Building Compassionate Education Systems for System-Involved Students
NCYL's Compassionate Education System initiatives work in partnership with a deeply invested team of state and local partners, students, and parents to create a future in which the vast majority of system-involved youth graduate high school with the widest array of possibilities for their future.
Equitably supporting students in foster care, involved in the juvenile justice system or experiencing homelessness, requires dynamic multi-agency collaboration between local education, child welfare, judicial and community-based partners with a shared vision for effectively serving these particularly vulnerable populations of students.
NCYL's Compassionate Education System projects support public agency partners around systems and practice reforms to better support the education needs of system-involved youth and youth experiencing homelessness through:
- The scale and spread of effective practices for local educational and child welfare agencies to meet the educational needs of young people;
- Multi-agency demonstration sites to improve high school graduation rates and expand post-secondary opportunities for system-involved youth;
- Technical assistance to public agencies in developing multi-agency agreements and implementation plans; and
- A policy agenda focused on collective responsibility around the education outcomes of system-involved youth.
