Judge Sheila Calloway says she had “absolutely no idea that I wanted to become a lawyer” when she was growing up in Louisville, Kentucky. But looking back over her fourth-grade papers, which her mother had proudly saved, she found an essay she wrote in which she said she wanted to be a lawyer and help people.

And she has. After stints in the Metro Public Defender’s Office and the Juvenile Court in Metropolitan Nashville & Davidson County, TN, she was elected juvenile court judge in 2014.

From high school, where she learned to argue skillfully in the debate club, to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where in 1991 she earned a B.A. in communications with a minor in political science, Calloway focused on law. At the same time, because Vanderbilt lacked a pre-law major, she took classes in a broad range of subjects, from psychology to sociology and human organization and development, while continuing to argue her cases as part of the university’s debate team.

Because the judge also likes to sing—she cofounded a choral group called the Voices of Justice comprising employees in her court and the juvenile justice system, and also leads a youth choir—her intent when she entered Vanderbilt School of Law was to become an entertainment lawyer. She imagined that “one day I would be a lawyer for Whitney Houston.”

But during her first year at Vanderbilt Law, she “bombed” the contracts class. That summer, she had a clerkship with a general practice legal firm in Louisville, where she discovered that she preferred criminal law.

When she returned to law school, she concentrated on criminal law, and during her second summer, she interned at the Vanderbilt Law Clinic, where she her passion to practice emerged. When she was given the chance to argue and win a case in the Criminal Court of Appeals, she knew she had found her calling. “This is it! This is the life,” she recalls thinking.

Discovering PACEs science

After finishing law school in 1994 and passing the Tennessee State Bar, Calloway worked in the adult division of the Public Defender of Metropolitan Nashville & Davidson County for five years. She switched to the juvenile division when one of her favorite judges suddenly passed away in 2004. That’s when she first heard about the CDC-Kaiser Permanente Adverse Childhood Experiences Study from Dr. Patti van Eys, who addressed judges across the state about how brain development was affected by childhood trauma.

“It was the first time I really heard about it,” she says. “It seemed so true and hit all the buttons we’ve been missing for years. We always knew that things that happened in the family affected the kids, but we never knew the actual scientific reasons.”

Calloway went further with the knowledge about childhood trauma and decided to make it a part of her court practice.

“For me, it’s important that our justice system does assessments of kids and their families in order to determine what their needs are and what services they require,” she explains. Otherwise, Calloway points out, “Nothing is evidence-based. If you have a kid on probation and don’t think about what they bring to the table, if they have trauma-related brain development, we’re not asking the right questions, and we’re not going to make a difference in their life.”

Integrating ACEs into the Juvenile Justice System

When she first started to integrate ACEs in her court in 2015, her goal was to do a 10-point ACEs assessment of every child who came to the courthouse. But with 10,000 children (up to the age of 18) who enter her court every year, her six-person team was not able to keep up.

A review of the initial assessment program by the Robert F. Kennedy Foundation in 2016 found that “we were clogging up the system.” Some of the kids were runaways or school truancy cases—behaviors that most kids might outgrow if they don’t get involved in the court system, according to the judge.

“We were causing more kids to have more extensive involvement in the court system,” she says, and they were getting traumatized.

Currently, a CANS (child and adolescent needs and strengths) assessment, which incorporates ACEs, is undertaken only if a child is placed under supervised probation because they are at risk of committing harm or reoffending or are found guilty of the crime with which they are charged.

“If a child has an ACE score of 8 and a lot of anger management issues, for example, we will make a determination of what type of program would be most appropriate for that child for rehabilitation,” she explains.

What if the child has committed a very serious crime, or many attempts at rehabilitation have failed? In that case, the child is placed in the custody of the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services (DCS) and could be placed by DCS at a Youth Development Center, “similar to a jail for kids,” she says.

Calloway feels the juvenile justice system in Nashville could do better running the two Youth Development Centers—one run by DCS, the other privately run. Children are still held in cells, and there is “not enough evidence-based therapeutic programming at these places. They are required to have schooling, but sometimes what they call a school could be a worksheet,” she says.

Employees of Judge Calloway’s Juvenile Court are required to complete ACEs training, and there are trauma-informed policies for all divisions of the court. “Incorporating ACES and the principles of youth brain development into our practices at Juvenile Court has improved all the work we do, and we have seen positive results,” she explains.

A Commitment to the Community

The judge extends her commitment to youth justice beyond the court by serving on several community legal associations as well as on the boards of two local foundations helping young people achieve academic success in Nashville public schools.

Still a singer, she’s an active member of the Temple Church Music Ministry, the Women’s Ministry, and a regular volunteer at the Second Harvest Food Bank. She is happily married to Paul Butler Calloway, Jr., and the proud mother of Paul Calloway III, already a college student, majoring in music, although like his mother, he loves to argue and help people, so who knows what his future holds?