Restorative justice invites all community members to respond to multiple forms of harm and support each other in healing. Such community-wide efforts are stronger and more sustainable than those led by one or two people, and they dramatically expand the tools we have to address harm, making it possible to draw on the many relationships, distinct wisdom, and capacity (including time!) of staff, students, their families, and neighbors. In particular, we heard from participants about how much is gained when students lead restorative responses to harm in their communities. [Link “when students lead’] Read More...
Restorative justice asks us to transform how we respond to harm and conflict when it does occur. A few participants emphasized how restorative justice helps communities rethink and “normalize” conflict, recognizing that it is unavoidable, and not a sign of failure or a lack of safety. Acknowledging, as Morgan put it, that “we’re humans and conflict does exist,” restorative justice helps us leverage relationships and key practices to address it in ways that promote safety and healing for all involved. And participants were clear that harm can take many forms—interpersonal, institutional, structural, which do not occur in isolation, and aren’t all named by school discipline codes. This recognition helps us move beyond narrow ideas about ‘changing student behavior,” and towards a holistic understanding that everyone in a community (youth and adults) can cause harm and be harmed, and that we all deserve chances to heal and grow.
Restorative justice asks that we focus on the healing needs of those who have been harmed, while also supporting those who have caused harm to take accountability—with action, not just words—to address their unmet needs. This dual focus is an essential part of understanding individual and institutional root causes of why harm happens, and ways to transform it. Many participants described a core belief in their school cultures and restorative practice that people make mistakes, but no one is ever disposable; this mindset transforms these difficult moments from sources of shame into opportunities for growth and healing. And in doing so, we continue building practices, skills, and knowledge to respond to and prevent harm in the future.
Youth and adults described powerful experiences of the way response-to-harm circles gave them a chance to speak and a chance to listen. We heard about how they walked away with a better understanding of those they were in conflict with, while also feeling heard, respected, and understood by others. As A. Geis explained her experience facilitating a conflict between two students, “We asked the questions of why. One person talked first and the other person has the time to talk… it wasn’t like, you guys are being interrogated or pushed to say that you were wrong. No, it was just sharing how you felt.”
But we also heard about times when people were harmed and did not feel adequately cared for by school staff, creating a second layer of harm. A couple people felt like a student who caused harm was the main focus of the ‘restorative’ response, drifting far from the healing promise of restorative justice. A few staff spoke about the delicate dance of restoratively addressing root causes of harm, while making sure not to center people who caused harm—especially when staff capacity is limited.
And staff spoke about the tension of navigating the sometimes blurry line between restorative and punitive responses in schools, with the ongoing presence of suspension. A couple of staff spoke about how they try to maintain a restorative spirit when students are suspended from their schools: making sure the student knows they are very much still a part of the community, by remaining in constant contact, providing supports, and addressing root causes of what happened. Both of these staff said that the temporary physical distance can be helpful for everyone to have space to heal, but there is still emotional closeness. On the other hand, another staff person described even the possibility of suspension as limiting the capacity of schools to be truly restorative. And a few students and staff spoke about the importance of student willingness to participate; as Sad C. explained, restorative practices can be “used very punitively… like “you have to go to a circle… It’s defeating the whole concept because there’s no self-determination. It’s like another form of punishment.”
Listen to Community Voices
Hear from students, parents, and educators about visions of what it can look like when we respond to harm restoratively, as a community.
“I’m thinking about normalizing conflict. The idea that restorative practice is absent of problems in a building is not true, we’re humans and conflict does exist. So, thinking differently about what type of conflict is it. Is it physical conflict? Is it emotional conflict? Like just normalizing that it will happen and how are we deciding to deal with it so that everybody feels safe? With the understanding that you WILL be in conflict with others… and work from that understanding that conflict won’t be erased, but that there are healthier ways of handling it.”
“I facilitated a lot of circles…. Restorative justice isn’t just about taking accountability. It’s about understanding and listening and hearing that you’ve done something that’s caused harm or that has broken a community and you’re committed to repairing it… [in one circle, a student] apologized for the incident, but it wasn’t just about the apology for me, because usually people apologize and probably they don’t mean it. For me it was the fact that he understood what he’d done—he did, and he took accountability for it.”
“When it [restorative justice] was working, it was really, really grounded in relationships and it was really distributed among many adults and students to solve problems…. Actually, we didn’t have a dean’s office or any one person who held onto discipline. It made it confusing, it made it messy, which a lot of people didn’t like. But I think it was really effective because it required many more people to step up and feel like they were essential parts of resolving conflict.”
“[In circles], we as the facilitators, make sure that [people] are heard, not just by the facilitators, but by each other. And then [at the end of the circle] we come to a consensus of what harm or value has been broken and then each of the people can choose whether or not they want to commit to do something to repair the harm. But it’s more so, not an apology, but something that you want to commit to move on in the future. And then a few weeks later, we do follow-ups to see the progress.”
“When students are requesting mediation, requesting to facilitate mediations, recommending to their peers that they come to our office for mediation, that feels to me like it [restorative justice] is working. And to see them successfully facilitate a mediation, feels like it’s working. When I hear some of the language that they [the students] have adopted and just the ideas that they’re conveying. That you can recognize harm…. recognize conflict, and that it’s inevitable and messy. But that you can also leave feeling better and you can leave feeling like I’m not going to hold on to this forever. And I can give you a hug, when we leave this office and continue our friendship. Or be in the same classroom together, right? Those are the things that make it feel like it’s working for me.”
“It (restorative justice) helped a lot with academics from my view. We would use circles to talk to students whose grades are slipping and we helped the students get what they need… I remember specific students needed a lot of movement when they had especially long classes. So… We had standing desks implemented for certain students. We had beanbags used for a more loose way of relaxing in class so that you can focus better, which did help. And we also had a beanbag, which was enclosed in a corner, if a student was having a hard time and they needed a break from class. And we would also have certain things where you could easily go into the counselor’s office.”
“[At my old school in California]… suspension was used as a very last resort policy, if something really harmful had happened where the entire community was like, ‘Well, we need to regroup and we need to do some healing work with everybody who’s still here.’ And for that really to happen, the best move is to sort of remove the student from the community for a period of time, but that doesn’t mean remove them and forget about them. It means we still have a team who’s doing home visits multiple times a week, people who are on the phone with their parents, and who are FaceTiming with the kids… You don’t really have an option to not be part of the school community…. You’re still going to get checked up on and you’re still going to have the same relationships and communication with everybody… And we’re going to make sure that you know exactly why this is happening and we’re going to do that family work and that community work. And when you come back into the community, it’s a big deal. We have that circle where it’s like, “We’re welcoming you back” and we celebrate that process. But [the NYC school] I’m at now, it’s really different, where kids just float in and out of the building and there’s just no impact, suspension doesn’t really mean anything to them.”
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 restorative responses to harm in school communities.
No one should be harmed in school
Everyone causes harm sometimes
Talk with Your Community
What does this look like for you and the people in your life? Use the prompts below to explore ideas about conflict, harm, and healing with others in your school and communities, 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. Why do you think conflict might be an important part of any community? What can we potentially learn from it?
Share Experiences. In your life, what is something that you have learned through making mistakes? How have those things impacted you?
Envision. If you were to make another mistake, how would you want the people around you, or even yourself, to respond? How would you want to be treated at that moment?
Explore. What skills or resources exist in your community to understand or respond to conflict? What do they do?
Share Experiences. Can you remember a time when your community responded to conflict in ways that resulted in positive change or learning? What happened?
Envision. What do you think your community could do to change the way they respond to moments where others create harm or make mistakes? Is there something you want to keep in mind in the future when it might happen?
Make It Happen
The young people, educators, and parents we spoke with shared incredible examples of healing-centered, restorative responses to harm in their school communities, 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 respond to harm restoratively, as a community.
- Create a simple, accessible process for anybody in the school community to request a circle, with designated people and time to respond to those requests.
- Determine who in the community is the best fit for facilitating each response to harm (one-on-one preparation conversations, mediations, circles) based on a range of factors, including relationships, facilitator strengths, capacity, and availability.
- Develop clear steps for before, during, and after circles, to support transparency and follow-up. This may include, but is not limited to: sharing facilitation questions with participants before circles (get consent); asking about the needs of those involved and mapping out potential supports (center healing); determining the best-suited facilitator and support people (build on relationships); and designating accountability partners and key dates for follow-up on action steps after a circle is complete (seek transformation).
- Discuss privilege, oppression, and other relevant institutional or structural forces in preparing and facilitating restorative circles, considering the ways in which these structural forces and related personal experiences may be important to understanding the specific instance of harm, and for those involved to feel their experiences are being acknowledged and taken seriously.
- Convene as a school quarterly to expand on possibilities of non-punitive responses to harm that have shown to be supportive of student, staff, and community growth. This should be facilitated by restorative justice leaders within the school, and should be both public to the community and transparent in planning its responses.
Lily T. (she/her), school staff: We have only one kid who’s Jewish in the whole school. He’s also the only white kid who is not Albanian…. it wasn’t from the student, but other students wanted to do a tier two circle after the violence at synagogues. And a bunch of our Jewish staff showed up and they were so thankful that our students have chosen to create that healing space for the whole community and that they got to talk about things. And also our Jewish staff wanted specifically to talk about the issue of racial solidarity. And how there are parallels between the violence, and that was really meaningful for our kids to hear some of their Jewish elders.
Demand Policy Change.
Here are some key policies needed to better support school communities in responding to harm restoratively.
- 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
- Provide discretionary funding to schools to support next steps resulting from restorative responses to harm, including accessing social and emotional supports for those who have been harmed and those who have caused harm.
- Establish data systems for tracking responses to harm and other school issues that better reflect restorative processes and a non-punitive approach