SHADES: Stopping Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students
In partnership with the LA Superior Court and Dept. of Probation, the Museum of Tolerance (MOT) is providing youth juror training for a specialized Teen Court that focuses on crimes rooted in prejudice and bias on inner-city campuses in Los Angeles. The program is called SHADES (Stopping Hate and Delinquency by Empowering Students) and the goal is to train the youth participants to serve as informed and effective jurors in these school-based cases.
Teen Court is an early intervention program that provides an opportunity for selected juvenile offenders to be questioned, judged, and sentenced by a jury of their peers. The program diverts young people from the formal court system and promotes restorative justice through innovative sentencing. The Los Angeles Superior Court’s Teen Court program operates at 15 LA County schools and is the largest and fastest growing Teen Court in the state, if not the country. Though SHADES, the student jurors and their adult partners promote understanding of the negative impact of bias crime on the community as well as advance hate crime and incident prevention through new community service sentencing at their schools.
The Youth Juror Institute is a five-day summer camp program with follow up. Students are divided into groups of no more than 30 to engage in a series of interactive activities led by a professional facilitator and to undertake group projects. The headquarters for the program is the Museum‘s Youth Action Lab complete with media walls, ARS, multi-purpose rooms and state of the art AV equipment. The camp concludes with presentations from the students and a ceremony with family and friends where students receive certificates of completion.
Institute Objectives:
- Understand the meaning of hate and bias crime and identify the forms it takes
- Gain greater self-awareness of our own biases and be sensitive to how they can impact judgment
- Enhance empathy for people different from ourselves and gain greater comfort with multiple perspectives
- Learn new communication skills including effective questioning and listening and respectful communication styles
- Brainstorm and research ideas for creative and constructive sentencing that will promote problem-solving and involve students in hate prevention initiatives at their schools
This program is open to High Schools in Los Angeles that have Teen Court programs already or are in the process of creating one.
The next Youth Juror Institutes will be held on August 17-21, 2009 and August 24-28, 2009. Download the Application and register your students for one of these sessions now!
|
