Sofia Yanza and Tony Torres, both sophomores at High School in the Community, have met students who have made mistakes.

But both are volunteers with the citywide Youth Court, which encourages student volunteers to come up with productive, non-punitive punishments for peers who have admitted to misdemeanor offenses.

“I think everyone’s main instinct when kids do something wrong is to send them to the ‘proper authorities,’” Yanza said.

Youth Court, however, is one of the city’s several diversionary programs meant to keep students engaged in school and out of the juvenile justice system. It focuses on restorative justice solutions, which aim to repair harm in lieu of enforcing punishment.

U.S. Secretary of Education John King stopped in New Haven Monday as he concludes his term to highlight such work the city and state have done in the arena of restorative justice and ending the school-to-prison pipeline. City, state and federal officials met for a roundtable at Wilbur Cross High School to share with King the work being done in New Haven and Connecticut to keep students out of the justice system and to reintegrate disengaged students back into the classroom so they can graduate from high school.

High School in the Community sophomore Brianna Carmon said the Youth Court program helps students with accountability and responsibility.

King said President Barack Obama in 2009 inherited a struggling economy, and he believed a long-term investment in the economy is investing in public education. King, who grew up in Brooklyn and lost both his parents before he turned 13, said he was angry in high school. He considers himself “the first education secretary who was kicked out of high school.”

As an Afro-Latino man, he said, getting kicked out of school could have been a blown opportunity at life, were it not for adults who took the time to nurture and support him.

“One’s life is not a tiny narrative,” King said. “We can’t afford to throw people’s lives away.”

King said Connecticut has shown an understanding of having “a strategy for getting young people’s lives back on track” and he believes it has “leaders who get it.”

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, who has overseen several criminal justice system reforms, such as the reclassification of some nonviolent, drug-related offenses as misdemeanors, said criminal justice reform and education reform are inextricable.

“We have seen an over 50 percent drop in arrests of young people in our state over the last couple years,” Malloy said.

U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., said he first seriously entertained the importance of social and emotional learning when he introduced the Jesse Lewis Empowering Educators Act, so named after one of the child victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting.

“Social and emotional learning are so important to reducing conflict and enabling young people to learn to talk with each other when they disagree,” Blumenthal said, adding that “emotions should be educated the same way as their minds.”

The Child Health and Development Institute of Connecticut announced last week that Wilbur Cross was one of 18 schools selected to participate in its Connecticut School-Based Diversion Initiative, joining Augusta Lewis Troup School, Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School and New Horizons School in the most recent cohort from New Haven, with West Haven’s Bailey Middle School, Carrigan Middle School and West Haven High School. The program, funded through a partnership of four different state departments and recently expanded through Malloy’s Second Chance Initiative, connects students with mental health professionals as an alternative to arrest in some cases.

State Education Commissioner Dianna Wentzell said New Haven schools such as Wilbur Cross and Lincoln Bassett School, both part of the state’s Commissioner’s Network school turnaround effort, are showing success.

“We really need to reach a little higher and a little harder to reach all those at-risk kids,” Wentzell said.

Locally, New Haven Mayor Toni Harp said the city’s YouthStat program, which works to help at-risk students, came about because “we were really tired of losing kids on our streets.”

“It’s important when kids come back to us from the juvenile justice system, that they are restored back to the educational system,” she said.

Interim Superintendent of Schools Reginald Mayo, who left the district as its full-time superintendent in 2013 and came back to serve a little more than three years later, a time in which YouthStat began to grow, said he was “catching up a bit now” with things like restorative justice, but YouthStat is “one of the most inspiring, great things” he had seen in decades as an educator.

Cross students Joseph Albarran and Jahi Brooks, who both served as roundtable panelists, testified to the impact citywide second chance and alternative education programs had on them.

“I went from missing out on opportunities to gaining them,” Brooks said.

He said he bore the burden of financial struggles each day and wasn’t focused on school until YouthStat placed him as a student intern at Yale New Haven Hospital.

“I was stunned at what knowledge could do for someone’s life,” he said. “You guys really helped me change and helped me get my life together.”

Albarran said Cross Principal Edith Johnson had kicked him out of the building, sending him to an alternative education program for a semester.

“I didn’t have a support system at home,” he said, noting that the lack of support bled into school.

Alberran said the alternative program opened his eyes to the path he was headed toward and it wasn’t what he wanted.

Now, both are on the honor roll. Alberran said he was recently accepted to Mitchell College in New London.

“People say, ‘He’s an African-American or a Latino. They could throw their lives away in a matter of seconds,’” Alberran said.

It was a sentiment with which other students were familiar. Davon Brown, a sophomore at Metropolitan Business Academy and a volunteer with the Youth Court, said students in urban environments are often not given second chances, and “ethnicity matters, too.”

But Jason Bartlett, director of the city Youth Services Department, said the department is able to take a data-based approach, by looking at chronic absenteeism, suspensions, expulsions and poor academics, to determine its most at-risk students.

“It’s important to identify and know who our youth are,” Bartlett said. “I think it’s where other cities have fallen short.”

Gemma Joseph Lumpkin, school district chief of youth, family and community engagement, said giving students a second chance “really takes a paradigm shift” and an acceptance that “sometimes they break our hearts” because of recidivism, “but we don’t start there.”

“Our goal, our focus, is prevention,” Lumpkin said.

Cameo Thorne, who supervises implementation of restorative practices in New Haven schools, said suspensions don’t “repair the relationship” between two parties after “harm” has taken place in a community, such as a classroom.

After the roundtable concluded, Malloy told reporters he believes the work done in reducing youth arrests and keeping students engaged is sustainable.

“Degrees represent something, more than they have in the past,” he said.

Malloy pointed to a shrinking achievement gap and graduation gap between high-achieving districts and the Alliance Districts, or the 30 lowest-performing districts in the state.

King said the task for the next administration should be to build on progress made. In one month, King will be replaced at the helm of the U.S. Department of Education by a candidate of President-elect Donald Trump’s choosing. Trump has appointed Betsy DeVos, a proponent of charter schools and voucher programs, to assume the role.

Blumenthal said that, since the president-elect is a businessman, he would hope he understands the value of a good return on investment.

Blumenthal also said gains made by “second chance” programs are “fact-based.”

“We know it works; it’s proven,” he said. “Any secretary of education who fails to follow this model is betraying students.”

He also said he believes programs like Youth Court are “enormously creative and innovative.”

U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy said many schools in the nation view suspensions as a method to “push kids out,” but some of New Haven’s programs show how to “pull them back in.”