restorative justice

Suspensions plummet in NC school with restorative practices

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A restorative practices program at McDougle Middle School in North Carolina has resulted in a 74% drop in major discipline referrals. That has convinced Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools to take the approach in all of their schools.

Language arts teacher Stephen Rayfield and behavior and academic support specialist Wendy York started talking to each other about restorative practices about five years ago, when McDougle had a higher number of in-school suspensions than administrators liked. They talked Principal Robert Bales into sending them to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the International Institute of Restorative Practices graduate school.

Rayfield told the Durham, NC, Herald-Sun that restorative practices draw from Native American and African traditions. “A big part is restorative circles,” he said, “where the wronged and accused come together to discuss how to deal with an offense, or where a whole class can get together to discuss something.”

York said the focus becomes relationships, not punishment or who’s right or wrong. “Now when you’re called down to the discipline office, you’re called down for a conversation” about what happened, who’s been affected, and how to make it right.

As students have become accustomed to the circles, they have asked for particular problems to be addressed. Three years ago, for example, a Latina student who grew tired of hearing slurs asked for a circle to discuss the problem.

McDougle started small but smart—using their “shoestring budget” to send two passionate leaders to learn the system. Restorative practices take time to learn, and after five years of growth, now other schools are ready to begin.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia,  notes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America that “The components of morality are expressed in a community’s institutions, including its moral rules.” Hunter continued, “When it functions well, our moral culture binds us, compels us, in ways of which we are not fully aware.”

Restorative practices reform teachers’ and students’ expectations.  Students know that they must both listen and speak and that the offender bears responsibility for making amends. The moral culture is starting to compel them in powerful ways.

The International Institute for Restorative Practices in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is the world’s leading provider of professional development, conferences, and symposia in the field of restorative practices. They offer graduate degrees and certificates, continuing education, and trainer licensing programs.

Suspensions are down in Buffalo, but at what cost?

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“Restorative justice” practices have reduced school suspensions, but also have resulted in unpunished bad behavior, said the president of the Buffalo Teachers Federation. The school superintendent, however, wants to address discipline problems at the “root cause,” and not take students out of class for minor offenses, The Buffalo News reports.

The Buffalo Public Schools, like many districts across the country, has seen a push away from authoritarian discipline in favor of such “restorative” practices as dialogue and mediation. But Buffalo Teachers’ Federation President Philip Rumore said disruptive or even violent students are being sent back to class with few or no consequences. “When you send a student back to class,” he said, “the message goes out to the rest of the class that that behavior is OK.”

School Superintendent Kriner Cash has a different view. “We have a significant challenge with disproportionality here,” Cash said, referring to the high number of minority students who have been suspended.

George Mason University Economist Walter Williams rejects the idea that the racial disparity in suspensions is caused by shortcomings among the teachers rather than disparate behavior among the students.  In a column published earlier this year, Williams cites a March 14 report by Max Eden, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Eden quotes a Buffalo teacher who was kicked in the head by a student. “We have fights here almost every day,” the teacher said, and students taunt the teachers with the words, “We can’t get suspended.”

Williams asks how restorative justice policies that prevent motivated black students from learning, differ from policies that would seek to sabotage black education by making it impossible for schools to remove students who make education impossible for everyone else.

Some argue that punitive discipline systems that disproportionately affect minority students should be challenged and a new, restorative culture, should be built in place of the old, punitive one—a culture that is stronger than mere techniques and training.

Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture founder James Davison Hunter, in his book The Tragedy of Moral Education in America, points to the fact that it is not techniques that are of first importance, but a moral culture. “In such settings, people will not merely acquire techniques of moral improvement but, rather, will find themselves encompassed within a story that defines their own purposes within a shared destiny, one that points toward aims that are higher and greater than themselves.”

Moving away from punitive systems of discipline is hard work culturally. It takes time to reshape the assumptions of teachers and students alike, and failure to lead that cultural transformation will produce frustration. The State of Illinois offers a guide to implementing restorative justice. For school systems that are going to take the long road to restorative practices, it is worth investing the time and energy to do it well.

South Bronx students take responsibility for peer mediation

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Community School for Social Justice founder Sue-Ann Rosch discussed how administrators at the South Bronx school help students take responsibility for their actions with peer mediation during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture this spring.

“. . . Peer meditations are led by two students from the peer mediation class, and by the social worker who teaches that class, and sometimes it’s just led by the two students without the adults if we feel they have the capacity to do that,” Rosch said, adding that the student mediators also conduct a crucial follow up with their peers to make sure issues are resolved.

The Community School for Social Justice publishes its restorative justice policies and practices on its website, in full transparency for the school and community, and as a resource for others looking to implement their own restorative justice practices.

Reconciliation over suspension in Alberta schools

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Canadian schools are combating student discipline problems with restorative justice circles.

In Fort Saskatchewan, social worker Tammy Palmondon uses “peace keeping circles” to prevent problems between students before they arise. Elementary students sit in a circle and listen to each other to help solve minor problems, a process that gives each child a voice and fosters trusting relationships and empathy, she told Global News.

“It’s about feeling closer to everyone in the classroom because one of the principles of restorative practice is that you are building empathy and compassion for other people. Because when you get to know somebody’s story then you can’t act towards them in a negative manner,” Palmondon said.

The circles—a central element of restorative justice practices—are also in play in Alberta schools, which use the discussions in lieu of suspension or expulsion. The restorative approach to student discipline is also becoming more popular in the United States because it’s based on repairing relationships between students, staff, and parents, and not on punitive consequences or zero tolerance policies.

“The idea of holding a conference where they can be directly accountable to the people that they harmed, they learn something. They learn how their actions impact others,” Caroline Gosling, a former Edmonton principal who now works as a restorative justice practitioner.

Gosling and her colleagues met for the 11th Annual Restorative Justice Conference in Calgary in November to advise teachers on how to implement restorative justice practices. Gosling contends that helping students work through their problems is a better solution than forcing them out of school for days or weeks.

“In my experience, suspensions don’t really teach anything. At best they are a three day holiday and at worst, we are sometimes sending kids back to a situation that is unsafe,” she said, according to Global News. “They don’t learn anything and nothing changes when they come back.”

Gosling said her experience as a principal proves “it works.”

“I’ve always worked in schools where suspending children wasn’t an option because it wasn’t safe,” she said. “And so this was the go-to option for resolving conflict and I saw huge changes in kids’ behavior.”

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, lamented the inaccurate notion of individuals as isolated and not socially connnected in his book, The Death of Character.

“Unencumbered by prior obligations, commitments, and relationships, the [false conception is that a] person is capable of creating, out of no other resources than his or her mind and emotions, the ethical and moral justification to which he or she is committed,” Hunter wrote.

Educators use the circles to force students to hear the pain and offenses they’ve caused others, and help students to find the desire to change and to reconcile with those they’ve harmed.

Fort Saskatchewan’s Palmondon said he recently resolved a conflict between three boys in a circle that involved their parents, teachers, and principal, who all provided context on how the issues impacted others.

“Everybody learned more about the perspective of the other person that they didn’t realize before and the impact,” she said. “They thought it was just between me and him but really there were three people involved and beyond that the parents were affected and so was the whole school.”

The Edmonton Youth Justice Committee Society “contributes to safer communities by providing support to young persons who accept responsibility for their actions and make amends.”

Educators can also consider tips from Fania Davis, co-founder of the Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, about implementing restorative justice practices in schools.

Maryland schools combat fights with conversations

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Six student fights this school year, and three in the last week, prompted Wilde Lake High School Principal Rick Wilson to start a conversation with parents.

In the early December letter to parents, Wilson discussed “a very visible fight” a few days prior and explained how many of the recent altercations spawned from conflicts in the community, often involving students from other schools, The Baltimore Sun reports.

He asked parents to have a conversation with their kids.

“I kindly ask that you take some time . . . to speak with your children and remind them that the adults in their lives are here to provide for their safety and to guide them through difficult situations,” Wilson said in the letter. “We have trained personnel throughout the building if he or she feels the need to talk to a trusted adult.”

The call for communication reflects the Howard County school district’s shifting approach to student discipline and other school issues that’s moving away from punishments toward “restorative justice” practices focused on repairing relationships.

According to the Sun:

To prevent recurring acts of violence, Kevin Gilbert, director of diversity, equity and inclusion, said his office is working to expand relationship-building skills, known as restorative justice practices, and train staff at more schools. These practices teach students how to create and maintain healthy relationships with their peers, focusing on social and emotional development.

Since 2012, 34 schools have been in the process of implementing restorative practices, mostly at the middle and high school level. The process to fully implement and change culture in all county schools could take three to five years, Gilbert said.

Behavioral support specialist Rosanne Wilson explained how it works.

“A lot of times, schools want training on the discipline part of restorative practices [and] want to know how to facilitate a circle that brings the victim and the offender together, so that both can tell their story,” she said. “Then, they come up with a means for some kind of an agreement to say this is how we’re going to move forward so that this doesn’t happen again.”

The district is working with the Howard County Education Association teachers union and the Community Justice for Youth Institute in Chicago to train educators on restorative practices like talking circles, which allow students to resolve conflicts through discussions to prevent or resolve incidents.

“The emphasis in the training was on how the implementation of peace circles can build trust, promote social and emotional well-being and facilitate harmonious relationships,” said HCEA President Colleen Morris. “Just like teaching academic subjects requires planning, preparation and knowledge of students, peace circle implementation relies on well-trained facilitators to insure a safe learning environment is created.”

District spokesman Brian Bassett noted “The most effective way to prevent a physical altercation before it happens is through conversation.”

Joseph E. Davis, scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and publisher of The Hedgehog Review, quotes Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sherry Turkle on the critical importance of conversation:

But it is in this type of conversation—where we learn to make eye contact, to become aware of another person’s posture and tone, to comfort one another and respectfully challenge one another—that empathy and intimacy flourish. In these conversations, we learn who we are.

Howard County schools are trying to rebuild this sort of conversation through restorative circles in which students deal honestly with each other and repair the damage caused by a slight or a fight.

New rules keep Illinois students in schools

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Limiting suspensions and expulsions is creating different outcomes for students in Illinois schools.

Legislation adopted by lawmakers in 2015 and implemented last year limits suspensions and expulsions for students in favor of “restorative practices” that promote dispute resolution, NPR Illinois reports.

The result has been a drastic decrease in suspensions, and a far different approach to discipline after years of zero-tolerance policies.

Springfield high school football player Isaiah Cooper explained how previous policies led to his expulsion for an innocent mistake. Cooper tossed a milk carton into a door jamb on his way out of the cafeteria one morning, only to find out the carton hit a girl in the head by accident.

“’He was just goofing off’—those were (the assistant principal’s) exact words,” said Cooper’s mother, Lindsay Chisam. “He ‘pulled back his arm and chucked it down the hallway’ is what she says, and she said he didn’t even stick around long enough to see if he’d hit anything.”

Cooper wrote the girl an apology, but her parents pressed charges and school police charged him with battery. He was eventually expelled for the remainder of his sophomore year, as well as his entire junior year.

NPR Illinois points out that the situation could have played out differently with new restorative practices in place.

“’Under new policies created by Senate Bill 100, exclusionary discipline of more than three days could be used only in cases where ‘the student’s continuing presence in school would either (i) pose a threat to the safety of other students, staff, or members of the community or (ii) substantially disrupt, impede, or interfere with the operation of the school,’ and after all other interventions have been exhausted,” according to the news site.

Statewide, suspensions decreased from 10,077 before the new law to 7,643 last year, many replaced with restorative conversations between students and administrators and parents designed to address the underlying issues involved in student conflicts.

“Sometimes, it’s a conversation and the student gets returned to class,” social worker Brielle Siskin told NPR. “However, often my goal is to bring the student and the teacher or the other student they had a conflict with together to have a conversation to really resolve the issue and talk about it so that it doesn’t happen again.”

Veteran Champaign teacher Jennifer White put it another way.

“The way we interact with students now, I almost think is a lot more like we interact with our own children,” she said. “You know, if my son does something disrespectful or that he needs some correction on, I’m going to take time to build our relationship and to teach him those things. And so we’re looking at responding to student behavior now, it is about the student as the entire person, and not just how they are academically in your class.”

The new approach plays into an observation University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter makes in his book The Death of Character, that “human beings are anything but automatons.

“We reflect, ponder, act in the world around us in ways that have consequences,” Hunter wrote.

Restorative practices are an effort to treat students less like automatons and more like human beings who must face the consequences of their actions and take responsibility for restoring relationships.

The Centre for Justice and Reconciliation offers other examples of how a different approach to student discipline has impacted other students, as well as resources for schools and educators looking to implement restorative practices.

South Bronx school uses advisory groups to craft restorative justice model

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Sue-Ann Rosch founded the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, where administrators used advisory groups to craft a Restorative Justice Model for student discipline and address rising student suspensions and chronic absences in a violent inner-city neighborhood.

Rosch discussed how the advisory groups helped to shape the core values that drive the school’s restorative justice work during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March.

“We ended up with four community values that we live by . . . one—respect, two—supportive community, three—everyone has a voice, and four—social justice.”

The Community School for Social Justice includes information on its approach to restorative justice on its website.

Poverty, child abuse, and low achievement make forming character hard—but not impossible

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Sue-Ann Rosch, founder of the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, detailed the rampant school discipline problems that prompted a shift to a Restorative Justice approach during an Education Leaders Roundtable at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture in March.

“There was a frightening amount of suspensions during our 2014-15 school year, there were . . . 113 in total,” she said. “In addition, we started to see a trend of parents coming to the school to initiate fights in the school neighborhood if they felt their child had been wronged.”

EdWeek offers tips on how to implement restorative justice practices in schools.

‘A work in progress’: Restorative justice in action at South Bronx high school

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Sue-Ann Rosch, founder of the Community School for Social Justice in the South Bronx, explained how a Restorative Justice Model for student discipline helps her students resist their often violent reality to focus on academics—a story she calls “a work in progress.”

 

At the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture’s Education Leaders Roundtable in March, Rosch discussed the interventions and strategies educators used to address rampant discipline problems and chronic absenteeism in an unforgiving inner-city neighborhood, and the positive impact they’re having on students in and out of the classroom.

“How do you get students to de-escalate or to buy into resolving things peacefully when they’re fighting to survive in their neighborhood?” Rosch questioned. “That’s the norm, and their families are often telling them that that is the right thing to do.”

New Orleans school looks to ‘restorative justice’ to slow ‘school-to-prison pipeline’

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A soft approach to school discipline at New Orleans’ Marrero Middle School is reducing suspensions and building relationships—a new dynamic after years of arresting and suspending students for bad behavior.

In 2015, Marrero Middle School drew national media attention when a Jefferson Parish 8th grader was arrested and handcuffed in front of his social studies class for throwing Skittles on the bus the day before.

According to The Atlantic:

The Skittles arrest drew national scrutiny. In response to the attention, the school district came up with a new discipline plan featuring restorative justice. The handbook now gives students the right to request a restorative circle before a suspension and offers schools guidance in how to use restorative techniques. The district also contracts with (New Orleans nonprofit Center for Restorative Approaches) to facilitate circles or train staff in restorative practices for any school that wants them.

In “restorative circles,” student caught fighting or breaking other rules or laws come together with a facilitator and parents to “repair the harm” through some sort of an agreement, a process Marrero principal Christina Conforto contends is more of a punishment than sending students home.

“Staying home for three days is an easy solution. That’s a vacation,” she said. “What is a harder solution is to sit there amongst your peers and their parents and your parents, and be made to take responsibility for what you did wrong. Being made to make amends, to have to make a contract, and have to apologize and shake hands in front of everybody? That is much more difficult than to stay home for three days.”

Since Marrero implemented the restorative justice approach in August 2016, suspensions at the school have declined by 56 percent, though Trout said the statistic is a side effect of the real goal of restorative justice.

“The goal of restorative practices is to create cultures and climates in which people feel connected to each other,” she said.

The process of building a stronger community at Marrero will undoubtedly benefit students and staff in ways they couldn’t predict.

James Davison Hunter, founder of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture and University of Virginia sociologist,  notes in The Tragedy of Moral Education in America that “The components of morality are expressed in a community’s institutions, including its moral rules . . .”

“When it functions well, our moral culture binds us, compels us, in ways of which we are not fully aware,” he wrote.

Marrero is putting in the hard and slow work of establishing moral rules in its school climate and culture by requiring students to take responsibility for their actions. Not only does it reduce suspensions, and possibly incarcerations, but also establishes norms and practices of making amends students are unlikely to forget.

Restorative practices are difficult, and success requires sustained, committed work. The Centre for Justice and Reconciliation offers a six-part tutorial to better understand the model used at Marrero.

©2017 Advanced Studies in Culture

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