I came across this interesting article today which I wanted to share. The article speaks to the importance of communication and information sharing as it relates to juvenile justice and youths in the system.
After the 17-year-old was accused of severely beating a classmate in March, Williamsville officials said they had no idea about his past.
The attack has prompted parents and school employees to ask whether the system is set up that way or whether schools are failing to fulfill their responsibilities.
The answer seems to be a little of both.
“This was a dramatic and compelling example of the gaps that exist in information,” said Donald Ogilvie, superintendent of the Erie 1 Board of Cooperative Educational Services, which provides regional educational services to students. “In a sense, no one is to blame, and yet everybody is responsible.”
At the heart of the matter are two competing principles: Children deserve the chance to learn from mistakes, and juvenile confidentiality laws sometimes harm troubled kids and needlessly put others at risk.
Byers was charged in April with assaulting Michael Lang, a classmate and friend who required reconstructive surgery for multiple face fractures. Edla Collora, Lang’s mother, has filed notice of intent to sue the school district for “failure to properly investigate the background of incoming transfer students.”
Before shifting to Williamsville South, Byers had been involved in an armed robbery and shooting in August 2007 and the June 2007 Wende Street arson that nearly killed Buffalo Firefighter Mark P. Reed.
In court, Byers was treated as an adult for the armed robbery. But State Supreme Court Justice M. William Boller gave him youthful offender status and placed him on probation after his sister came forward, described a long history of child abuse and pleaded for giving him a second chance.
Williamsville Superintendent Howard Smith said the district had no idea about Byers’ background and, like most districts, doesn’t do criminal background checks.
Even if the Williamsville district had been more aggressive in seeking information about Byers, confidentially requirements would have severely limited what would have been learned.
As a “youthful offender” — a designation that a judge can give to 16- through 19-year-olds who otherwise would be treated as adults — the district would have been entitled to know that Byers was on probation, but not the reason why.
Byers fell into a legal category in which he was afforded leniency and the confidentiality of a younger person but not the full range of services, attention or mental health evaluations that he would have received had he committed the armed robbery even a month earlier, when he was still 15, court and probation officials say.
Criminal-justice, school and social services groups acknowledge interagency communication as a problem that can harm some youngsters.
Local participants in the juvenile-justice system say they have worked on the problem for years, but without changes in the law on confidentiality, their efforts are limited.
“We haven’t been able to move past that,” said Sharon Townsend, who has headed the Western New York court system and formerly was chief judge of Erie County Family Court.
After the 1999 Columbine High School shootings in Colorado, the New York State Legislature passed a series of laws in 2000 known as “Project SAVE”—the Safe Schools Against Violence in Education Act.
Changes included a provision stating that when students are sentenced for a crime, the court “shall provide notification of the conviction and sentence to the designated education official” of their schools.
Despite this wording, some legal experts have interpreted the provision to apply only to students who have been incarcerated or sent to a juvenile detention facility.
Shelly Schratz, an Amherst Town Board member and Michael Lang’s aunt, said she intends to lobby lawmakers to enforce the law as it is broadly written.
“No one challenges it, and it should be challenged,” she said.
Family Court Judge Paul Buchanan, lead judge in the Juvenile Justice Court, heads a group seeking to break down barriers between organizations that deal with troubled youth. But he said schools have raised no outcry over the lack of shared information about students’ criminal backgrounds.
“If area school districts want to start that conversation, I’d be happy to host something and begin that,” he said.
While parents and some school officials cite the Byers case as an example of what can go wrong, others argue that the system works more often than it doesn’t.
“How many hundreds of kids are on probation that aren’t ending up in the paper, attacking other school kids?” Buchanan asked. “He’s not the only other kid in Williamsville on probation.”
“These kids have constitutional rights,” he added. “Let’s say this kid is on probation, and let’s say he has an ankle bracelet. Does that mean he’s more likely to suddenly attack somebody, or is he going to be stigmatized unfairly?”
Under current laws, school districts are not powerless to discover if a child could pose a threat to others, even if the student transfers from another district.
School officials point out that each district is responsible for designing its own process for enrolling students and collecting information from transfers.
When a student transfers in, the district typically asks for two things: proof of residency and guardianship, said Smith, the Williamsville superintendent.
Buffalo Public Schools, however, have a comprehensive, centralized intake system that includes a full-blown “threat assessment” if officials come across any information — such as an unexplained gap in recent school attendance — that raises a red flag, said Will Keresztes, associate superintendent for educational services.
Records from a previous school also could provide clues to a student’s background. But the type of information requested and provided — beyond academic transcripts — varies greatly by school and district.
Ogilvie said disciplinary records commonly are omitted from transferred student files or subject to parental consent.
But Jay Worona, general counsel of the New York State School Boards Association, said federal law does not restrict the disclosure of disciplinary records.
On the contrary, federal laws encourages the disclosure of disciplinary records for conduct that could put the safety or health of the transferring student or any other students at risk. In such instances, parental consent is not required.
Public schools are also supposed to have a system for transferring suspension and expulsion records, according to law.
All this, however, only goes so far.
“[A] lengthy suspension record can’t be used to deny access to a student or keep them out of a particular school,” Keresztes said.
But Ogilvie contends that the Byers case shows that the less information provided about a troubled student, the greater the exposure of an entire school community.
“This should be the prod that brings the court system, the schools and social service agencies together, because an individual did not get, in truth, the fresh start that people had hoped for,” he said. “Parents and other students did not get the safe environment that they expect, and a school district and a school that has outstanding reputation was made to appear that they didn’t do what was right.”
Byers pleaded guilty Friday in State Supreme Court to several probation violations that could result in a four-year prison sentence. He still faces a possible indictment in the assault on Lang.
stan@buffnews.com