Juvenile Centers
Juvenile Centers
~LETTER TO~
Great Day Juvenile Centers Superintendent:
It’s an honor to be able to communicate with you and your staff about our children. As a doctoral student at Liberty University, former Marine, and one who grew up in the inner city, I have a visual blueprint of the intricacies of juvenile learners. I worked towards my undergraduate degree in psychology while at Marion County Juvenile Center (2012-13). Years prior I’d worked as a correctional officer at Westville Corrections (1997) and for three years my company, TripGear, was contracted at Meridian Transition Alternative School in Indianapolis, Indiana teaching character development. Many juvenile students have problems reading, writing and display poor comprehension and critical thinking. The Behavior 100 (B100) curriculum provides a visual and poetic paradigm that assists learners in decoding and extracting meaning, whether it be from text or real situations. The corrections staff would be geared with visual/graphic novels and narratives and I-MICE creative captions. These B100 devices also allow juvenile staff the flexibility to enlist volunteers to teach the materials.
B100 is tooled to enrich learners’ cognitive abilities in reading, writing, critical thinking, comprehension, and intra/interpersonal development. Knowing that many juvenile offenders are not in the facility long-term, B100 is designed to be implemented within limited ranges of time; minutes, days, hours, or months.
Juvenile learners can feel demotivated and disenfranchised when they view themselves as a world apart from the learning process. B100 combines rich stories and vivid visuals that imparts lessons of educational empowerment and personal development, all in a culturally relatable voice. Learners become immersed in art and poetic narratives that tell their own stories encouraging them to become people that build the world around them rather than a cancer on their communities.
