When Mark Dostert was hired as a “children’s attendant” at the Cook County Juvenile Temporary Detention Center back in 1997, he didn’t realize that meant he would actually be serving as an unarmed guard of the facility’s inmates.

But the seventh-grade English language arts teacher, now in his eleventh year at HISD’s Johnston Middle School, said the year-long experience in Chicago taught him some valuable lessons about working with at-risk youth—and now he is sharing those lessons with other educators. Continue reading →