When we understand restorative justice as a “way of being” that centers relationships and healing, we see its potential to enrich all parts of our lives. Youth, parents, and staff told us that one of the major aims of using restorative justice in schools is for youth to engage restoratively in all contexts: family, friendship, career, and community. Nori explained the thrilling feeling of having students tell her, “‘I called the circle at home today, like my parents are stressing me out or my brother.’ And it’s just like, wow, these skills are… being used outside of our community too, which is eventually the goal, right?” After all, the roots of restorative justice are in Indigenous community and kinship practices that persisted in spite of the U.S. education system, not because of it.
Read More...Including students’ families in restorative processes can have cascading effects, strengthening the depth and reach of restorative justice within schools and beyond. Many of the same lessons about Making Rituals & Relationships apply to families, as community-building circles create opportunities to introduce circle practices, build trust between staff and family, strengthen relationships between parents and their children, and give parents an opportunity to engage in storytelling themselves. We heard about other key ways that school staff build trust with caretakers and involve them in their children’s education, keeping in contact outside of school hours with frequent text communication with student advisors, weekly emails about what’s happening in school, and an intergenerational reading group about race and racism, open to staff, students, and parents.
This relationship building lays the groundwork for harder conversations down the line. Staff described how restorative responses to conflict are strengthened by including family members (with student consent), as they can provide additional support and offer different perspectives on the root causes of harm and paths to healing. Goldie spoke about the powerful experience of watching her child grow before her eyes during a restorative response to a conflict her daughter had with a teacher. And importantly, when students and parents engage in restorative practices together in school settings, they do so in existing familial relationships, building tools for strengthening relationships and handling conflict at home.
Yet, there are many challenges to parent participation in schools, from highly practical issues like family work schedules and language barriers, to deeply personal challenges, such as the trying experience of being a BIPoC parent navigating institutional and interpersonal racism in the school system. With restorative justice specifically, lack of information was seen as a major barrier. Two parents described themselves as deeply engaged in their children’s schools that used restorative justice, but still felt that their schools had not described the steps of restorative justice in detail, limiting their capacity to meaningfully engage. These participants expressed a strong desire for parents to have greater access to training on both anti-racism and the philosophy and practice of restorative justice, growing their capacity to participate in specific instances of conflict, and advocate more broadly for their children to have access to rich, restorative justice and healing-centered school cultures.
Finally, family engagement is only one starting point for thinking about the many ways that restorative practices are carried outside of school buildings, and into other community spaces. Morgan shared one vision of what this can look like, describing a restorative justice response to address the harm a local business owner experienced as the result of actions by a student–avoiding the young person being arrested and ultimately forming stronger bonds between this business owner and the school community.
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about why it’s so important to connect with students’ families and the school’s surrounding community, as we build restorative school cultures.
“A year ago or so they had said that all DOE staff, teachers, everybody has to participate in an implicit bias workshop, and they offered it randomly to some parents who sit on CEC or PTAs or SLTs, because they knew somebody… I think it would be amazing to have parents also do an implicit bias workshop with their school community, just to get the groundwork: what is restorative justice, what’s an implicit bias, how can parents and teachers come together with administration of the school to support our school community… We as parents need that starting point too, so we’re all communicating with the same language… How are we defining this, how are we using these as values within our school? …If DOE as a whole is going to do restorative justice [and implicit bias training] then that’s something that we should learn as a parent in workshops.”
[Speaking about a circle for a conflict with her child and teacher] “It was awesome to see restorative justice come together… The [facilitator] was able to introduce everyone and mellow down the environment, everybody was calm, everybody knowing what the steps were… It made me and my daughter feel comfortable… It was a great feeling… [the school] taking something that was inappropriate for my child to do and just demonstrating that it’s okay that you made a mistake, but here we are, let’s talk about the situation. And here’s your teacher and how she thinks about it, how she felt…. It’s not something to be ashamed of…. it was more of a learning process, where I get to see my daughter interact and expressing herself… not only for her education, but more for her self esteem, where… she’s able to say ‘Listen, I’m sorry that I said this to you, it must have been hurtful’ and just own up to something.”
“[After a student vandalized a business, the owner] was very upset, obviously…. But because our school is dedicated to restoring things when things were harmed, instead of the owner calling the cops or escalating… we invited him into the school to have a conversation… What were some of the things that he needed from us or this particular student to help restore the harm? ….The idea of restoration didn’t just exist within our four walls. We saw our students as a part of the community that was a living, breathing thing… This is how you harmed this person here, how can you make this right…. That was a really great example of what schooling under the restorative model can look like. And it’s not just limited to what happens in the buildings, but building community with the organizations, families, and residents around the school. And moving forward, we had such a great relationship with that [business owner].”
“Being able to incorporate families also really made it [restorative justice] feel like it was working… That it could extend to the larger community and not just happen within the confines of a school, but that it could reach community and family…. having families agree to come in and meet with the team and sit with their kids and unpack really difficult ideas. That they trusted people enough to come and say, yeah, I will do this… and not in a way that it felt like I’ll do this because if I don’t, my child is going to get suspended or something like that… It was just like we want you to come do this and they were like, We want to do it.”
“But I did see parents have a lot of conflict with teachers and staff… 99.9% of the time it was based on race, you know, the child was not being treated the same, the child was being blamed… My opinion is they [school staff] tend to pacify certain parents based on color and then the parents who are people of color… They don’t know what to do… they don’t want to take their kids out and put them somewhere else… To be a person of color in New York City, when it comes to education with your kids… If you don’t conform or if you’re seen as an outlier, and you’re going against the grain, then you’re all these adjectives: you’re combative, you’re disgruntled, you’re aggressive, you know? But if I was a white parent and these things were happening to my kid, I’m an advocate, I’m strong, I’m fearless, I’m a warrior.”
“The parent of the student who started the fight actually apologized to the parents of the harmed student. It was just a really powerful piece… It allowed for an opportunity for us as a community to provide support for these two individuals. I felt very proud of that… It just kind of put together the power of parents, because I feel like many times when it comes to restorative justice, we talk about students. We talk about admin. We talk about teachers, but we never talk about the impact that parents can have… but the outcome was really, really, really powerful.”
“Our families trust us… but [most of them] they won’t ever say, “Oh, you know, the school does a lot of restorative justice. That’s why I like it so much.” But they love our school because they trust us, because we’ve spent all this time doing RJ so that people know that that their teachers are going to listen to them and the parents know that we’re going to hear them, even if we’re like, that was a crazy thing you just did [laughs].”
“It was also helpful following a student from grades nine to 12 and the family… Being able to pinpoint the success and the progress their child has made, which for parents, sometimes it was hard to see… And also showing parents the value of having restorative conversations with their children. You model for them what works in a school… maybe the parent can try that at home too, and have some sort of success. And so how do parents see us as a resource and help to them, and not as someone who’s calling to complain about their child? More so working as a team with them, right? Like our goal is the same, we want to see the student graduate, to develop themselves as a human being in the society, not only our school… And so I think that that really helps parents feel safe and like someone had their back. They weren’t in this alone, raising a teenager by themselves.”
Work through Contradictions
Vent Diagrams help us reflect on the challenges, complexities, and contradictions of doing this work, and figure out how we can keep moving forward. Here is one of the big tensions we heard from participants about building with families & neighbors within school communities.
Families & neighbors are a part of school communities
School life & schedules are designed for students and staff
Talk with Your Community
What does this look like for you and the people in your life? Use the prompts below to explore ideas with others in your school and communities about building with families and neighbors, laying the groundwork for community understanding and making change. (Check out the Community Conversations Toolkit for downloadable guides for facilitating discussions about this project.)
Explore. What have you learned from your family or community about what it means to have each others’ backs or to support one another?
Share Experiences. Think about some of the places you go on a daily basis… who are the people in those spaces who you look to for wisdom or advice? What have you learned from those people?
Envision. In what instances do you think would be helpful to include parents, families, and community members in what happens at school? Why?
Explore. Can you think of places in your community where people interact across generations? What kind of experiences happen there?
Share Experiences. Can you remember a time where parents or families worked together to make something happen for the community? What did you learn from that?
Envision. In a time of need, who would you want to call on for help or care in your community? How do you think having that support system might impact yourself or others?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of how their schools are already building with families and neighbors, as well as visions of the world we must keep fighting for…. This is what restorative justice looks like, when it’s On Our Terms.
Build School Practice.
Here are specific ideas about how school communities can build with families and neighbors.
- Integrate parents and family members into community building and response-to-harm circles, including time outside of the school day that is accessible to parents. Making this possible requires taking into account family members’ work schedules, the availability of translation services, and the impact of community members coming into contact with and navigating interactions with school safety agents and metal detectors, and the nature of specific students’ relationships with their family members.
- Integrate restorative practices like community circles within non-disciplinary contexts such as PTA meetings and parent-teacher conferences or parent-teacher reading groups, providing opportunities for parents to engage in storytelling and reflection on behalf of their own lived experiences.
- Offer restorative justice and circle training to parents, and provide opportunities for parents to facilitate circles within the school community, with young people, staff, and other parents as co-facilitators.
- Co-create resources with students, families, and community leaders documenting community spaces, people and resources within them, and how to access them
- Incorporate conversations into community building and response to harm circles that involve reflection on relationships outside of the school and how the growth and learning that takes place in circle applies in the community at large
Morgan L (she/her): Each advisor was ‘responsible’ for 12 students so that made the parent-to-staff member ratio really small…. Parents felt like they could connect or reach out to someone right away if there was any big news updates… because you’re building a relationship with that particular family…. As an advisor, I was constantly communicating with the family about what was going on, the good and the bad things… That parent or family felt comfortable reaching out to me, following up with me… So I think that really allowed me to dive deeper with my parents and our school to dive deeper with parent relationships because we were building trust through being consistent with them.
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to better support our schools in building with students’ families and the surrounding community.
- Provide and fund introductory workshops about restorative justice available to all NYC parents via borough-wide or city-wide workshops at least twice a year, promoted through children’s schools and community networks.
- Provide and fund restorative justice training for parent leaders in school communities and in citywide positions, including intergenerational training experiences with students and staff.
- Create citywide resource guides of neighborhood-based support services for youth and families that are not attached to systems of policing, surveillance, or family separation, to be used in support of response to harm circles.