SIJ
Southern Indiana Justice StatsSchools & education context

Education context · school corporations across 12 focus counties

How schools connect to justice outcomes.

The pipeline from school discipline to juvenile justice and downstream adult-system contact is well-documented. SIJ tracks school-corporation level indicators — not individual student data — for each of the 12 focus counties.

About this page.

This page explains the school-corporation indicators SIJ uses and where each comes from. We do not publish invented rates — only figures sourced directly from the Indiana Department of Education and other named publishers. The official source files are linked under each indicator below. For the justice outcomes these indicators feed into, see Correlations, Counties, and Programs.

Indicators we track per school corporation

Out-of-school suspension rate

Source: IDOE Suspensions & Expulsions report

Per-1,000-student suspension rate, broken by grade band and offense category. Used as a leading indicator of juvenile-justice referrals 18–36 months later.

Chronic absenteeism rate

Source: IDOE attendance file

Share of students missing ≥10% of enrolled school days. Strongly correlated with later contact with truancy court and CHINS petitions.

Four-year graduation rate

Source: IDOE graduation file

Cohort graduation rate per school corp. The single strongest community-level predictor of adult IDOC admission risk in published criminology literature.

Post-secondary linkage rate

Source: Indiana Commission for Higher Education

Share of graduating cohort enrolling in college, career certificate, or military within one year. Connects directly to HIRE / workforce-reentry outcomes published on Programs.

School-corp MAT / counseling capacity

Source: Per-corp staffing tables

Counselor-to-student and social-worker-to-student ratios — a measure of in-school capacity to interrupt the discipline-to-justice pipeline.

Free / reduced meal share

Source: USDA FNS reporting

Economic-stress proxy at the school-corp level. Cross-tabbed with overdose, IDOC, and arrest indicators on the /correlations page.

Why this matters for justice outcomes. School discipline, attendance, and graduation are among the strongest community-level predictors of later justice-system contact. SIJ uses the corporation-level indicators above — never individual student records — and reads them against arrest, IDOC, and overdose figures on Correlations, with the county breakdowns on Counties and the workforce-reentry link on Programs.