When Sean Hadaller gets a new student, he has no idea what curriculum they’ve already covered.
“I’ve had times where a student enrolled in class and we haven’t gotten transcripts from the school district that they came from yet,” Hadaller said.
When the transcript does arrive, it’ll often list a partial credit for one subject or another. But that’s typically not much help.
“Credits are just a number on a sheet,” Hadaller said. “I don’t know what was actually taught.”
Hadaller is a teacher at Green Hill School in Chehalis, one of Washington’s schools for youth and young adults in juvenile detention.
Green Hill, along with Echo Glen, a juvenile detention center in Snoqualmie where students are 11 to 25 years old, are Washington’s two major schools for its state-run juvenile detention facilities. Outcomes at both are dismal. Green Hill served 214 students as of August this year. Less than 10 of them — in total — were on track for college-level math and reading. And less than 10% of Echo Glen’s kids were meeting this benchmark.
Students at Green Hill are ages 17 to 25 — but it’s not uncommon for them to have the same amount of credits as a freshman in high school, said Hadaller. As of 2019, about half of the school’s students had disabilities qualifying them for special education. Some students, Hadaller said, have reading and math scores as low as a 3rd grade level. Sixth and eighth grade levels are common, he said.
Despite all the challenges that come with institutional education, the field is woefully underfunded by the state. No state agency has a strong role overseeing the state’s 31 institutional education facilities, leaving a patchwork of school districts and educational service districts, which provide services to school districts, in charge of student outcomes.
Washington’s lawmakers are trying to change that. The effort to fix the state’s institutional education system is largely being championed by Rep. Lisa Callan, D-Issaquah, who sponsored a bill last year to move oversight from the districts to the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction. The bill passed, so the agency is working with lawmakers to build a new, centralized model for juvenile detention education that would overhaul the current system.
“The youth that are connected to juvenile justice — while they are wards of the state during their time, the state has the responsibility to deliver education,” Callan said. Before becoming a legislator, Callan was a school board member at Issaquah School District, which runs Echo Glen’s school.
The Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction is proposing that responsibility for juvenile justice education be shifted from school districts to educational service districts in order to create a less fragmented approach. But teachers like Hadaller are worried they might be forced to choose between their current school district employer and a new unknown service district.
“You’re going to force people like me to make a tough decision,” Hadaller said. “I’m leaning with staying in Chehalis School District, as much as I love my students. I know there’s other teachers in that same boat, and if we lose that experience, this bill just hurt institutional education for at least the next two — if not five — years.”
Challenges to institutional education
During the 2022-2023 school year, at least 2,500 students took classes while detained. Many of those students bounced between juvenile detention centers.
Due to gaps in communication between a student’s home school district and the juvenile detention centers, students will often spend time on course credits they don’t need, leaving kids with an “impossible pathway” to graduation, Callan said.
Students in institutional education will also stay there for vastly different periods of time — anywhere between 24 hours to years.
According to a 2020 state task force on institutional education co-led by Callan, more than 50% of students enrolled in institutional education settings have an individualized education plan, or IEP, which outlines accommodations for students with disabilities. But many of those plans expired because students hadn’t received updated assessments.
“And that doesn’t even get into the very specifics of these children and these youth that clearly are living with and experiencing a lot of trauma,” Callan said.
Students who participated in the task force outlined numerous issues with IEP compliance. One said their IEP had not been discussed since arriving at the school. Others said their plans were ignored or described special education classes as “chaotic.”
At Green Hill, of the students with disabilities, Hadaller said the majority are dealing with emotional or behavioral disabilities — in many cases alongside learning disabilities or physical health impairments, like vision or hearing issues.
Institutional education also comes with unique safety and security challenges. Hadaller, who’s taught history, health and math courses at Green Hill, is currently a physical education teacher. He said the school tries to keep class sizes under 10 people — but his gym classes can include up to 26 kids at a time.
“The higher the number it is, it’s harder for students that we’re trying to serve to have gang life stay out of the classroom,” Hadaller said.
Some students also have specific court-mandated restrictions around what they’re allowed to do or access online, which makes using technology in the classroom difficult. Many teachers simply use paper — but many students also don’t have computer literacy, which means they aren’t learning it while incarcerated.
“I would imagine it’s difficult for our guys to leave, and they go to a different school, everything’s on a computer, and this is another hurdle they have to overcome,” Hadaller said.
Some schools have the opposite problem: Virtual learning is common in institutional education settings, which students in the task force had mixed feelings about. Research shows that while some students do better in online learning, it generally has a negative impact on student performance compared to in-person instruction.
The proposed model
By moving operations from school districts to the educational service districts, the Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction will be better able to oversee institutional education and ensure that curriculum and other standards are consistent across the schools, said Mikhail Cherniske, senior policy analyst at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction.
Dealing with the state’s nine educational service districts will be easier than the dozens of school districts involved in the current system, said Callan.
“That’s not to say that we’re getting rid of any school district connection at all,” Cherniske said. “We want to strengthen those relationships with school districts.”
The new model will also make it easier to have “education advocates” — essentially a social worker but for education purposes — assigned to each student, which should help with gaps in communication, Cherniske said. There are 21 education advocates currently, but they’re “spread super thin,” said Jessica Vavrus, executive director of the Association of Educational Service Districts. The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has requested about $3.1 million per school year in the next budget cycle to ensure one advocate per 25 students.
“We have so many quotes and anecdotes from justice-involved youth saying, ‘This [education advocate] got me on the right track,’” Vavrus said. “‘They were consistent. They were in my face. They were really present in ways that not a lot of other adults are in their lives.’”
The agency also hopes to create what Cherniske called a “digital backpack” that will keep all of a student’s information in a common database and help prevent delays in transcript transfers.
Many of these proposals make sense to Hadaller. But he believes this kind of work can be done without moving institutional education to the educational service districts.
“Changing our employer is not going to change the student outcomes,” Hadaller said.
Aside from his concerns about losing teachers, he said the curriculum at Green Hill is owned by Chehalis School District, and it will cost taxpayer money to create an entirely new curriculum.
Hadaller has a simpler proposal: Just fund the current system. Institutional education is funded differently than general education in the state, and it’s slow to adapt to increases in detained youth — Callan called it a “funding death spiral.”
Cherniske acknowledged that the underfunded system is being propped up by “wonderful people” using “shoestring and bubble gum” to hold it together. Callan said it’s important to hear what educators have to say. But they both believe that more money won’t fix everything.
“It’s not all about funding,” Callan said. “Is funding going to make a difference on how school districts are responsive and sending records over? Is funding going to help with the definition of how you connect credit?”
Callan and Cherniske said they do want to revamp the education funding model for juvenile detention, but the details are yet to be hammered out. Callan said she wants to wait and make sure the state has a comprehensive plan in place before it channels more money into the system.
The Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction has requested some stopgap funding in the meantime: $2.7 million for the next budget cycle to help fund the current system and an undetermined amount to transition to the new model that the agency wants figured out by the start of the legislative session in January.
Cherniske said the agency is hoping to try out the new model in a few schools over the next year or so. But that will require legislation — and Callan is unconvinced the state will be ready by next year.
While her legislation gives the agency oversight over juvenile detention by 2027, she believes that the deadline may have to be extended.
“We’ve got to take these problems on. We’ve got to take them on and understand it from 360 [degrees],” Callan said. “We got to understand it from the teachers, the students, the budget and the funding.”
“That takes time. It just takes time and deep engagement and listening,” Callan added. “But then [it’s] recognizing that every day that we don’t do something, more students are going through a system that’s not geared to give them the best chance.”
