Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the youth mental health crisis, with data from private insurance revealing an 82-94% increase in mental health diagnoses among children across the United States. Despite this surge, school districts fail to meet the mental health needs of their students due to a critical gap in mental health resources. This lack of support perpetuates a cycle of poor early childhood mental health, exclusionary discipline, and the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately affecting students of color. This dissertation examines the educational experiences of six formerly incarcerated college (FIC) students to explore how school-based mental health support- or the lack thereof- shaped their high school experiences and involvement in the carceral system. Using a transformative social-emotional learning and community-based participatory research framework, this study employs a qualitative transformative method to analyze the FIC students' mental health challenges, perceptions of school discipline policies, and recommendations for systemic reform. The data uncovered a troubling truth: mental health challenges among high school students frequently go unrecognized or are misinterpreted, resulting in disciplinary measures instead of support and perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline. Nonetheless, their insights also emphasized that educational institutions have a crucial obligation to genuinely support students by addressing their overall development rather than concentrating solely on their behaviors. The findings inform educational policies that shift schools away from punitive discipline models toward holistic, preventive interventions, such as the tenets of transformative social-emotional learning and community-based participatory research, that can help redirect students’ paths toward positive mental health outcomes and higher education rather than worsening their psychological distress and pushing them towards incarceration.