Repairing Black Girls’ Relationship with School: An Evaluation of the EMERGE Program for System-Impacted Girls
May 2022
Research from the National Black Women’s Justice Institute
“The EMERGE (Educating, Mentoring, Empowering, and Reaffirming our Girls for Excellence) Reentry Program is a new promising model and educational approach that is designed to dismantle existing pathways to school disengagement and confinement and instead build pathways to college and careers for Black girls and other girls of color who have been involved in the juvenile-legal or foster care systems. EMERGE operates from the belief that preparing Black girls who have been involved in the juvenile-legal or foster care systems for educational and employment success requires also addressing their mental and emotional wellbeing. EMERGE’s program model integrates educational assistance and accelerated credit accrual with intensive mental wellness and crisis intervention services to create a learning environment organized around its students’ specialized and complex needs. These elements work together to repair students’ connections with learning and academic achievement.”