Abstract

Although much has been written about demographic disproportionality among children identified as eligible for services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in the United States, much less has been written about how school district employees manipulate nuances of this federal civil rights legislation to requalify or exclude eligible children for the IDEA’s protections or how young people and their families fight for the educational access and protections students are entitled to receive. This article was produced from a larger project that explores incarcerated young people’s access to educational opportunities when they are transferred from the juvenile court system to adult criminal courts and facilities. The study utilizes critical archival practices to collate observations and artifacts from a youth carceral facility between 2014 and 2022 in River County, located in a Midwestern US state, and critical horology as a theoretical framework for presenting findings. The stories of two incarcerated young people’s attempts to gain access to educational opportunities and the protections afforded by the IDEA as they are transferred from the juvenile court system to adult criminal court and adult incarceration facilities are presented in the article as “witness marks.” These witness marks illuminate agency and active resistance to statistics and portrayals of incarcerated youth as lacking or disinterested in formal education as well as incarcerated young people’s refusals to accept micro and macro-level systemic blockages to schooling. The end of the article synthesizes what emerges in the study and offers suggested alternatives to the unjust practices and policies portrayed.