Today in Texas, nearly six in 10 students are suspended or expelled at least once between grades seven and 12. Many believe that those numbers are too high. Take a look at how RESTORATIVE JUSTICE at SBISD's Academy of Choice is helping to keep kids in school and on track in the pursuit of their goals.
What is restorative justice?
From the Restorative Justice Project, National Council on Crime and Delinquency:
"Restorative justice offers alternatives to harsh school discipline processes. Rather than focusing on punishment, restorative justice seeks to repair the harm done. At its best, through face-to-face dialogue, restorative justice results in consensus-based plans that meet victim-identified needs in the wake of a crime. This can take many forms, most notably conferencing models, victim-offender dialogue, and circle processes. In applications with youth, it can prevent both contact with the juvenile justice system and school expulsions and suspensions.
Restorative justice also holds the potential for victims and their families to have a direct voice in determining just outcomes, and reestablishes the role of the community in supporting all parties affected by crime. Several restorative models have been shown to reduce recidivism and, when embraced as a larger-scale solution to wrongdoing, can minimize the social and fiscal costs of crime."
Spotlight on RESTORATIVE JUSTICE in SBISD
When a child is suspended or expelled, it rarely improves his behavior or his academics. See how SBISD's Academy of Choice has adopted an old technique to handle student disputes: the healing circle.
Read more: http://www.npr.org/2014/05/14/312411336/more-school-districts-rethink-zero-tolerance-policies
Houston Public Media spotlight on SBISD Academy of Choice students and staff on how RESORATIVE JUSTICE is shaping their learning, campus culture and lives outside the classroom.
Read more: http://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/news/spring-branch-high-school-pilots-new-way-to-discipline-students/
An Insider View: One school's attempt to change the culture of student behavior
(San Antonio, Texas)
by Shelley Seale from Texas School Business February 2014
Jack (not his real name) was a sixth grade special ed student with speech difficulties who told his teacher he didn't want to be at school anymore because other kids were picking on him. Rather than falling back on a disciplinary action to the other student, the teacher called both boys in to discuss the problem, asking Jack to explain to the other student how he felt and what harm was being done.
At first, the other student didn't get it; he just continued to focus on Jack's irregular speech patterns. "1 know I have a problem," Jack responded, "but every time I walk into a class, that's the first thing you guys tell me. It's making me feel really uncomfortable, and I don't even want to speak in class anymore. I just want to put my head down because I'm embarrassed. You and the other guys are cool and you have a lot of friends, but it's harder for me to do that."
Suddenly the other boy started crying. The teacher asked what caused him to cry, and that's when he admitted that he didn't know how to read. "I just realized that I'm doing the same thing to him, but I have a fault too. The other kids were doing it; I just thought it was funny so I joined in. I never thought about how it was making you feel," the boy said.
This incident took place at Edward H. White Middle School in San Antonio during the first year of a restorative discipline pilot program. The program was designed to combat the severe discipline problems the school was facing. Recording some of the highest discipline rates in its district, Principal Philip Carney and school administrators had come to the conclusion by early 2012 that they needed to fundamentally change the way they approached student discipline.
"Looking not only at our campus data, but also at the student discipline data from across the state, we decided that we must do a better job of helping students to improve their behavioral choices," Carney says. About that time, he was introduced to the idea of restorative justice through his wife, who was taking a course on the topic at The University of Texas at San Antonio.
Legally denned, restorative justice is a philosophical framework and a series of programs for the criminal justice system that 7714- Ed White Middle School restorative discipline leadership team and students demonstrate a typical circle to resolve a student conflict. In most circumstances, a circle would not include this many adults. Seeing the potential application of restorative justice principles at Ed White,
Carney set up a meeting with UTSA Professor Robert Rico, who
explained restorative jus
tice and its applications
to campus and district
leadership teams. The
intent was to create a restorative justice program
within a school setting.
The goal of restorative discipline is to
change the school climate rather than
merely respond to student behavior.
Restorative discipline focuses on the
harms, needs and causes of student
behavior, not just the breaking of
rules and dispensing of punishment.
Restorative discipline requires a top down
commitment from school board
members and administrators.
Restorative discipline uses a whole school
approach. Administrators,
teachers, staff, and students should
be exposed to and/or trained in restorative processes, with periodic
boosters.
Restorative discipline calls for an out
side restorative justice coordinator to
serve on site at the school.
Restorative discipline has a data sys
tem to analyze trends and early interventions.
Restorative discipline takes time. It
is dialogue-driven and rests on the
steady establishing and deepening of
relationships, feeling that this would be a more accurate description of what we were attempting
to implement at our school," says Carney.
Restorative discipline (RD) is a prevention-oriented approach that fosters consensus-based decisions to resolve school
conflict, such as bullying, truancy and disruptive behavior.
Rather than focusing on
punishment for breaking rules, RD focuses
on the harms, needs and causes of student
behavior with a goal to change the entire
school climate.
"Somehow or another, the word 'discipline' has lost its original meaning," says
Rico, who acted as a consultant to help Ed
White Middle School implement the RD
model.
"It does not mean punishment; discipline means to train, and that's what restorative discipline does. It changes behaviors
in a more humanistic approach to dealing
with student conduct; it also enhances the
learning environment in schools and reduces
violence. We want these kids to learn some
thing, and they're not learning anything
from punishment. RD does a lot of things
that make kids stay in school and not drop
out."
Rico has a background in the criminal
justice system, having been a police officer for 20 years before moving into public
education, and was involved in a restorative
justice program for juvenile offenders. The
importance of implementing such a program
in the school system early on, he believes, is
that it prevents kids from entering the criminal justice system to begin with.
"The zero tolerance mentality came
from the criminal justice system, and it has
spilled over into the school setting.
We are
suspending and expelling kids at alarming
rates, and the majority of these areminorities."
Rico says that students who get expelled or drop out of school tend to get involved in the juvenile justice system.
"And once that happens, they're
doomed," he says.
According to Rico, this is a big reason
why there are 2.5 million people in prison in
the United States.
"Eighty percent of prisoners in Texas
are school dropouts. There's a big relation
ship there.
Something different needs to
happen; zero tolerance policies aren't working, just like punitive policies in the criminal
justice side aren't working. It's not changing
behaviors; it's not making schools safer or
doing anything else but throwing kids out of
school — sometimes for very minor infractions."
After consulting with campus stake
holders' and district leadership, the Ed White
Mari/vn Armour
campus decided to adopt
the RD model. Rico
reached out to Marilyn
Armour, Ph.D, L1CSW,
the director of the Institute for Restorative
Justice & Restorative
Dialogue (IRJRD) at
The University of Texas
at Austin.
The institute was established to
build a national mindset for embracing restorative justice principles.
"It's very difficult for restorative justice
to grow when people have to invent it all by
themselves," Armour says, explaining that
one of the purposes of IRJRD is to assist organizations like schools that want to implement such programs. "It's very tricky as a
concept, because it really goes against so
much of the social conditioning that people
have. It sounds great, but the doing of it is
much thornier."
Armour commends Camey for pushing
to adapt an RD model at Ed White Middle
School.
"To have someone at the top have that
kind of vision and really decide to do some
thing that is a huge experiment is very un
usual," she says.
Camey asked the institute to write up
a proposal for how restorative justice principles could be used at the school, and the
result became the restorative discipline pilot
program.
The proposal's recommendations
included:
• Do a strategic rollout, implementing
the program one grade at a time, beginning with sixth grade for the 2012-2013
school year, with plans to add seventh
grade and then eighth grade in the two
successive years;
• Hold a two-day training for the teachers
at the beginning of the school year;
• Hire a consultant to help implement the
program;
• Form an on-site leadership response
team at the grade level that can be responsible for day-to-day implementation; and
• Have the institute evaluate the out
comes and the implementation process
on a monthly basis so that the knowledge will be transferable.
"Every little piece of this has been
thought through in terms of not just what's
needed in the school, but what will help to
increase credibility, to increase rigor, and
what will help in terms of generating a con
tagion effect. Schools will always do better
if they come to this voluntarily. Restorative
justice is built on the idea that people partici
pate voluntarily.
A whole-school approach is
really the most effective way to do this, it
needs a sense of safety for it to work, and
that's not going to be the case if the rest of
the school is punitively oriented. You can't
be focused on the kids1 behavior; the focus
has to be changing the climate in the school."
Training teachers on RD principles
and practices and how to apply them in the
classroom was paramount. Armour decided
to bring in someone with a national reputation in the field. Dr. Nancy Riestenberg from
Minneapolis Public Schools conducted a
two-day training in August 2012, where she
introduced the foundation of RD practices
to 40 Ed White teachers, staff members and
administrators, along with other district personnel.
Armour says it was important that
other stakeholders beyond the sixth grade
teachers know what the RD program looked
like and what it meant.
"'We purposefully brought people in, to
be transparent about the process and to en
gage them in the learning part of it, along
with the teachers," says Armour.
After training, the model was taken
back to the Ed White campus, where a
framework was built for implementation.
"We began by using circles to help
solve conflict and confrontation when situa
tions arose," Principal Camey says.
Led by an adult facilitator, a circle
brings together the students in conflict in a
setting that emphasizes mutual respect, deep
listening and the search for a consensus based
solution. The agreed-upon solution is
then written in a binding document that all
circle participants sign and promise to up
hold.
Says Camey, "We also formed a restorative leadership team that monitors the
implementation process on the campus.
Kevin Curtis, an assistant principal and the
RD campus coordinator, plays a critical role
in this process. He has personally worked
through many of the obstacles that we have
encountered, and he develops creative solutions to help the campus, teachers and stu
dents find success with RD."
There have, of course, been challenges.
Carney and Rico both agree that the biggest
of those was convincing teachers that the
RD model would be effective.
"Most educators operate under the paradigm that we can punish our way to better behaviors," Carney says. "They were so
used to traditional discipline that they did
not expect a satisfactory change in behavior
from students sitting in a circle talking about
their feelings. We had to help teachers realize that these traditional practices were not
working for the students."
While some teachers were initially
skeptical, their level of "buy in" increased
dramatically once they experienced a circle
and began to see changes in student behavior.
"Whenever you start something new or
try to change something, you meet with resistance," adds Rico, who says that veteran
teachers seemed to be the most resistant.
"They weren't really implementing the restorative discipline, and they were the ones
who were having a lot of issues with the
students.
The other teachers who were actually using [the RD principles] were seeing
a difference in the way students acted; the
relationship between student and teacher
was better."
Another challenge was the time involved. It takes time to run a circle — time
that, in some teachers* eyes, detracts from
classroom instruction. RD practices are not
a quick fix, particularly if the goal is to truly
change mindsets.
"When a student misbehaves, instead
of saying 'go to the office.' it's about engaging with that student in a
meaningful way," Armour says. "It is time consuming,
but it's about investing in the
creation of a different kind of climate that
pays dividends when times get tough."
Being the first school in Texas to implement the program without an existing model
to reference also presented an obstacle. But
with feedback and guidance from IRJRD
and Rico, the school has created a model
that eventually could provide a blueprint for
other schools.
Now that Ed White Middle School is
halfway through its second year of using
RD practices with both sixth and seventh
graders, some remarkable results are com
ing to light. There has been an 84 percent
drop in off-campus suspensions in the past
year, along with a 44 percent drop in total
suspensions.
Armour stresses that the drop
in suspensions does not necessarily mean
that there are fewer student conflicts. It sim
ply reflects that teachers are responding to
student misbehavior in a different way.
"Because only one-third of the campus
was engaged in and understood restorative
practices [last year], there were challenges
that arose from the majority of the campus
operating under a different discipline ap
proach," Carney says.
"This year we have
two-thirds of the campus operating under
restorative practices, and the cultural shift is
evident. You can feel the difference as you
walk down the hallways. It is now a regular
practice for students in conflict to seek out
an opportunity to "circle it,' rather than en
gage in a verbal or physical confrontation.
It has been amazing to see the impact on the
students and how quickly they have taken to
this alternate way to handle conflict."
Ultimately, the method is about build
ing relationships. With more dialogue in
volved in conflict resolution, teachers often
learn about issues outside of school that are
impacting their students' behavior and per
formance. And for students in conflict, it can
be a powerful experience to have adults tak
ing the time to look behind the behavior and
ask them how they feel.
They begin to see
teachers as partners in their education and
school experience, rather than just another
authority figure.
"The kids have a lot to say," Rico says.
"It's building a relationship, where before
they didn't have that, and that's the biggest
thing."
