Temple Law students Michelle Ashcroft, Alex Dutton, and Jonathan
Lauri have partnered with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the
Eastern District of PA and with EducationWorks to develop and
implement an innovative peer justice program at Strawberry Mansion
High School.  Youth Court, as the program is known, is a
non-adversarial system in which a student who has been charged with
a Level I infraction (eligible for an out of school suspension) is
given an advocate and a hearing before a jury of her peers, who act
as both fact finder and decision maker. The goal of the program is
to provide a restorative justice alternative to out of school
suspensions and to support the school district’s new policy to use
suspension only as a last resort.