4. Preventing Incarceration through Special Education and Mental Health Collaboration for Students with Emotional and Behavioral Disorders

Abstract

This chapter focuses on students with emotional and behavioral disorders and how to keep them from incarceration through special education and mental health collaboration. It explains how children and youth with emotional disturbance (ED) encounter difficulties that often surface in school, particularly in connection with zero tolerance policies. These policies, it argues, have had a disproportionately negative effect on youth with ED because they behave in ways that violate those policies. Moreover, mental health services for youth in public schools are often ad hoc, fragmented, and suffer from inadequate funding. As a result, the juvenile justice system is utilized as a de facto approach to treatment of youth behavioral and mental disorders. The chapter proposes a tiered, comprehensive approach to prevention, based on universal programs aimed at all youth, selective interventions aimed at identified at-risk youth, and intensive interventions aimed at youth with the most severe issues or those who have already experienced the juvenile justice system.