Understanding How Mentoring Can Disrupt the School-to-Prison Pipeline and Promote Positive Youth Development

University Of South Carolina At Columbia, Columbia SC

Investigators

Abstract

The school-to-prison pipeline is a metaphor used to describe the ways in which educational policies and practices funnel youth out of public schools and into the juvenile and criminal justice system. Exclusionary school discipline, such as school expulsion, is an important component of the school-to-prison pipeline and associated with youth drop out, delinquency, and justice system contact. Mentoring interventions for expelled students may represent a key, untapped potential lever of change for preventing and reducing risk behaviors, while promoting positive youth development, and disrupting the school-to-prison pipeline from a midstream vantage. However, research is needed to determine the most effective structure of mentorship programming for this population of youth. The research will be conducted on participants in the University of South Carolina Adolescent Mentoring Program (USC AMP). Developed in 2017, USC AMP is a university-community partnership program that matches trained university student mentors who are planning to pursue a career in a criminal justice, human services, or law-related field with youth who have been expelled from their traditional high school and currently attend a disciplinary alternative school. To explore whether alternative school-based mentoring programs promote positive youth outcomes, the researchers will use a mixed methods experimental design and draw upon quantitative survey data and qualitative interview data collected from mentor-mentee pairs. The researchers will evaluate differences in 9- and 18- month educational, vocational, and delinquency outcomes between expelled students receiving one-on-one mentoring alone and those receiving a supplemental structured curriculum. The researchers will also examine the impact of the mentorship experience on the university student mentors, particularly their perceptions of cognitive, personal, and interpersonal skill growth. This project will advance the scientific understanding of the impact of mentoring programs and has the potential to provide a scalable blueprint for reducing the school-to-prison pipeline and illuminate a curricular experience that allows undergraduate students to move beyond skill competency to develop emotional intelligence, personal, and interpersonal professional skills. This project is jointly funded by the Law & Science, and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) programs. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.