Satellite Project Helps Detainees Keep Up School Work

Northern Arizona University is using computer-assisted instruction transmitted by satellite to help students who are incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility keep up with their peers in the public-school system.

Three times a week, 28 students at Coconino County’s juvenile facility are escorted to the campus for courses in basic English, science, and mathematics. The courses are delivered on NovaNET, an educational network owned by University Communications Inc. in Champaign, Ill.

The purpose of the program, says Stella Malis, an instructor at the Arizona Center for Vocational Technological Education, is to keep the juvenile offenders in school so that, “when they are mainstreamed back, they haven’t lost anything.”

Ms. Malis, who received a grant from the Arizona Supreme Court to offer the program, says she tries to give positive responses to the students’ efforts.

“Considering some of their backgrounds, they have a tendency to be negative,” she says. “They don’t need any negative feedback from me.”

Ms. Malis says the reasons for the students’ detention are never discussed.

“We have a rule around here, and that’s not to talk about the juvenile-court system,” she says.

Northern Arizona University uses a program developed for the Illinois Prison System.

Four or five other institutions offer “the prison package,” according to Mike Smith, director of NovaNET operations in Tucson, but they use educational laboratories in the prisons.