Unlocking Potential

"Kids are in a jail cell all day long for months and months and months...They're entitled to receive an education but no one has worked out how to provide that education."

-Senator Evie Hudak, D-Westminster, Colorado

"It is refreshing to see information and concerns navigated towards our unique situation. It is not often that I find information specific to what we are doing."

-Robert Leyrer, Correctional Educator & Special Education Coordinator

Would you model success after a school that looks and feels like a prison?

In Unlocking Potential award-winning educator Hilderbrand Pelzer III shows corrections professionals, teachers, and educators of all levels how to make superior educational services for incarcerated school-age youths a priority as they await trials as "adults."

Having sharpened his expertise in one of the largest urban county jail systems in the United States, Pelzer presents a successful approach to confronting the legal, logistical, and educational dilemmas that have thwarted most programs dealing with the education of incarcerated school-age youths in county jail systems across the country. Pelzer examines the assumptions that have existed about the capacities and capabilities of schools in prisons and he offers a successful reform model that focuses on solutions.

Unlocking Potential stresses the power of education and the importance of leadership. Professionals working with incarcerated school-age youths can use this book to review their educational practices; examine their assumptions about the capacities and capabilities of schools in prisons; plan action to overcome legal, logistical, and educational dilemmas; design schools that align with a deliberate correctional education purpose; and raise educational dialogue to the level that such work merits.

This timely book emphasizes how education can and should play a prominent role in all institutions that are responsible for children.