Youth Court Is In Session For Strawberry Mansion Students
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- Dozens of prosecutors, defense attorneys and judges spent Tuesday evening at a special court session at the Stout Justice Center. As KYW Community Affairs reporter Cherri Gregg tells us, the judge, jury and advocates in the case- were all students.
About a half-dozen students from Strawberry Mansion held a live viewing of their Youth Court.
"It's a paradigm shift. Instead of adults correcting students for misbehavior, students correct students for misbehavior," says Gregg Volz, director of the Youth Court Support Center at EducationWorks.
The group has trained teachers and students to youth courts in more than a dozen schools in the region.
"You take advantage of positive peer pressure," he says. "Everybody knows about peer pressure. Tell me who you run with and we'll tell you who you are."
At Mansion, 17 kids and a teacher hold hearings four days a week.
The kids who are respondents in the four-year-old program are those up for suspension.
Youth Court provides an alternative solution.
"We don't want to punish the kid that misbehaves, we want to help the kid not misbehave again," says Volz.
The students questioned the respondent in a case of rough keep-away that landed junior Nasir with a suspension.
After 15 minutes of cross-examination, the jury decided to order the young man to write a three paragraph essay on how playing around in school can impact his life, talk to the teacher who wrote him up and give up his phone at the start of class anytime he's in the teacher's classroom.
"It was a little too much," says Nasir.
But the lawyers and judges who watched the court session were in awe.
"They're asking great questions, the judge is fantastic," says Zane Memeger, U.S. Attorney for the E.D. Pa.
Memeger says his prosecutors have gone into schools to help train students.
The trip to the Stout Center was a special treat for the students in the class.
"I was so excited to know we were coming down here," says Chanelle Green, senior.
She was the judge in the case and says she's inspired.
"I want to be a lawyer, but I know I'm going to work my way up to a judge," she says smiling.
And she wasn't the only one.
Nearly all the student jurors, bailiff and others raised their hands when asked whether they wanted to work in the courts.
Common Please President Judge Sheila Woods-Skipper was so impressed she offered to mentor Green herself.
"She is going to be a judge one day," she says. "She has it in her mind, it's in her bones and I know she'll do it," Woods-Skipper said.
Woods-Skipper says the youth court students will be invited to be mentees, sit in on court cases and take on internships at the court in the future.
