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There is a growing concern about violent and destructive behaviors of youth that require intervention by juvenile justice and youth-serving agencies. This concern has led many to conclude that schools and community agencies must increase efforts to prevent juvenile delinquency and to provide programs that will facilitate rehabilitation, education, and vocational training for youth already involved. A clear understanding of the nature and range of behaviors that result in juvenile crime is needed in order to develop programs and interventions that can be expected to lead to beneficial changes for youth and for society as a whole. The purpose of this article is to describe the relationship between school behaviors and youth characteristics in school (e.g., discipline referrals, teacher nominations, nomothetic ratings) and referrals to juvenile authorities (e.g., illegal behaviors). We describe a strategy of using teacher nominations, school discipline referrals, and community arrest data to predict delinquent and violent behavior in youth. We outline data from a group of socially maladjusted middle school youth to illustrate the relationship between the two data sources and recommendations for identification and treatment of youth at risk for delinquency and antisocial behavior.

This article examines factors associated with the substantial underidentification, referral and service of the student population having emotional-behavioral adjustment problems in school. The identification of students as emotionally or behaviorally disturbed over the past decade is analyzed in terms of their absolute number and distribution across age-grade levels. These results are contrasted with those for students with autism, which show a highly divergent pattern in both level and distribution. The validity of the EBD categorical certification is evaluated in terms of its ability to identify a unique student subpopulation as distinct from students with social maladjustment and learning disabilities. The professional literature related to disincentives and barriers to the proactive screening and identification of students having behavior problems is discussed. Multiple-gating and universal approaches to the screening-identification of students with EBD are illustrated and some guidelines are offered as to their effective application in school settings. It is recommended that schools abandon the EBD certification process to focus instead on assessing behaviorally at-risk students along internalizing-externalizing and severity dimensions.Convergent expert opinion and considerable evidence suggest that school settings substantially underrefer, and thus underserve, students with emotional or behavioral disorders (

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