THE NUEVA SCHOOL
131 E. 28TH AVE. SAN MATEO, CA 94403
STUDENT STANDOFF: High taxes, insane housing prices, homelessness and crime—should we be proud of the state we call home? PAGE 18
IN REVIEW: Lexi Howard is Euphoria's real villain. PAGE 5
THE NUEVA
Get to know some of the local stores in Downtown San Mateo. PAGES 8
Upper school community examines whether the war on Ukraine is the fault of Putin or the West. PAGE 14
Interview with Dr. Melanie Rudd on the scientific basis behind happiness. PAGE 15
CURRENT APR. 8 2022 | VOL. 5, ISS. 5
Recent incident puts restorative justice into practice Circumstances surrounding the hate speech incident allow for never before seen transparency into the disciplinary and restorative justice process STORY ANOUSCHKA B. & ANISHA K. PHOTO FREEPIK
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epair for the harm that tore through the community as a result of the antisemitic hate speech began immediately after the assembly. A number of students and teachers stayed “stuck to their seats” in disbelief as the gym emptied out for lunch, while others approached Upper School Division Head Liza Raynal with suggestions for next steps. “Somebody said, ‘We need to come back and be together,’” Raynal said. “‘I think we need to have student voices. I think we need to have teacher voices.’” The idea for the fishbowl-style meeting, where there is an open circle of chairs for community members to move in and out of as they please and take turns speaking, came from a previous MLK day event Alegria Barclay had organized as Equity & Social Justice Director. “The fishbowl provides people compelled to speak with an opportunity, while being contained and held within the community,” Barclay said. “There's a level of both intimacy and sacredness that's implied by a circle.” Barclay hoped both speakers and
listeners would be encouraged to “lean into discomfort” as they heard people share stories in the fishbowl, whether they were a part of the Jewish community or not. She herself was reminded how many Nueva families’ histories have been touched by the Holocaust. “I think we forget people's lived experiences, and the impact that our actions have as they trigger those lived experiences,” Barclay said. “But if you sit in a room and hear people share their pain, you're going to remember that, right?” After the fishbowl meeting, Jewish students and faculty processed the events privately at an affinity group meeting the next day, where the student first publicly came forward to address the group. “His first thought was to make repairs in his own community,” Barclay said. “It seemed like an appropriate consequence, and harder than almost anything else he had to do.” Raynal commended the student’s bravery in stepping forward after listening to testimonies from the fishbowl. “When I said, ‘what do you need to
do to make this right?’ He said, ‘I need to make sure my Jewish community doesn't feel afraid,’” Raynal recounted. “I don't think everybody has the character to stand up in front of a group of 25 people and say, face-to-face, ‘This was my mistake, and I'm tremendously sorry for it.’” At the end of the week, on Friday morning, Raynal and Barclay organized an all-school assembly that saw seniors Coby W. ’22 and Marcus K. ’22 share prepared statements. In addition to his own, Coby read a statement written by the student. Addressing the entire school in a reflection on his behavior and its impacts was part of the consequences outlined for the student by school administration. “Sitting in the audience at the afternoon assembly on Wednesday and listening to the courageous people who spoke about their experiences and how what I said affected them was a position I never thought I’d find myself in,” the student wrote. “I was both us and them, both at the same time.” Unlike with past instances of disci-
plinary action, Raynal chose to share the student’s consequences with the rest of the student body at Friday’s meeting as well. “I knew there would be consequences. I knew they had to be fitting, they had to be strong, and they had to be shared,” Raynal said. “Because it was too public of an experience for people to not know there are consequences for actions like that.” During the process of disciplinary evaluation, Raynal, Barclay, and others kept their reasoning grounded in principles of restorative justice, a philosophy that aims to repair damage caused by harmful actions, as well as examine and address the circumstances that led to those actions. Raynal noted how these principles aligned with Jewish beliefs around repair. “If presented with the same set of choices, would they make a different choice?” Raynal said. “That’s how we know that something has changed, and how we prevent similar things from happening in the future.”
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