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Incarcerated youth find out quickly that they should not try to settle in. They are moved frequently from site to site and from city to state custody. As they get older, they are moved again, and each move means a new school.

"So right now what happens, is when a student moves from one school on Rikers to another, they're in a whole different school with a whole different curriculum and a whole different set of teachers, and we don't want that," says Department of Education employee Tim Lisante.

That's where Nick Marinacci comes in. The Department of Education hired the Bronx middle school principal a year ago to reform their seven schools in juvenile jails. Now they have asked him to become the founding principal of the new school on Rikers Island.

"We created a standards-based curriculum that would be followed by all the sites so that as kids traveled from site to site they’d be learning approximately the same thing," says Marinacci. "Not only do students come in as chronic truants, they come in as very under-credited for the high school age. So what we did is we doubled certain periods that way they could earn more credit in a faster fashion."

Every year, several thousand city kids are convicted and sent upstate to facilities the federal government has called "uncontrolled and unsafe." There schools are not run by the city, or really by anyone.

"Their schools are not accredited. Kids are placed in state custody and their schools do not follow the New York State education law about accreditation," says Gabrielle Prisco of the Juvenile Justice Project of the Correctional Association of New York.

The state commissioner of youth jails has been fighting to move those facilities into the city and let the city run the schools. This winter, the first will open in Brooklyn.

"Trying to keep New York City kids in New York City, and we're working with them now in the Brooklyn initiative," says Lisante.

Yet for teachers in all of the jails, educating such a transient student population is one of their biggest challenges.

"You can have a student for a day, two weeks, three months, six months. It depends," says former Rikers Island teacher Nicole Greaves. "Some students come in on a Monday. They get bailed out on Tuesday, they’re gone on Wednesday. From the beginning of January to the beginning of February you could have a whole new crop of students."

"If every time a new person comes you go back to yesterday. You would go back to yesterday every day," says former Rikers Island inmate Avion David.

Starting this September, new students will not arrive every day. Inmates will go through an academic intake process, so teachers only get new students once a week. When inmates move to new facilities, their new classes are supposed to pick up where their last classes left off.