

This language of individualization and helping the students develop skills for
academic independence was familiar from the hundreds of IEPs this researcher had
attended. Hearing her describe the setting as a full-time special education placement and
listening to her describe the IEPs she assembled, some of the same language was

eXpected from the students.

107

U

DWrence in Student Perspective

Another way that special education looked different had to do with the way it was
handled or seen by the students. This idea that spans this theme and the next is introduced
here and further articulated in theme four. Most of those eligible for special education
seemed to know they had a disability or some needs warranting special services, but there
seemed to be less stigma attached. All the juveniles were in the same boat, and any
comments about special education were not handled as though there was any negative
connotation. In the public schools, special education students were often taken aside and
quietly spoken to about their services, upcoming meetings, arranging accommodations,
and similar activities, in order to reduce the potential stigma. At Haven, I saw students
come into the class, march up to the teacher, and ask when their IEP was. Michelle
incorporated upcoming IEPs into the morning announcements, which drew little or no
comment from other students. The observation excerpt presented below supported this
idea.

OBSERVATIONS: One student wrote something about God on the board, and

Michelle said half-jokingly that he needed to erase it because no religion was

allowed in public schools. Three students started laughing and one said, “This

ain’t no public school!” Another said, “This is a special ed. school.” Michelle

said, “I am a public school teacher, so you are getting a public education.” The
mood during this conversation was light, and the students seemed to be in a

playful mood.

This researcher believed this attitude stemmed, at least in part, from the
homogenized entrance process and programming. A consistent response from staff when
they were asked whether or not the entrance process was different for special education
eligible juveniles indicated that apart from a single IEP meeting, it was not. Programming

was nearly the same for all the youths adjudicated there. It was slightly individualized by

108

things like their academic skill level or history of substance abuse, but the options were
the same for everyone in terms of recreation, groups, behavior planning, etc. The
probation officer, the staff member most familiar with the adjudication process, had the
most to say about this issue.

VD: The entrance process, is that different at all for kids who are eligible or are
suspected of being eligible for special education.

PO: No. The process. . .Johnny’s in special ed. classes at whatever high school,
he’s got learning disabilities, he’s EI, whatever classiﬁcation you want to give
him. You can give him the most severe classiﬁcation you can come up with. He
goes out and commits home invasion and has those classiﬁcations. That is not
going to enter into the process, unless, when he gets to that hearing, that
preliminary hearing at the youth center, and there’s an attorney there to represent
him, or a parent there to speak on his behalf, the referee holding the hearing
determines that there’s really something wrong here. I’m not sure that this kid
understands what he’s done; I’m not conﬁdent that he understands right from
wrong, and at that point, that person is going to be writing things down, and
recording things that the judge or the chief referee of the court needs to be aware
of. There seems to be some learning difficulties, or there seems to be some
intellectual impairment. . .something doesn’t sit right. But still, the court
proceedings are going to continue. That young man’s hearing is probably going to
be set for a pre-trial. There’s going to be an attorney appointed, and at that point
that attorney who’s appointed, is going to become aware, through talking to his
client and the client’s parents or family, that there’s a unique situation here. Ok,
this young man has these disabilities or these difficulties in learning, and we’re
going to be sensitive to those kind of things, but unless he’s incapable of standing
trial, and unless he’s incapable of understanding right from wrong, that young
man or young lady is going to continue through the court process to that
dispositional stage. Unless they can show that they are incapable of standing trial,
or incapable of understanding right ﬁom wrong, that they did something illegal
and it was wrong to do. They’re still going to be involved in the court process.
And if they’re found guilty or admit guilt, they’re still going to ﬁnd themselves at
that dispositional stage.

The entrance process considered special education eligibility to a degree, but it
appeared that only a major disability, such as severe cognitive impairment would impact
the adjudication process. Through learning that the vast majority of youths were treated
the same in the entrance process to Haven, and since many were not able to articulate

much about their eligibility or services, the next theme became apparent.

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Theme 4: The trappings of special education meant little to the juveniles at
Haven.

This theme was evident both in the responses of the juveniles and staff, as well as
this researcher’s observations. In public school, many times when a student gets in a ﬁght
or damages property, the ﬁrst question asked is, “Is he special ed?” If the answer is yes,
then procedures swing into action to determine if the behavior was a result of the
disability, and whether the student had a behavior plan that was appropriate based on his
needs and goals. At Haven, the issue of eligibility did not seem to come up in regard to
behavior. The ﬁrst thing considered was the residential behavior plan, followed by the
school behavior plan, in determining what should take place as a consequence.

The “trappings of special education”, means the labels, procedures, meetings,
services, evaluations, and paperwork that accompany eligibility. Staff and students alike
were consistent in their responses and indicated that these accouterrnents bear little
signiﬁcance.

VD: From your experience, what do you think the special ed. students at Haven
would say that having a disability means?

SW: Hmm, I would say that most of them think it just means that they get
isolated and put in a different room [laughs]. Or that they’re bad, or that. . .I don’t
think that they necessarily connect it with. . .maybe I have a reading problem or
maybe a problem with math. A lot of the kids when I go and tell them what I do,
and that they’re in a re-evaluation process, and what that means, there’s a lot of
the kids that don’t even know that they’ve been labeled emotionally impaired to
begin with. So then you’re kind of trying to explain that to them, and they’ll say,
“Well I used to have problems with that but I don’t anymore.” So I don’t really
think that they understand what it means, except for maybe they feel that they’re
in special classes, or that they’re labeled emotionally impaired because they
skipped school.

VD: How many of the ones that you work with know that they are special ed, or
are able to tell you about it at all?

SW: Probably out of all the kids I’ve done, maybe twenty-ﬁve percent, and that
would be more of the high functioning kids.

VD: What do they tell you about it?

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SW: They know they’ve had problems, or they have problems getting along with
people, or they have anger problems, those types of things. And those types of
kids normally can differentiate between it being a problem with law enforcement
and a problem at school. Course then I’ve seen some of the kids that don’t
understand, who think maybe they’re emotionally impaired because they’ve
gotten in trouble, cause they stole a car or broke into the neighbor’s house or
something.

VD: From your experience, what do you think the special education students at
Haven would say that having a disability means?

PO: Boy, I don’t know, some of those kids are pretty sensitive about it. I’ve talked
to a lot if kids who won’t go to school because they hate being in special ed. I
think it’s a little easier for them at Haven than it is in their home school
environment because all of the kids are in the same classrooms. Out at Haven, we
don’t have a special classroom where the regular education students go, and a
regular classroom where the special ed students. . .they’re not separated out there.
They’re kind of all in it together. I think that kids out at Haven are more
supportive of one another in the school environment, than they are in their home
school environments. There’s more structure, teamwork is encouraged more,
cutting on individuals is discour. . .you know what I mean in terms of that’s
[cutting], making fun of, or picking on other kids, is not tolerated out there. So a
special ed. student can settle in, feel more comfortable asking for help, out at
Haven than he can in his home school environment, I believe. So I think kids. . .I
don’t think we get a real good feel about how kids feel about being special
education classiﬁed out there, as much as you probably do in their home
environment.

In the student responses, there was a common thread in regard to their answers on
the question, “What does it mean to be in special ed.?” They were able to tell what had
happened to them in public school because of their eligibility, but not what the disability
itself meant. For example, they told about things such as what classes they were placed in
and that they met with a social worker or speech teacher, but not what areas of learning or
speaking or behavior were so challenging for them that they required special services. On
a couple of the interviews, I pressed the students a little to try and get at what special
education meant to them. What they indicated was that it is something put upon them,

and most of them were barely able to articulate why. Special education to them is a

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illl’l‘u’
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phrase, a label, which is decidedly different from the voluminous construct encountered
by adults working in the ﬁeld.

VD: What does it mean to be in special ed, like what does that mean to you?
DAVE: Um, I don’t really know.

VD: Yeah, like uh so they like put a label on you right?

DAVE: Mmm.

VD: So what does that does that. ..does that mean anything to you really, or is it
just kind of something that somebody says to you?

DAVE: It’s just a word. . .special ed.

VD: What does it mean to you to be in special ed.? Like what did that mean to
you?

ARNOLD: Really I don’t, I don’t, I don’t think it means anything, like, you see
when some other person in special ed. they think you’re all retarded and stuff.
When I hear special ed. 1 think it’s just a regular school; it doesn’t really matter.

VD: What does it mean to you to be in special ed.? What does that mean?
DEVON: Uh...it means that...you can break down.. .people can. ..that special ed.
is. . .like. .. for people that are special. . .and like that’s what. ..a lot of people think.
VD: What do you mean by special?

DEVON: People think that, people that are in special ed. are special
because...they can’t think. . .they can’t.. .basically can’t think or talk good.

Another student, when speaking about the differences between his school
experiences at Haven vs. public school brought up special education as an example.

VD: What is different about a day here compared to a day at public school
BOBBY: (long pause) Other then girls, the attention that you get from the
teachers.

VD: Explain that a little bit for me.

BOBBY: Well. . .uh public schools teachers are paying less attention to you
because there’s more people in the class. People that need less help than you,
even in special ed.; it’s people that need more help than you. So they’ll be paying
more attention to them. Here it’s kind of like you’re doing your own thing and
you see come up to a teacher and just sit with that teacher for how ever long
‘cause the kids usually, well in my classes don’t need help, ‘cause I’m in the top
class.

Bobby was speaking about more than just differences in class size. He had
expressed something that had been observed, which was that special education eligibility

very rarely came up in the classroom. If a student was having trouble with an assignment,

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they would go to the teacher and sit with them until they completed it or understood, and
that was the end of the matter.

VD: From your experience, what do you think special education students at
Haven would say having a disability means?

CT: Well it’s so interesting, because when you sit down with them, and start the
IEP, the vast majority have no idea they have a learning disability or have an
emotional impairment. So you’re breaking news that you qualify for special
education, and then you’re trying to explain to them what it means to have a
learning disability or an emotional impairment. 1 don’t think it really is an issue
for the most part here, unless you’re a non-reader. Because, not to sound cheesy,
but it’s such a close-knit family environment that unfortunately you’ve probably
noticed that kid’s issues get thrown out, confronts are really blatant, you know,
it’s not true reality therapy, but it’s just all out there [laughs]. You’ve put yourself
here and people are gonna say things that you didn’t want anyone to know. So,
student A may be special education, and student B’s high ﬁmctioning, but let’s
talk about what his [student B’s] issues are, and they are way worse than anything
that has to do with being special ed. So, I think here they learn they have learning
needs or emotional needs that are different than other peOple. But I don’t think
there’s a stigma or a feeling of “I should be embarrassed” that I saw in the public
schools. It’s very evident in the public schools, but because we kind of all look
the same here, except a few of us read better, is my perception.

Thinking about staff spending their efforts on things other than paperwork and
procedure and ﬁnding that the students did not know or care much about the idea of
special education led to the next theme. As Michelle and other staff spoke of meeting
their needs and giving them a structure in which they could be successful, this researcher
thought about the importance of the information that comprised the next portion of this
chapter. In my experience with public school evaluations, IEPs, and other means of
planning special education student progress, basic health and safety needs rarely must be
considered. I have been involved with far too many children who have not had proper
care, but the vast majority of public school students with special needs can have the
parent and staff resources focused on helping them gain in academic skills as opposed to

worrying about general wellbeing and protection.

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Theme 5: Students at Haven had many of their basic needs met in new ways.

The data that comprised this theme involved how the students at Haven have
certain needs met that most people take for granted. After reading about the backgrounds
of deprivation ﬁem which most of these kids had emerged, I thought about their basic
physical and emotional care. Many of the records contained references to abuse and
neglect. At Haven, attempts were made to ensure that health and safety needs were met in
order to permit some energy to be spent on remediating areas of academic or behavioral
need. I observed a structured schedule, consistent discipline activity, and access to
medical care. Some of these students may not have had access to any or all of these
things at any point in their history. Below, excerpts from observation notes and interview
with the probation ofﬁcer elucidated this theme.

OBSERVATIONS: Another student was going to the dentist, and was being taken
by a residential staff person. He asked several times when he would be going, and
seemed to be looking forward to it as he told the other students what work he
needed to have done. Several of the others seemed a bit jealous and asked if they
could go along.

VD: What components of the programs and services are designed to help prevent
students from coming back repeatedly?

PO: I think all of those programs are. These kids come out there, after having
been doing the things they’ve been doing, unchecked They’re fourteen or ﬁfteen
years old, they don’t see eye to eye with their families, they’ve been struggling in
school, they’ve been smoking, smoking marijuana, or using alcohol, come and go
as they please, there’s a lot of things [at Haven], that I think prepare these kids to
come back to the community better than when they got there, and I think all of
those things that we’ve talked about, the educational program, the work
opportunities, the athletics, but more than that, I think it’s just twelve kids living
together in a house, being provided positive adult supervision during their day,
and learning to accept no as an answer instead of just walking off and doing what
they choose to do.

In many ways the Haven program and staff served a parental role. In a public

school, things like immunizations, dentist visits, and psychiatric care would be the

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responsibility of the parent. Michelle commented how a major ﬁ'ustration she experiences
revolved around how the Haven and MWS staff learned about and developed ways to
meet the needs of students but have very little faith that their needs will continue to be

met when they make the transition back to their communities.

CT: I don’t really know if I could say there’s a typical student, because they are
all so different and have really unique needs which you’ve probably seen. The
typical student, once they are here, is a young man who probably has had a pretty
difﬁcult home life, with parents that are still involved, but who have had
numerous issues of their own. I would say almost every single student has
struggled tremendously in the public schools. School has not worked for the
majority. Some days I could say one hundred percent of them. . .they have
somehow failed in the public school system. Although I think that that’s one of
their major issues, an inability to function successﬁrlly in the schools, substance
abuse affects almost all of them, and whether it’s the sale of it or the use of it.
They’re usually about fourteen or ﬁfteen years old, below grade level, and
typically immature. I don’t know if I said this already, but typically, the kids once
they’re here, you see their best side. Their best academic abilities, their
personality which is usually pleasant, although you see anger and stuff too, you
see their best side.

VD: Why do you think that is?

CT: I think all of the variables that cause so many problems in the community
have been removed. Substances, they’re sleeping normal hours, I mean some of
them struggle probably with insomnia or medication-related sleep troubles.
There’s no violence that they’re witnessing, they have a routine, and
unfortunately a lot of their freedoms have been taken away so their choices are
limited. And, ﬁom this academic environment. . .its very supportive, and all the
expectations from classroom to classroom are very different. But, I believe every
classroom is set up to make sure kids succeed.

Below, excerpts from the interviews with the school principal and family
counselor added to what was learned from Michelle, and described how the youths’
backgrounds led to needs for safety and structure. They also noted how the Camp
endeavored to provide health services and keep connections made with doctors and
counselors alive, even after the students returned to their communities.

SP: Well obviously they have had some problems in their community. For the
most part their home structure is not there for the kids kind of run the show. I

115

guess one of the things if I had to look at the majority of our kids, they’ve had a
hard time accepting no for an answer.

VD: Sure.

SP: So they pretty much kind of run their own lives in terms of not having an
adult being viewed as the person that they get their guidance from. Usually a lot
of conﬂict in their lives, usually pretty angry and a lot of times they have a lot to
be angry about. I think after they are here for a bit they really enjoy the structure
that the program offers for the most part, because they haven’t had that in their
lives and for a young person, that structure is pretty comforting. You know it’s
not. . .everyman for himself like out on the out on the streets and so forth. That’s
one of the things we try to focus on the most here safety and security and all that,
and making sure kids feel comfortable.

FC: . . .I’m not always doing that but one of the things we discovered with the
short term program, we’ve got a gal who coordinates a lot of the eye and doctor
and dental kind of stuff, but because these kids are here short term and we’re
keeping them connected with the family physician, the family dentist, mental
health, that’s a work for her. I’ve probably done a whole lot more of that than
what was anticipated early on in the program, but we just discovered it was
problematic to try and do it any other way than that. We have a behavioral
psychiatrist who comes in here, it takes you two to three months to get on his
schedule because he comes here once a month and his schedule is ﬁlled with the
kids who are in the long term beds. So even trying to push, or put a short term
kid, if we see a need for that we tell the family, hey you need to contact [County]
Counseling Center and work with them in terms of getting that done. It just won’t
work here. The logistics won’t work, even if we were keeping the kid here four,
ﬁve, six months.

VD: If the parents do that does the counseling person come on site or do the kids
go. . .?

F C: Well that’s the other thing. We’ve had kids where they have been assigned a
counselor, but with the behavioral psychiatrist seeing them for medications, we’re
going there, but when there’s an assignment of a counselor to that kid and his
family, we’ve had them coming here.

The structure and order imposed on these students seemed to wear on at least one.

We were speaking about the routine the students followed each day, and when he gave

the response presented below, he seemed to be half-joking, but genuinely exacerbated

with at least some of his experience. This student spoke of how many of the other

students looked up to him because of his intelligence and how long he had been there.

VD: Is there anything else you can tell me about what going to school is like
here. . .or staying out here is like?

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BOBBY: Boring! Really boring. Anybody who hears this, it’s really boring.

VD: It’s kind of the same stuff everyday?

BOBBY: I hate repetitive stuff, like repetitive questions. . .all that great stuff. . .so

this place really makes me mad. . .a lot of the kids, everything repeats itself, like

the kids always repeat themselves, behaviors, what they say, what they like.

Interestingly, this student insinuated that he did not get along with several of the
other boys. Most students in the classroom seemed to work alone, even after they were
given opportunities to pair up. This was different from my experience, where in the
public schools, kids almost never seemed to miss opportunities to socialize and work
together. During the free time at the end of each period at Haven, the students would
often play cards or visit, but it was rarely with the same people every day. I did not see
any relationships that I could have characterized as friendships.

Theme 6: Even though students were placed with a group of individuab with
similar circumstances, they remained isolated in many ways.

OBSERVATIONS: My impression up to this point was that the students, even
though they were always together, were more solitary than I expected them to be.
They spoke with staff at least as much as they communicated with each other. I
was not able to identify any strong buddy pairs, even though some students
seemed to have most of their classes together. By the same token, I was not able
to identify any students who were complete outcasts.
The residential director spoke of getting these kids involved in things like sports,
Boy Scouts, and 4-H as part of teaching them how to function in a group. Several of the
staff, including the principal, probation officer, and teacher, indicated how most of these
kids have been alone for much of their lives, with no consistent relationships with adults,
siblings, or peers. Each of the houses could earn trips or other rewards if they behaved
well as a group, and Michelle had opportunities to earn free days set up if everyone in the

house she was assigned to earned all their points in a day. Below, a student described his

117

perception of this treatment component, which serves to illustrate how it truly is an area
of need.

BILLY: If we, if our house does good we can go like Chicago, or

whole bunch of different places.

VD: Do you ever go because you did well as an individual, or does the
whole house have to do good before you get to do something like that?
BILLY: The whole house.

VD: Is it ever hard to get the whole house to do that?

BILLY: Yeah.

VD: Yeah? How often would you say that you get to do something special
because the whole house is good?

BILLY: Um. . .Have we ever went? Not yet.

The next excerpt comes from one of the long-term students who had been at
Haven for nearly two years, and had seen many other youths come and go. The
expectation was that his response would be different from what I had observed in
Michelle’s classroom, where most of the time short-term students were present. It ﬁt with
my schema that the short-term kids might not develop friendships as they were on site for
only three months, more or less. Some of the long term students had been there for
around two years, working on team-building activities, playing on sports teams, and
learning social skills in groups, so I thought that if any kids would have the time and
Opportunities necessary to make ﬁiends, it would be them.

VD: Are you pretty close with the other guys in your house or not really?
ARNOLD: Not really.

VD: Have you been with some of them for a long time?

ARNOLD: I’m the only one left of the ﬁrst two groups that came to my house.
VD: Oh yeah?

ARNOLD: I’m the ﬁrst one. I’m the only one left.

VD: Do all you guys get along pretty well?

ARNOLD: Sometimes.

VD: What kinds of stuff do you ﬁght about when you get, when you’re not
getting along?

ARNOLD: We get in argument over pool games, computer video games, kool-
aid. We get, basically, we get in arguments over every little thing.

VD: Oh yeah?

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ARNOLD: Yeah.

VD: Pretty much everyday?

ARNOLD: Yeah.

VD: How do those get worked out?

ARNOLD: Um. . .sometimes 1 get in an argument, and I keep it going then I drop

it. Sometimes I get in an argument, I tell staff to take, take over, they’ll handle it.

Other observations brought this theme to light. During staff meetings, both
residential and school, students were discussed individually with little mention of how
they interacted with others, or with which students they were ﬁiendly. In my experience
participating in team meetings, social relationships with peers are always discussed, as
difﬁculty here may be contributing to problem areas. This researcher found this
interesting due to the emphasis placed on social skill development at the camp.

The lack of close ties among the students further emphasized the need for social
skill development, one of the ﬁrst types of intervention employed after adjudication to
Haven. It was one of the most salient differences between young men at Haven and those
1 had known in public schools, but was not the only one. A few other examples are
presented below to provide the reader with additional instances of how the educational
experience at the camp differed from a public school one.

Additional Results

Results that may shed some light on the experiences of these youths that do not
necessarily constitute an entire theme, occupy impressions that struck this researcher
while observing and interviewing. One set of impressions involves the differences
noticed between the culture of a public school, based on this researcher’s experience,
versus that of Haven.

The ﬁrst difference was in regard to how conﬂicts between staff and students

were handled. In the public schools, if a student threatened or yelled at an adult, it could

119

very well dominate the conversations among the adult and student populations within the
building for the next couple of days. At Haven, such verbal sparring or outbursts were
handled differently. The following passage from personal observation notes displays
how a student/staff conﬂict did not disrupt the ﬂow of the classroom. The student
mentioned below had gotten into a ﬁght with another student the night before, and for
quite a while had yelled at the staff member who broke up the ﬁght. Even though this was
the next day, the student came into the school building and had been yelling in other
classes, not complied with staff requests, and had pushed other students.

OBSERVATIONS: After lunch the second math class came in and reviewed

percentages after Michelle explained that the class would be done with algebra,

but might pick it up again next term. They played a bingo game with
multiplication facts, and she used candy for prizes. A few minutes into the game,
the building secretary’s voice came over the loudspeaker and asked for all the
residential staff serving one of the houses to come to the ofﬁce. The students
began talking about how they knew it was Jose and that they had seen him being
taken into the office just before class began and that he was mad. This
conversation did not disrupt the bingo game, and they seemed engaged in it. After
six required rounds, Michelle allowed them free time while she explained their
grades for the term.

Another difference had to do with the topics of conversations which were
commonplace within the classroom. If some of these topics came up within a public
school classroom, the students involved may very well be suspended or investigated. At
Haven, commentary by students on a variety of topics such as drugs, violence, and gang
activity were part of the culture of the classroom. I do not speak of lengthy conversations
or the crafting of intricate plans but of one or two students making a comment with
several others chiming in. An example is presented below.

OBSERVATIONS: During the second hour class, the students came in and

Michelle told them to get their books ready for starting a new chapter on biology.

A couple students came up and greeted the student teacher and me, and asked
how we were doing. Michelle asked the class how they were doing and needed to

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remind a couple of them about appropriate language. One student talked about

being drug tested, and a couple others asked him what he had been taking on the

outside.

Another common characteristic among the student interview responses was their
ability to surprise this researcher with some pat answers. Several of them were able to
rattle off answers, most of the time in educational jargon or the language of the staff at
Haven, to questions that I had expected would take some thought. Bobby answered the
question about what types of things he needed to be successful in the following way.
After hearing the question, he paused, and then spoke quickly:

Bobby: Controllin’ of my anger, that’s why I’m still on meds. I’m on Wellbutrin

for mood swings, so I don’t ﬂip out on people. Uh. . .controlling my anger, having

positive peer interactions, it’s usually, well I used to seek the negative ones, and
make sure I get my stuff done. As long as I can get everything done, everything
else will fall into place.

The themes and impressions presented above have much bearing on the construct
of Locus of Control that was being explored. Most seemed to feel that factors outside of
their control were responsible for their incarceration. This feeling that they were not in
control of their destiny seemed to be something that the interventions at Haven
endeavored to change by equipping them with skills to forge their own futures.
Observation and interview excerpts that have bearing on this issue are presented in the
next section.

Locus of Control

The juveniles were asked to tell the story of why they were at Haven. Their

responses indicated that the majority felt external forces were responsible for their

incarceration. A sample of these comes from Dave, one of the students with signiﬁcant

expressive language impairment.

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VD: First I’d like you to just tell me the story of why you are here?

DAVE: Cause I (clears throat) I was at my cousins house one night, and um he
did something at his uncle’s house. He like went up and took his grandma’s key,
went and unlocked his uncle’s room and took all his stuff. And then his uncle
thought I did it, so he tried to press charges against me and then when I was in
here I was in here for something I like cause I knew I didn’t do it, so I AWOLed

ﬁom here. They brought me back, then I went to court for it, and they dismissed it

cause I didn’t do it.

Another common thread in the student responses in regard to locus of control was
that other students in public school were responsible for the lack of success these
juveniles experienced in that environment. They phrased things as, “other kids would
ﬁght with me”, or “the kids just picked on me, so I didn’t want to go to school.”

There was some variety in the locus. A couple students took the blame for their
incarceration when asked why they were at Haven.

VD: First I’d like you to just tell me tell me the story of why you are here.

ARNOLD: Well at my old placement 1 had a problem with staff putting their

hands on me. So I would, I’d be physically aggressive if I saw staff.

Another student spoke of becoming tired of doing work, so he would swear at
teachers and refuse to listen to them until he would be removed from the classroom.
These two students demonstrated some internal locus that accounted for their presence at
Haven. Working on this type of thinking was a focus of treatment. In the excerpt below,
students were asked to think about themselves and their futures. They were asked to say
something good about themselves and apply that to how it could impact them upon their
release.

OBSERVATIONS: Michelle asked the students if one of the residential staff was

coming to run “group”. She mentioned to me later that she was referring to an

interpersonal skills discussion that is led every couple weeks by the residential
staff. After being told by the students that no one was coming to run group,

Michelle led them in a discussion where each student took a turn, telling one thing

they were doing well, and one thing they still needed to work on. She asked
questions such as, “What do you think school will be like when you are

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released?” Or, “Do you think you will stay in school when you are released?” A
couple students could not come up with anything good they had done, so Michelle
would ask the class if they could help him come up with something positive.
Before starting the conversation, she told the class that no matter what people said
about themselves, it was ok, even if they were lying. She said that anything said
about another person needed to be positive. About half of the students said that
they hate school and were not srne if they would stay in it after being released.
Several students in this group had been placed in the program for truancy. She
also asked them to think about and bring up what things might be the same or
different at home after they were released. She asked them what types of things
they could do differently in their communities. This discussion lasted about forty-
ﬁve minutes.

Some students used language such as “making good choices on my own.”
Several mentioned that what they nwded to work on was ignoring people who
were picking at them and not retaliating. After the kids took their turns, Michelle
mentioned a couple things that she needed to improve on.

The themes and additional results presented in this chapter demonstrated that
many things were in place for students at Haven to help them succeed. The students had
opportunities to learn many skills that could aid them after they returned to public schools
and their communities. Areas of need were also identiﬁed and will be discussed in
Chapter Six. The next chapter will consist of a summation of what was learned at Haven,
recommendations for enhancing programs and services, and directions for future research

with this population.

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Chapter VI
Discussion
The data analysis ﬁ'om the interviews, observations, and record reviews were
compiled into the results presented in Chapter V. This chapter presents conclusions
drawn from conducting this study, organized into the following components:
0 Section one of this chapter consists of a review of the goals of the study.
0 The second section delineates what was learned, and compares and contrasts these
lessons to the literature presented in Chapter II.
o The third section is comprised of recommendations for improving service delivery
for students at Haven.
0 The ﬁnal portion lists directions for future research based on what was learned
from this study followed by a summation.
Review of Research Objectives
The purpose of this study was to learn about the experiences of j uvenile
delinquents with disabilities who have part of their educational experience at a detention
facility. There are many students served in these types of settings, some for entire years
of middle and high school. I sought to understand how special education services were
delivered in this setting, and what efforts were being made towards remediation. The
hope was that results ﬁ'om this study would assist in policy development and curriculum
considerations for disabled youths served in these places.
The methodology was selected to determine if there existed a common essence to
the experiences of these youths which superceded their many differences. The guiding

research question that ﬁamed the study read: What were the experiences of special

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education eligible youths in a juvenile detention facility, and what consideration had

been given to individual disabilities?

Sub-questions that were narrower in scope were developed into the interview

protocol.

To what do incarcerated juveniles attribute their current status/situation?
Do the due process rights and protections under IDEA 1997 clash with
placement of students in a facility without consideration of disability?
How proﬁciently are disabled, incarcerated youth able to discuss the
implications of their disabling condition?

What data was available that documents the impact for students who have
served time in a detention facility?

ls special education at a detention facility different ﬁom that in a public
school?

How adequately are special education service needs addressed in a
detention facility?

What programs and services are available, and what is the treatment focus

to prevent recidivism?

Many of the goals of the study were achieved. In terms of the objectives and

questions listed above, several things were learned about the experience of being an

incarcerated juvenile with a disability. Several things were found to be consistent with

prior research, and a few things that appeared either different or heretofore unexplored.

What I took from Haven and how it matched up with the literature I reviewed prior to

conducting the study is further elucidated in the following sections. The data described

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in Chapter V, and discussed in this chapter should not be generalized to detention
facilities in other locations. Rather, this study was an example of how one facility
provided special education services, and should be taken as such when considering the
operation of other places where disabled youth may be incarcerated.
Lessons Learned

From the themes identiﬁed in Chapter V, I have concluded that there is an
overarching theme or premise inherent in the data. This premise is the essence of the
experience undergone by the juveniles at Haven. Before conducting the study, I had
thought that the essence would be a single, shared experience or a common answer to one
of my research questions. After examining the data and thinking about the sum of the
interview responses, record reviews, and observations, I came to the conclusion that the
essence in this case is a possibility of the experience, not a facet. Through my eyes, the
real meaning did not lie in what happened to the students on a daily basis or what
language they used to describe it, but what their experiences as a whole could be. The
essence is as much what the experience as a whole could be for these young men
individually or as a group as how it manifested while I was there in routines, behavioral
systems, and worksheets.

The essence was not a shared experience such as a connection with a teacher or
common program. It was the potential of the facility and its staff to fulﬁll the promise of
special education and provide the resources these youths needed as determined by their

disabilities. The premise is:

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For students with disabilities and backgrounds such as these, the promise
of special education has the potential to be realized in a juvenile detention
facility better than in a public school.
The themes presented in Chapter V supported this quintessential statement.
Theme 1: The experience of being at Camp Haven was designed to be
educational to prevent recidivism.
Theme 2: Students at Haven experienced more academic success than they

did at the public school from which they came.

Theme 3: Special education looked different at Haven than in local school
districts.

Theme 4: The trappings of special education meant little to the juveniles
at Haven.

Theme 5: Students at Haven had many of their basic needs met in
new ways

Theme 6: Though students were placed with a group of individuals with
similar circumstances, they remained isolated in many ways.

Taken individually, as interview answers or observations, these themes have
much in common with research reviewed in Chapter 11. As a whole, they lead me to the
conclusion that when special education as I thought of it ﬁom my experience was set
aside, and the individual needs of the students were addressed, there was hope for saving
students who attend school bearing a massive load of risk factors. Special education, as I
learned about it through school psychology and special education administration training,
was designed to be specialized instruction with the purpose of remediating skill deﬁcits
so that students could progress in the curriculum appropriate for their age.

I still believe this deﬁnition has merit, but now believe that it does so for students

with mild disabilities and adequate environmental support. I have known a continuum of

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special education services, ﬁorn teacher consultants who touch base with students twice a
month, to categorical programs where the students spend nearly every moment in a very
structured, involved setting. Prior to this study, I had thought that such a range could be
adequate, and that as educators we could make great strides for all kids if we matched up
their needs and services appropriately. I now think, that for students such as those who
ended up at Haven, special education must be either altered into something more
comprehensive and ecological than I have seen implemented in public schools, or set
aside for a different model. For example, having the Woods School focus more on
vocational skills as opposed to progress through the State of Michigan curriculum
benchmarks.

One opportunity provided by the results of the present study is to open a
discussion regarding what juvenile detention facilities should really be about. What
business should they be in, when they have a unique chance to provide what many of
these students have been missing in their lives? Should incarceration and punishment
really be the focus, as the literature suggested our current legal trends are heading, or
could it be something greater? The discussion below examined lessons learned at Haven
that aligned with and were not congruent with the prior literature.

Lessons Congruent with the Literature
Consideration of Disability

In Chapter II, I cited the National Council on Disability’s (NCD) report on the
current state of knowledge regarding disabled, incarcerated youths. The report called for
more research about how these young people are perceived by law enforcement and court

personnel, in terms of understanding the impact of different disabilities. The interview

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conducted with the probation officer was consistent with what I believe the authors of the
NCD report suspected. Court personnel and law enforcement officials do not have
adequate training in recognizing or appropriately dealing with minors with signiﬁcant
disabilities.

This problem was noted by several authors who noted that understanding how a
student’s disability may have impacted his or her actions is critical in determining
effective placement and punishment (Burrell and Warboys 2000, Katner 2000, & Olson-
Raymer, 1993). Part of my overall research question was whether or not an individual
student’s disability was considered. I learned that in the adjudication process it was
considered very little, unless the disability was so massive or impairing that the student
had no basic understanding of right or wrong. When they arrived at the school, they were
grouped into instructional cadres based on academic skill as opposed to label. I went into
this project thinking that disability should absolutely be considered at every step as it is in
public schools, but left it realizing that for these young men it was often at best a tertiary
component that did not necessarily need to drive their services.

High Expectations

Howell & Wolford (2002) spoke of the virtue of setting high expectations in this
type of setting. The staff working at Haven clearly knew this lesson and practiced it in
their academic and behavioral requirements for the young men. This feature was also
consistent with how I had been socialized and trained to view public school education.
Students and people in general responded to high demands. They rose to meet loftier

expectations and at Haven this principle seemed to apply.

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Transition Process

Without comprehensive transition planning and care, the positive experiences of
students at Haven are in danger of not being transferred. Garﬁnkel, et. al (1997) noted
that comprehensive transition and aftercare services as well as a means to evaluate their
effectiveness are critical components of a successful program. A lack of a coherent plan
between the courts, Haven, the Woods School, and districts who receive released
juveniles was found to be a source of ﬁ'ustration for staff at Haven and of uncertainty for
the young men. The school principal spoke of how he felt transition IEPs were useful in
the process, but they had no means to evaluate what happened with the program
developed at that meeting after it disbanded. This difﬁculty was noted in the literature on
juvenile detention, and was certainly an area of concern at Haven.
Recreation and Employment Skills

Another ﬁnding consistent with prior research was that the juveniles did not have
to be convinced of the virtues of work and play. That is not to say that they had all the
requisite skills for success in these endeavors, but none of them needed convincing that
these two factors would be key components in their success in the community. Larson
and Turner (2002) wrote about the value of including these factors in a multi-modal
approach to treatment. I learned that academics were an equal component to recreation
and employment skills. When I ﬁrst began this project I was convinced that maximizing
their academic skill proﬁciency in reading, writing, and math should be the most
important treatment component. Now, I believe an emphasis on providing them with the

necessary skills to seek and hold employment should be paramount.

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Over the past two years, my district has put forth a signiﬁcant effort to develop
and enhance services for students with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This disability
manifests in a huge range incomparable to any other special education category. It may
include cognitive, language, social, sensory, and behavioral challenges that can be
extremely taxing on students, parents, and a school system. The best practices training
program for students with ASD that I participated in discussed how for students with
such broad and fundamental impairments, socialization and independence must drive all
program decisions. Academics come later, after students are making progress towards
what they need to someday hold a job and have as many self-care skills as possible. As I
thought about the students at Haven and their huge ranges of disability and risk factors,
the same ideas seemed to apply. Looking at the records of the youths at Haven, I thought
that many of them were as globally involved as students with ASD.

Lessons Divergent from the Literature

I learned things at Haven that were not discussed in literature presented in the
second chapter of this work. The topics below were either in contrast to what I found in
prior research or were absent. Either way, the subject matter in this section is interesting
as it has not been adequately explored and may have signiﬁcant implications on service
delivery and prevention of recidivism.

Relationships with Staﬁr

I did not expect to ﬁnd the strong relationships between staff and students. From
the literature review, I expected to ﬁnd a large inter-personal disconnect between students
with signiﬁcant needs and staff with too little training. Obviously there was a wide range

in how well students and staff co-existed, but for several of the students there was a

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comfort level with the adults I had not expected to ﬁnd. For example, students in public
schools who have emotional impairments and/or severe behavior problems often do not
seem connected with anyone with whom they are required to interact. Many times they
are quite hesitant or outright fail to initiate interactions that would help them complete
work, earn school privileges, or succeed in the classroom. At Haven, I saw students
constantly initiating with both residential and school staff. Not every kid did this
regularly, but many consistently seemed eager to learn and do well in the behavioral
system.

This certainly may be attributable to them wanting to accelerate their release or
earn privileges at the camp. However, that begs a line of questioning about why these
things were desirable now. Many of them were sent to Haven after failing to succeed in
alternative schools, other detention facilities, or foster homes. All students at Haven had
warnings that the paths of their behavior could end them up at a detention facility, so
what made the difference in terms of engaging in these self-advocating behaviors? Strong
role models and relationships developed with teachers and residential staff could have
accounted for part of this observation. Seeing the student connections made me wonder if
there was more happening than a change of location or desire for release accounting for
the improved behavior. For example, did the student’s who displayed increased self-
advocacy have an alteration in their locus of control regarding their circumstances?
Service Delivery

Howell and Wolford (2002) described common practices regarding the delivery of
special education services in detention facilities. They found that areas where signiﬁcant

improvement was needed included using instructional time to provide a variety of

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opportunities to learn; evaluations of student progress that did not match consequent
instruction; teachers and other staff did not have adequate supervision or support; and not
enough classroom time being provided to meet the goals of the IEP. These were some of
the factors I looked at while observing and later while analyzing the data. This reference
was salient because it was consistent with problems I observed in the public schools, that
I suspected were only ampliﬁed in a detention facility.

The present ﬁndings are divergent ﬁom what Howell and Wolford outlined
because of the transition IEP that occurred when students entered Haven. As can be seen
in the record reviews presented in Chapter IV, the student’s goals were altered to meet
the program of the Woods School and Haven. No longer were the goals based on speciﬁc
academic skill remediation but consisted of objectives by which the boys would progress
through the program. Looking at their new IEP’s and considering the grouping of
students into the ﬁve academic strata, I thought that teachers and staff did have adequate
supervision and support for what they were trying to do. They were able to have enough
class time to meet the goals of the IEP because the IEP was now designed around what
would be happening in their class.

From this observation I thought about the demands in public schools to have all
students achieving at certain benchmarks in the general education curriculum. Special
education, particularly as the movement for maximizing inclusion took hold, became
designed around supporting students in general education, as opposed to remediating
deﬁcits in basic skills. This was particularly true for the post-elementary school

experiences of special education students.

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Quinn, Rutherford, & Leone (2001) noted that counseling, and speech and
language services were the most commonly offered types of individualized service.
Based on this and my experience, I expected to ﬁnd these two forms of service present on
all IEPs for students with such needs. At Haven, students received individual counseling
intermittently through the family counselor, and their participation in groups also met
some of these needs. Speech and language services were signiﬁcantly rarer; even students
with such needs indicated by eligibility label or IEP service, saw a speech and language
pathologist intermittently if ever. My observations were consistent with the research
where speech and language service was a signiﬁcant area of need but diverged in terms
of what the literature indicated 1 might ﬁnd.

Meeting Basic Needs

Garﬁnkel et.al., (1997) noted that the OJJDP had found that most juvenile
detention facilities do not provide the necessary health or mental health services that they
are required to by IDEA, Section 504 of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), and
state laws. Based on literature like this 1 expected to ﬁnd students warehoused at Haven
with little access to things most public school kids took for granted. This was not the
case, as I saw students having consistent, regular access to dental care, being taken to a
ready-care facility after a ﬁght to ensure no injuries, having a psychiatrist visit to
supervise proper medication, access to individual counseling services, and group problem
solving experiences. This is not to say that room for improvement did not exist, as some
students would likely beneﬁt ﬁom regular psychiatric or psychologist therapeutic

intervention.

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Student Isolation

The ﬁnal theme presented in Chapter Five dealt with how I observed the students
to be socially isolated much of the time, even ﬁom those with whom they spent the vast
majority of their time. In public schools, students are often separated by opportunity to
participate, by socio-economic status, by race, or by academic ability. For example, some
may have had parents able to pay for athletic equipment required for certain sports that
allowed them to participate in that group. I thought these divisions of opportunity would
be lessened at Haven, where all students had the same opportunity to participate in
academic and leisure activities, had nearly identical schedules, and lived with a core
group of fellow residents. I was surprised to ﬁnd that the majority of them appeared to
have developed no strong connections with peers. Based on their interview responses,
most students seemed to internalize school failure but attribute their being at Haven to
external causes. For example, Dave spoke about having trouble learning in school
because of his speech problems, but was at Haven because of his cousin and uncle’s
actions.

I believed that this pattern of attribution had implications for programming. I
noticed a couple student pairings that seemed fairly constant in terms of hanging out daily
but no deﬁned group of three or more. If much of their self-esteem was linked to internal
loci of control, such as feeling that they were not successful in school because of low
intelligence or speech problems, they may also feel that their isolation was due to internal
factors. Their programs and services at Haven are primarily geared towards building
individual skills for the students to be successful in their local schools. They have team-

building opportunities, such as sports leagues, but may be missing a component on

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ﬁiendship development. Some of the long-term students had been there for upwards of
two years. These students in particular should have some increased opportunity to
develop peer networks. I did not ﬁnd any prior research that addressed this issue.
Contribution to the Literature

When considering what contribution this study has provided to the research on
juvenile delinquents with disabilities, I thought back to Van Kaam (1966) who provided
some rationale for qualitative phenomenology when there is a weak research foundation
in a given area of inquiry. “Research performed in this way is pre-empirical, pre-
experimental, and pre-statistical; it is experiential and qualitative. It sets the stage for
more accurate empirical investigations by lessoning the risk of a premature selection of
methods and categories. . .” (van Kaam, 1966, p. 295). He wrote how this type of research
complemented quantitative methods in the early stages of exploration in a given ﬁeld by
having the phenomena of interest be the center of study as opposed to a single, more
restrictive methodology.

I believe the contribution of this study was to give the reader a different
perspective regarding the goals of a juvenile detention facility, and what such a place
might be capable of under ideal circumstances, particularly for students with disabilities.
Much of the prior literature that looked at this population described how under-trained
staff would not be capable of helping students make progress in a curriculum similar to
that in a public school, particularly for students with disabilities. Perhaps by considering
different goals, such as socialization and independence, new treatment designs could be
implemented. By considering the detention facility as an opportunity to foster success,

rather than an awful situation that we should strive to end with all possible speed, and

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looking at the potential to identify and address needs that might well surpass the
capacities of a public school, I believe researchers can use this study as a new lens. As
van Kaarn (1966) suggested could happen when employing qualitative methods, I believe
a new line of research questioning exists that might bear ﬁ'uit for preventing recidivism
and addressing special education needs.

This line might very well be answered best through quantitative means. For
example, correlating standardized scales measuring locus of control to academic
achievement might yield information about which students are ready to re-enter a local
school and which still have some needs to be addressed. Quantitatively tracking
recidivism rates and combining that data with locus of control scales, academic skill
level, type of disability, and stability at home could yield helpful proﬁles to target
students with a facility’s limited resources.

From examining the data and comparing it to previous research generated on
juvenile delinquents with disabilities, I have formulated additional recommendations for
Haven. These suggestions are based on my training, what I have learned about special
education service provision in a detention facility, and the review of literature. As the
Haven community has considered opening a nearby facility for female juvenile
delinquents, any opportunities for improvement should be considered as they may
someday be responsible for twice as many students. Following this section I gave some
directions for future research and a summary of this project.

Recommendations for Improving Services
I found several aspects of the program at Haven that could use improvement if the

potential of the facility to meet more of these student’s needs is to be ﬁrlﬁlled. While the

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basic structure exists to provide students with constructs like health and safety, the
success that many of them experience often does not translate into their lives when they
return to their communities. The recommendations in this section are focused around how
the program could better facilitate keeping local districts providing what Haven has
identiﬁed that these students need. The recommendations are:
0 Enhanced Communication
0 Coordinated Process for Release
0 Improved Assessment Practices
0 Centralized Record Keeping
Enhanced Communication
The need for better communication has already been recognized at Haven, but
room for improvement still exists. The school principal told me how Michelle had
worked hard to organize some of the local school districts to facilitate smoother, more
productive transitions between them and Haven. Michelle told me this has been partially
successful, but she recognizes the need for something more. Below, the school social
worker described her observations regarding communication between the residential and
school components of Haven.
VD: How coordinated do you think the residential and the school pieces are, and
how closely do they work together. . .both staffs?
SW: 1 really don’t know that, but I guess there’s an answer in that, since 1 don’t
know. I’ve had good luck with various personnel and counseling staff and stuff

like that, cause I seek them out to be a part of the evaluation process, but I think
sometimes when I do that, I do notice that there isn’t as much free ﬂow of
information between the school staff and the residential staff. You know, that the
right hand doesn’t always know what the left hand is doing, as far as, something
could happen over the weekend, and that would greatly impact what happened
Monday in Mrs. Jonely’s English class, and she may not know. . .and so I would
say communication could be much better.

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According to Michelle and other staff, two separate communication issues need to
be addressed if the efﬁciency of special education service provision at Haven is to be
improved. First, communication between the residential and school components must be
examined. Recognizing ancillary staff as school staff, even though they are not present on
a regular basis should be considered, at least for students whom they are evaluating. The
primary means of daily communication is the daily, memorandum style report each
teacher received and any conversation they had with residential staff who had
accompanied the students to breakfast. This seems adequate for daily updates, but the
improvement I refer to involved the overall well-being of the students and educating
residential staff about the impact of disability. The school staff should compile an end of
the day memorandum to be shared with evening residential staff. This might let them
know about particularly salient issues that had emerged during the day. It could also
serve as a vehicle by which the school staff could make recommendations based on their
expertise.

Second, the Woods School and the districts that send and receive students should
be on similar pages in terms of expectations and student needs. I recalled the principal’s
tale about talking with the superintendent of a student who had recently returned from
Haven and crashed a bulldozer into the school. This reminded me of observations and
conversations with staff, where I gained the impression that the school staff felt a
signiﬁcant degree of frustration that their input is not given adequate weight in

determining when a student is ready for release.

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Coordinated Process for Release

The release process for the juveniles eligible for special education had a transition
IEP as a requisite component. School staff can only guess at a general timeline for a
given student’s release date. When students leave and where they go seem highly
variable based both on possible options and their needs, primarily as determined by court
personnel and residential staff. This makes opportunities to prepare the local district and
for that matter the community sparse and unwieldy. The family counselor sometimes had
little time to arrange after-care services, and Michelle spoke of representatives from local
districts attending IEPs with little idea about what type of program they would place the
student in.

Observation: At 11:15, someone came in, pulled a student, and brought him back
about ten minutes later. Michelle explained that this was the probation officer for
the START (short-term) students. During the ﬁ'ee time at the end of the hour, she
described him as the court representative, who had about ﬁfty kids on his
caseload, twenty-four of them being at Haven. She said that at times problems
arise because this person tells kids that they will be leaving sooner that they are
ready to. She expressed some frustration with the lack of consistency between the
Woods School, the courts, and the public schools. “There is no process, and we
are in year four. I have never been asked, ‘Do you think so and so is ready to go’,
but I communicate this through my case reviews which the judges read.”

Observation: One student came back ﬁ'om meeting with the probation ofﬁcer,
and mentioned how he had been told that if he kept up the good behavior, he
would be out of here in a couple weeks and would get to choose what school he
would be going back to. Another student said, “Man, he’s been telling me that for
weeks and I’m still here.”

SW: I would say it’s pretty typical as far as the timeline for getting a referral. I
mean, obviously we have to do it in thirty days and all that, but I would say the
one thing that’s kind of different is because it’s such a unique setting, in that it’s
so closed, the amount of time the teachers spend with those kids and how the
classrooms are smaller and things like that that you really ended up getting like
instead of one teacher’s input, you really can get everyone’s. The TC knows those
kids as well as Phil the principal does, as well as Sherry (building secretary) does
in the main ofﬁce, so you really can get a real good picture even though the short
time that they’re there. Even if they are a START kid for example, of what his

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needs are, where his strengths are or where the weaknesses are, so that’s kind of
unique compared to your typical school setting.

Improved Assessment Practices

Several of the school staff discussed how they are able to get to know the student
fairly well in a short period of time. I believed the staff has a unique opportunity to
measure these students academically that is being wasted. When the students arrive and
are given achievement testing in reading and math, the results were reported as grade
equivalents. The problem with this is that grade equivalents can be misleading since, in
terms of levels of measurement, they are not an interval scale, but an ordinal one. This
means that the distance between the intervals is not consistent, and therefore charting
growth based upon it is inaccurate.

Another problem with grade equivalents lay in the fact that these types of scores
cannot be compared across time or tests. The inaccuracy manifests itself when looking at
a student’s exit scores, where teachers in some cases said that the young men had made
two years growth or more in their time at Haven. Additionally, the test that was used with
the youths is quite old. That means that the normative data to which their performance
was compared may also be misleading due to being outdated. This problem could
partially be corrected by applying a current achievement instrument and reporting
standard scores instead of grade equivalents.

Haven has an opportunity to assess students in a unique way. Taken as a whole,
the residential and school components have the young men engaged in a curriculum that
is signiﬁcantly diﬂ‘erent ﬁ‘om what they would experience in a public school, despite
having their academic classes based on the State of Michigan curriculum benchmarks.

They have the students twenty-four hours per day, often for many months, and control the

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student’s environment quite rigidly. Because of this, I recommend that Haven consider
employing a more ecologically valid assessment procedure, in the form of curriculum-
based assessment. For example, they could incorporate progress through the various
group experiences, sports, and work into a curriculum that could be assessed to determine
readiness for release. Below, the residential director spoke of what type of information
about a student had proved valuable in his experience.
RD: You know I think. . .the understanding of different areas of, you know a kid
is EMI, what does this mean. . .you know none of the staff are necessarily that
versed in understanding that. I think the key thing with some of that with a kid E1
or LD is really learning what is the kids learning style. So again that’s going to be
where you’ve got to talk with the teachers what is this kids learning style. Cause
again that’s going to tell you how a kid responds to even certain directions you
give him in the house, or whether you’re going to give him directions, maybe this
kid here, 1 got to keep it real simple I can’t give him a lot of directions. I may
want him to do this here but I may have to ask, “OK did you understand what I
was saying”. Cause sometimes the kid will tell you yep, yeah, you understand
what I’m saying, and then he go do something like, he told me. . .so again it may
be a kid where I got to ask, “OK what did I say and what did I mean by that”, so

he can tell you a little bit better. So you. . . just knowing the kid some simple,
some basic things I think around the kid.

The residential and court staff are less knowledgeable about the various
connotations of special education disability, another area where improved assessment
practices can be helpful. The school staff is well versed in assessment, and would need
relatively little additional training to adopt a curriculum-based model. Brooks and White
(1999), in conjunction with the National Juvenile Detention Association (N IDA) and the
OJJDP, developed a curriculum designed to help teachers identify the needs of their

Stlldents, improve behavior management skills, and promote the development of social
Skills. This curriculum is consistent with many of the aims of Haven, and it may be used
to Provide a framework of expectations that an assessment system could be built around.

By incorporating more substantive evaluation, expectations about academic and

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behavioral performance for the student are more valid. This is very important as
providing accurate due process protections are very difﬁth without knowing how the
student’s disability affected the problem behavior before sentences are determined and
educational plans are developed. Further, having the opportunity to review prior
documentation is a key piece in the process of useful assessment.

Centralized Record Keeping

CT: . . .this impacts the special education students as they can exit the program

before their records arrive or any IEPs are convened. Also, because the decision

rested with a team instead of just him, what he tells the students can often vary by
day. She also mentioned that with truancy cases, the court seems to prefer the
juveniles to be at Haven for no more than thirty days, which means that many of
these kids come and go before records arrive.

The inﬁ'astructure for improved record keeping and distribution already exists in
the county where Haven operates, at least in regard to special education records. The
Intermediate School District requires that all local districts send copies of any special
education paperwork. This includes evaluation reports used to determine eligibility and
IEPs that document what services the student is receiving. Because of this repository, no
student from the county should have their entrance IEP crafted in the blind. The record
sharing delay is more problematic for long-term students coming from urban areas in
Michigan. A centralized records repository could also facilitate tracking these students
once they leave a detention facility to allow longitudinal research on recidivism to be
Conducted more efficiently. The staff interviewed at Haven has plenty of anecdotal
eVidence of the successes and failures of their program, but no hard data by which

PTOgram altering decisions may be made with any degree of conﬁdence.

I recommend that Haven administrators contact the ISDs serving those districts to

asCertain if they also have a central repository of information. Even if the most recent IEP

143

and evaluation reports are faxed to Haven, while the student’s full school records creep
their way along, the planning team would be farther ahead. This will often provide them
with information about possible developmental considerations, achievement and IQ test
scores, and other information that will be an important complement to the court
paperwork with which the young men arrive. If problems with compliance exist, Haven
administrators should consider working through the courts. For example, they may refuse
to take any students who are not accompanied by records from their local school.
Directions for Future Research
A research agenda needs to be developed and pursued that would develop a
means to track special education students and their rates of recidivism. Policy-makers at
the federal and state level should consider monitoring recidivism by disability
classiﬁcation in order to target resources. This would also assist public schools in the
identiﬁcation of at-risk populations. Future research must also include longitudinal
studies to determine if recidivism is linked to either type of disability or quality of special
education services received. Research also needs to be conducted to determine whether
juvenile detention programs with a signiﬁcantly greater vocational component experience
less recidivism for students eligible for special education.

When observing and speaking with these kids, it is clear that language deﬁcits are
severe and abundant. While ISDs or agencies who ﬁscally support detention facilities
may ﬁnd it a hardship to provide these services, they are a necessary component of
treatment and effective reincorporation into local communities. Students must have as

Well developed language skills as possible if they are to be able to advocate for

thelrrselves, ﬁnd and hold employment, and access appropriate recreation (Mclin 2002,

144

Smith and Griffin 2002). Towards this end, researchers in this ﬁeld should explore
alternative means of delivering this service that is more ﬁscally palatable. Assistive
technology, such as computer-aided language instruction, may be a viable alternative to
traditional models.

Summation

The experience of receiving special education in the environment of the Malcolm
Williams School at Camp Haven was a positive one. While the services did not closely
resemble traditional public school special education, the students had needs that were
likewise non-traditional and required an alternative delivery system. From the literature
reviewed, I thought that disabled youths were being failed by these facilities. From this
study, I saw an instance where kids had an opportunity to have what most students take
for granted, and the failure lay before they came and after they left. This irony, that the
juveniles only had real learning opportunities after committing a crime and being
incarcerated, speaks volumes about their backgrounds. This form of incarceration has
some possible beneﬁts for some students with disabilities; the problem for the future is
how gains made can be sustained once they return to public school. Areas of concern
included services like speech and language that did not seem to have an alternative
modality but were left behind as students entered the camp. Employment skills and
recreation were key foci of the treatment program that students bought into. Students had
Consistent medical, dental, and psychiatric care that most would not have had would they

have stayed in their home communities.
The essence of the experience is that a great deal of potential exists to meet the

needs of disabled youth with the resources available. The potential for this experience to

145

be enhanced exists primarily through improved assessment and communication between
the many agencies involved with these youths. I believe that if the essence is about
meeting needs, then there is hope that if done properly recidivism can be reduced, and
initial infraction can be avoided as risk factors are further identiﬁed and reﬁned. It is my

hope that this study will contribute to this goal.

146

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