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The Children’s Aid Society’s concept of community schools came to life in February 1992 with the opening of the Salomé Ureña de Henriquez Middle Academies (Intermediate School [IS] 218) and the opening in March 1993 of the Ellen Lurie School (Primary School [PS] 5). These were the first community schools operated by The Children’s Aid Society (CAS) in partnership with New York City’s Board of Education. PS 5 is an elementary school whose students advance to middle school at IS 218. The model has evolved into a well-integrated, multidimensional community school involving CAS, the Board (now Department) of Education, and the parents and many other partners from the broader community. Before the two schools opened, several years were spent in preparation and planning. Initially, CAS surveyed New York City communities to identify those that would benefit most from CAS’s services. This was part of an ongoing effort on CAS’s part to examine its current programs in order to modify them to meet current social and familial needs. The survey led to the selection of the Washington Heights community, which was characterized by a large influx of recent immigrants, substantial poverty, large families, and a dearth of services. A more intensive study conducted by CAS in 1987 had documented the dramatic needs of families in this community and the shortage of services available to them. The school system ranked 32nd of 32 districts in nearly every category. The type of poverty that characterizes new immigrants was endemic: very low-wage jobs, two and three families sharing one apartment, and a reluctance to accept outside help. Washington Heights was the substance-abuse and drug-trafficking hub for the tri-state area and had the city’s highest homicide rate. Teenage pregnancy rates were also among the city’s highest. This community is not unlike those that CAS has traditionally served throughout its 150-year history. What was to be strikingly different was how CAS would address these problems. In setting out to plan a service model, CAS drew on its long and rich history of operating community centers in low-income neighborhoods.

In the United States, Juvenile Court jurisdiction targets young people at serious risk of anti-social development to whom society is committed to offering another chance, with some assistance, to develop in a more pro-social direction. This chance is offered, however, through a dispositional process that undermines the law’s pro-social goals. An extensive body of literature in developmental and social psychology suggests that a dramatic transformation of that process that brought the young people to the center of the decision-making could materially enhance the developmental value of that process for young people. It could offer them meaningful opportunities to develop their decision-making skills and foster an understanding of self as a part of, rather than outside of, the community of law enforcement. This chapter brings together current law and practice with the social science literature to argue for the undertaking of a process experiment in Juvenile Court.

This chapter introduces the urgent need to develop a coherent approach to respecting privacy’s appropriate place in our lives by taking a developmental-science view of the right to privacy. It reveals the book’s argument that the nature of the right to privacy has undergone rapid transformation, and that transformation requires a different approach to protecting what we have come to understand as privacy. It requires what society typically has done to address all other social issues—looked toward youth. This means understanding the place of privacy in adolescence and how society can shape the experience of privacy and its outcomes. It means understanding how the adolescent period triggers the manner in which people will use, expect, and respect privacy. It means thinking through how the legal system could be harnessed to shape adolescents’ experiences critical to protecting privacy in ways that would enhance individual well-being and societal functioning.