Advocates have filed a complaint with the Pennsylvania Department of Education detailing what they say is a systemic failure to provide students with disabilities who are incarcerated at the Allegheny County Jail with services they’re entitled to under the law.
The complaint, submitted to the department’s Bureau of Special Education by attorneys at the nonprofit Education Law Center, alleges that the Allegheny Intermediate Unit and Pittsburgh Public Schools discriminated against students with disabilities held at the jail.
“These students are there for months. and it completely upends their education and their educational trajectory,” said Maura McInerney, legal director at the ELC. “That's true of students with and without disabilities.”
The AIU manages and operates the jail’s Academic Institute, a school located inside the jail. Minors held at the jail on adult criminal charges continue to receive their education there while awaiting a resolution to their cases, whether that be a trial, plea deal, or “interest of justice” hearing.
Students can take courses offered by PPS and receive a high school diploma. But in-school learning abruptly ends upon a student’s 18th birthday, the complaint alleges.
Both PPS and AIU declined to immediately comment on the complaint.
According to ELC attorneys, all children upon their 18th birthday are withdrawn from the jail’s in-person school and special education programming. In addition, individualized education programs (IEPs) created to help students with special needs are no longer followed. Instead, they’re offered “self-guided study packets” or a GED program and minimal access to support from teachers.
Also upon turning 18, incarcerated students no longer receive emotional support, transition services, progress monitoring, or IEP monitoring, the report continues, and parents do not receive progress updates on IEP goals.
The complaint describes how, on one student’s 18th birthday, jail administrators swapped his tan juvenile uniform for a red adult uniform and told him “he could no longer be educated at the ACJ school.” His IEP was “abandoned,” and he was given generic study packets and received few supports or accommodations, even though he had “significant disabilities.”
As a result, he was “unable to make progress towards graduation,” lawyers said.
“Instead of a student being able to move forward, make progress, continue on a path there, it's a really abrupt drop-off,” said Ashli Giles-Perkins, a staff attorney at the ELC.
Attorneys for the ELC argue the practice violates parts of the Pennsylvania code and the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which guarantees students with disabilities the right to receive schooling until their 22nd birthday.
Giles-Perkins said that while education is undermined at juvenile justice centers across the state, the “blanket cutoff” at the Allegheny County jail is distinct. At other facilities, “there is still at least an effort to make sure that students are getting to the finish line," she said.
The complaint details multiple other similar stories, including that of a 19-year-old student with a disability who was never enrolled in school at the jail “despite repeated requests.” According to attorneys, he did not receive worksheets or special education services, and his IEP was not reviewed.
Prior school records indicate that he was performing on a fourth- or fifth-grade level in both reading and math. He returned home without earning any credits towards his high school diploma.
Students held in “isolation” units due to health, disability, discipline, or risk of being harmed also do not have access to the jail school, the complaint alleges. Though they sometimes received study packets, many students said they lost ground academically without access to special education services and their IEPs.
Female students, according to the complaint, are placed in isolation units “by virtue of their gender” and cannot participate in the regular school program because males and females are not permitted to interact.
As of Dec. 21, 20 people under the age of 18 were held in the jail, all of them male.
The jail school program was also suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic, and students did not receive the support, services, and accommodations to which they were entitled during that period, according to the complaint. Instead, the complaint says, they were sporadically given “unmodified education packets.”
ELC lawyers are asking AIU and PPS to end policies and practices that discriminate against students with disabilities and deprive them of a free, accessible public education.
“The rights of these students trump the convenience of the institution, and that's what needs to happen here,” McInerney said.
The Bureau of Special Education must now complete an investigation of circumstances at the jail and issue a report within 60 days.
Jails are full of barriers to students; attorneys say that’s not an excuse
According to the jail’s former school principal, educators there worked with students’ IEP teams — often made up of a student’s family members, teachers and school representatives — to adjust IEPs based on what services were available at the jail.
The IDEA requires that schools provide students with disabilities a free appropriate public education, also known as FAPE.
“We took that very seriously and would not want to be in violation of FAPE, so they were given access to educational programs. But it's still a county jail,” said Jay Moser, who led the Academic Institute for nearly a decade.
Moser left his post at the jail in 2022, prior to the scope covered by the ELC’s complaint. But he said that throughout most of his time there, students’ IEPs could be fulfilled as written, and if not, accommodations were made to provide the closest possible replacement.
When students required certain interventions or outside specialists, however, Moser said his team couldn’t necessarily fulfill those needs.
“But that didn't happen that often. And when it did, the parents and the students certainly understood,” Moser said. “There’s no way we can bring in someone.”
He added that while jail staff had a positive and cooperative relationship with the school, getting students into the classroom or providing packets to individuals where they were housed often proved challenging even outside of COVID.
Lockdowns in which movement inside the jail was restricted could happen as often as twice a month, Moser said; missing school was an unintended consequence.
“The jail’s safety and security was always their priority, and so that trumped school some days,” Moser said.
But Giles-Perkins said that as the local education agency, PPS has an obligation to create another pathway to education for incarcerated students even when circumstances prevent them from reaching the classroom.
“Some facilities have technology,” Giles-Perkins said. “There's a lot of other ways — there is that sort of smaller unit learning, giving the teachers and staff the clearances needed to go to the units. There are options.”
She added that the same goes for ensuring students with disabilities between the ages of 18 and 22 receive a fair and appropriate education.
Pennsylvania requires that minors held in carceral facilities are separated by sight and sound from incarcerated adult populations. Moser said that, for that reason, students 18 or older couldn’t be taught in the same room as the juveniles and instead were switched to the “packet program.”
After dropping off a week’s worth of instruction, educators would come to students’ housing units one to two days later to see if the students had questions, Moser said. Another packet would be delivered the following week.
Moser said the educators he oversaw during his time at the Academic Institute worked diligently to ensure students 18 and older were receiving the education to which they were entitled.
But delivering therapeutic services can be difficult “when there’s 100 other men walking around listening,” and Moser said educators often found themselves tutoring incarcerated individuals in subjects outside their expertise.
“That's the challenge because you're not really actually getting any instruction,” Moser said. “You were trying to figure your way through these packets.”
No matter the schooling, advocates and experts say minors don’t belong in adult facilities
To ELC’s attorneys, the packet program has deprived students of their fundamental right to an education under state law.
“We send a really powerful message to students when they are in a jail and we tell them, ‘Here's your packet, good luck to you,’” McInerney said. “We're really pushing them out of school and pushing them further into the criminal justice system.”
During the time that Moser worked there, juveniles were held there for 16 months on average before there was any resolution to their case — juveniles held at the jail have been charged, but not convicted.
They are held at the jail awaiting resolution, meaning there is the chance a student’s charges will be downgraded to the juvenile justice system, or dismissed entirely.
“There's a chance that this kid is just going to walk out, not be found guilty of anything,” said Tanisha Long, a Pittsburgh-based community organizer with the Abolitionist Law Center. “But they've lost a year or two of critical development and education in the process, so you're setting them back just for being accused of a crime.”
Juveniles are afforded more protections than their adult counterparts, including specific timetable authorities must follow regarding holding limits and mandatory hearings.
That makes it easier, Long said, for families and community leaders to advocate for students who are still in the juvenile population.
“You have to know where the kid is and the parents have a right to be involved in their carceral process,” Long said. “You lose that when the kid turns 18.”
Giles-Perkins said that beyond creating a discriminatory system, the education cutoff for students who turn 18 at the jail further drives a wedge between incarcerated students and the outside world.
“[In] high school classrooms, students turn 18 all throughout the year. They're not plucked from the classroom and told to not return to the school," Giles-Perkins said. “And so it creates this disconnect between what classrooms look like in the community and what classrooms look like in a facility.”
The education — or lack thereof — that students receive at Allegheny County Jail creates additional barriers, not just for the students returning from incarceration but also for the community receiving them upon release, she added.
“I don't think it does our society any justice when we take that away from young people released into a community without any credits or any skills and then expect them to be model upstanding citizens that never get involved in the justice system ever again,” Giles-Perkins said.
“I think part of the education system is to give those tools so that there are other alternatives other than what landed them there.”
