You Have to See It to Believe It The Promise of Restorative Justice in Schools BY PERRY PETRICH
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hink of all the ways that schools get students to do what they’re told. The classic is detention. Threaten the students with that—maybe escalate to threats of suspension or expulsion—and you can drum up some fear. Appeal to that fear, and they’ll fall in line. There’s also affirmation. Shovel some praise on an exemplary student or two, and you’ll encourage them to keep it up and maybe even get others to imitate them. You pick who you praise and, if you play your cards right, everyone starts to behave like they do. If you’re John Dewey or Thomas Aquinas (or somewhere in between), you might have thought about building habits. Set some clear and detailed expectations and hold everybody to them, and students will begin to reflexively act a certain way. The students will comply without thinking about it. If, however, you thought first of mutual respect, then I wish I had more teachers like you. Maybe all it takes is teaching students to listen to and care for one another. As they realize more and more how their actions affect other people and care more and more about how others might be doing, they’ll take responsibility for treating one another right out of sheer respect. If you talk too much about school discipline based on mutual respect, you’ll start to hear, “I’ll believe it when I see it.” But consider this possibility: The boys’ bathroom at a small high school was getting vandalized. Daily. What will stop this bathroom vandalism? The school practices restorative justice. There are no offenses that end automatically with expulsion or even suspension. No zero tolerance. Everyone wondered how this is going to play out, maybe with a bit of cynicism. These are children, after all. The principal sent a note to the whole staff on a Thursday night. The boys and male faculty were pulled from their classes on Friday morning and gathered in the wellness center at 8 a.m. for a restorative circle. Teachers had to throw out their lesson plans, but their reaction was one more of curiosity than frustration. What on Earth would happen? The first thing the students and teachers noticed that morning was all of the chairs. They were in an improbably large circle, and they all matched. Somebody must have gone up and 10
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down the stairs, searching out 40 matching chairs from all the classrooms. As students trickled in, the principal asked them each to take a seat and to put their stuff under their chair. As they did, they looked through bleary morning eyes at a vase of flowers placed on a cloth at the middle of the circle. The principal picked up a stone with the word respect painted on it. He spoke about the reason everyone had gathered (urine on the bathroom floor) and said what the group was going to do (share how it affected each of them) in order to solve this problem (without suspension or expulsion). And then they talked and listened. Each boy took a turn holding the respect stone and, in their earnest 14-year-old-boy way, shared how scared or angry or lonely the vandalism made them feel. One staff member said that the smell of the urine made him think of the homeless shelters that he was in and out of as a child. One of his favorite parts of attending school, he continued, was escaping that smell. To walk down the hall and smell urine destroys the sense of safety and escape he treasures. On it goes until one student asked to speak again. The kid started talking about how unwelcome he feels at the school. He was being singled out by teachers and felt like he didn’t have any friends. He hated it there and took out his anger by, well, vandalizing the boy’s bathroom. He didn’t realize how that made people feel. He apologized for hurting people in ways that he didn’t know he could. He promised he wouldn’t do it anymore. Nobody saw that coming. What’s crazier is that there was no punishment. There was a moment of silence together, and then it was off to lunch. Problem solved. No more bathroom vandalism. All it took was half the school missing half an instructional day. Hour-long classroom circles three times a week. A few daylong training sessions for all the adults on campus. And then all of the time persuading teachers to abandon all the school discipline that they’ve known from their training and from their own experience as students. Keeping up hope that the school won’t fall apart even when the smell of urine lingered in the hallway for days. The conflict and mistrust that occur whenever people have to face anything new. Not to mention lugging all those matching chairs back and forth. I think restorative justice works in schools. I also think