The Disproportionate Overrepresentation of Minority Youth in ...

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They seem to want to turn the kids over to the court and let the court send
them somewhere and fix them so that they can come back and be good
students. I know that the kids are difficult to work with but I think that the
schools need to make more of an effort to deal with the kids in the
classroom and in the community more than they do.
Schools pass kids and move them on to the next grade even when they
shouldn’t be just so the school can get them out so they don’t have to deal
with them. Some kids graduate without even being able to read.
A few of the juvenile court officers believed schools were ineffective in providing
alternative educational programs for students who do not conform to regular school
programming. A need for more programs which would focus on problematic youth was
expressed by a number of the officers.
I would like to see more testing to identify kids’ strengths and
programming along that line for them rather than the opposite, looking for
all of their problems and then identifying those. Perhaps we need to go
back to more kinds of vocational training for kids with strengths in those
areas.
Decision makers also argued for an increase in the hiring of minorities within the
school system. It is believed that these people could provide needed role models for
minority youth.
Schools don’t have enough minority role models within the system,
particularly at the elementary level. I think that if we had more black
people in education, in the roles of teaching, and that sort of thing, it
would really help a lot.
I think the administration needs to hire more minorities.
Parents were also seen as not involved with their children and the school. “The
school isn’t getting the support from the