Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities across Systems through Community-Based, Collaborative Research

Background and Purpose

Minoritized and marginalized youth continue to experience disparate and more severe outcomes than their White counterparts; outcomes that cannot be explained by behavior/legal factors and which occur across multiple systems (Hockenberry & Puzzanchera, 2021). This study used very unique community-based, collaborative data on racial and ethnic disparities in education, child welfare, law enforcement, justice systems, and the courts (plus others), to create a static community-facing data dashboard that documents and connects racial and ethnic disparities across systems.

Methods

As part of Race Matters for Juvenile Justice’s (RMJJ) practice change efforts, RMJJ’s university partner worked with nine additional community partners including the school system, social services, Guardian ad Litem (GAL), police, Sheriff, juvenile justice, and district court to collect, analyze, and share 15 data metrics for 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. These data were all disaggregated by race/ethnicity in order to document and describe racial and ethnic disparities for youth across various systems in a large, southeastern metropolitan city.

Results

From 2005-2020, the county’s under 18 population increased, but the percentage of youth of color decreased during that period. The school district reports that of third graders in 2020 (before the pandemic), 45.5% identified as Black, 40.1% identified as Latinx, 8.4% identified as another race/ethnicity and 6% identified as White. Conversely, the county’s private, parochial, and home-schooled students are mostly White. They also contribute that in 2020, 77.8% of third graders who received out-of-school suspensions were Black, as compared to 16.7% of OSS for Latinx third graders, and less than 3% for both White students and students of other races/ethnicities. Meanwhile, the Department of Social Services reports that only Black families experienced more investigated reports of abuse, maltreatment, and neglect as compared to their percentage of the population. The Trial Court Administrator’s office suggests that youth of color comprised 91.2% of abuse, neglect, and dependency cases as compared 8.7% cases filed for White children/families in 2020. The GAL’s office notes that the number of youth who are not assigned an advocate trended down (2005-2020), but the percentage of unassigned Black youth was consistent between 57-61%. Communities in Schools contributed that the number of hyper-segregated schools in the county is trending down while the number of diverse schools is trending up. According to the metropolitan police department, in 2020, despite being 28% of the county’s under 18 population, Black youth comprised 80% of the juvenile justice complaints; whereas Latinx youth had 14.7% of the complaints (17.5% of the population), “other” race youth had 1.4% of the complaints (8.2% of the population) and White youth comprised 4.7% of the complaints yet were 37.3% of the county’s under 18 population. (And we have six additional data metrics.)

Conclusions and Implications

RMJJ’s partnership is novel across the US and this data dashboard has facilitated evidence-based community collaborative research designed for practice change. Transferable lessons learned will be shared with participants to address racial and ethnic disparities and to build community-focused, collaborative solutions.