Stoneleigh Fellow David Rubin is featured in The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Citywide, across all grades, 17 percent of students have been involved with DHS or the juvenile justice system, the Children’s Hospital analysts found. By high school, that number grows to 20 percent, and nearly half of all district high schools have more than 100 pupils or more than 20 percent of the student body involved with DHS.
David Rubin, a Children’s Hospital pediatrician and codirector of its PolicyLab, said he imagined a typical high school classroom, where perhaps a dozen young people in a class of 30 might have complicated needs arising from a life in foster care or problems with the law.
“In a very challenging financial environment, it helps us understand what these teachers face every day,” Rubin said Tuesday at a news conference at district headquarters. Students involved in the DHS and juvenile justice systems need social and emotional supports often in short supply or absent in the city’s strapped public schools, which often lack full-time counselors, nurses, psychologists, and social workers.
