alleging inadequate education programs for youth in the county’s largest juvenile detention facility. Reforms focused on 13 major areas, including literacy, instruction, transition, special education, and aftercare.One of the four people who helped conduct the observations and interviews for the latest report is Sean Garcia-Leys, a member of the Probation Oversight Commission and a civil rights attorney.
“We’re in there for a reason; we’re all going through something. Some teachers come with that mentality of: ‘These kids don’t listen,'” said Xuncax, who grew up near downtown Los Angeles. “I feel like they give up and feel like we’re lost causes.” Teachers don’t get the support and training to succeed in the system, said Florence Avognon, who has worked as an educator in the L.A. County juvenile justice system for 20 years and received a Teacher of the Year award in 2012. Her experience confirms the teacher challenges described in the report, she told EdSource.
In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Senate Bill 823 into law, requiring the state’s youth prisons to shut down by 2023 and send youth instead to local facilities run by the state’s 58 counties. Depending on the severity of the allegation, the youth can still be sent to state facilities. “I worry that we’re holding off so long to choose a new facility that when it finally happens, everybody’s gonna be like: ‘Go, go, go, let’s make it happen,’” he said. “And in that rush to find a permanent home for these young people, things like ensuring that we’re creating a new school from the ground up that is the best it could be — those sorts of steps might get skipped over.”