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About The Legal Center for Youth Justice and Education

The Legal Center for Youth Justice and Education (LCYJE) is a national collaboration of Southern Poverty Law Center, Juvenile Law Center, Education Law Center-PA, and the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law. Our mission is to ensure that all youth in and returning from the juvenile and criminal justice systems can access a quality education. We build collaborations among juvenile justice and education professionals, highlight innovative model litigation strategies, and work to reshape federal, state, and local policies.

About The Blueprint

The Blueprint for Change: Education Success for Youth in the Juvenile Justice System presents 10 goals that set forth the broad framework for promoting education success for young people involved in the juvenile justice system. There are correlating Benchmarks for each Goal that, if achieved, would indicate progress toward improving educational outcomes. The Benchmarks are the more specific and concrete policies and strategies for achieving the broader goals. Download a pdf of the Goals and Benchmarks here.

Each Goal includes Examples of programs, legislation, resources, policies, and practices that exist to improve educational outcomes for children in the juvenile justice system.

If you know of a program, resource, legislation, policy, or practice that we should highlight, or see an error in those included, please email [email protected].

This Blueprint was developed with financial support from the Southern Poverty Law Center.  This Blueprint is modeled on the successful Blueprint for Change: Education Success for Children in Foster Care developed by the Legal Center for Foster Care and Education, a collaboration of the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, Education Law Center-PA, and Juvenile Law Center.  LCYJE gratefully acknowledges the contributions of partner organizations in the collection of these resources and the development of the Blueprint framework.  In particular, we thank those who provided feedback during the April 2016 Juvenile Justice and Education Expert Roundtable.