The last two years, East has started incorporating Restorative Practice (RP) within the school structure as part of a district-wide initiative. Officials hope RP will change the social atmosphere of the school and the way conflict is dealt with within the school.
RP’s goal is to strengthen relationships between individuals as well as build social connections within communities. The fundamental hypothesis of RP is that people are happier, more cooperative and more likely to make positive changes in behavior when those in authority do things with them rather than to them.
At a meeting in November, Principal Jesse Casey told attendees that he had positive experiences with RP. When Casey implemented RP in his previous high school, The Academy at Virginia Randolph, he said there was a 54.5 percent decrease in discipline infractions, and a 74 percent decrease in out-of-school suspensions. There was also a marked decrease in second suspensions when students participated in a Restorative Circle after returning to school from suspension.
“I think [RP] is a really great mindset and approach to building community among people and also repairing harm,” said Melissa Breaden, a social worker at East who has been trained in RP.
One of the fundamental tools of RP is the Restorative Circle. In a Restorative Circle, people form a physical circle to discuss something. Restorative Circles can be used to help resolve a conflict, but also to proactively build community.
“I’ve been to some powerful Restorative Circles,” said William Vincent, an engineering teacher also trained in restorative practices.
East is implementing Restorative Circles through Wildcat PAC. In PAC, teachers are instructed to lead a circle where students can share their thoughts and emotions.
“I think the idea of PAC is to have an opportunity to connect with others in a non-academic way,” Breaden said. “If you have a strong community and people feel close to each other, connected to each other, [and] they care about each other, then there is less chance that anybody is going to do harm to each other. PAC definitely builds into that overall framework.”
However, RP does not have to be only implemented in a non-academic setting. RP can be used during instructional time as well.
“I’ve also incorporated circle activities in my instruction,” Vincent said. “We’ve had projects, and as a reflective component, I had my students get together in a circle, and they were able to articulate what were some of the things they enjoyed about it, what gave them the most trouble, what did they learn most, and this was a way to have that shared experience through that project in a reflective way.”
A common assumption of RP is that it is simply an alternative method of discipline. While this is a part of RP, it is not the main use of RP. Restorative Practice is more proactive than just reacting to conflict or poor behavior.
“When people talk about [RP], I think there is an initial feeling that they’re only used for trying to correct some conflict or resolve some conflict,” Vincent said. “That is something they can be used for, but I think what’s more important is the proactive things that RP can do as far as community building and relationship building… using it proactively to build that community, to build those relationships will in many ways head off or eliminate the conflicts because you’ve built community.”
RP is focused on building a tight-knit community so that there will be fewer opportunities for negative situations and events to occur.
“The idea is you should be doing 80 percent proactive community building, and that leaves only 20 percent of your time or less that is going to be reactive,” Breaden said. “Things are going to happen sometimes, but if you have a strong community that’s tight, and cares about each other, there’s less chance for harm to happen.”
However, there are potential drawbacks and concerns about RP. RP is an alternative to the Zero-Tolerance Policy (a school discipline policy that mandates severe consequences in response to student misbehavior) so it may not provide substantial consequences for severe misbehavior. RP also relies on cooperation between the parties involved in the conflict. A Restorative Circle can only take place if both parties want to do it. If one party does not want to participate, then Restorative Circles cannot be effective.
“There’s been instances here [at East] where I wanted to do a Restorative Circle between two students and one student didn’t want to, and I had to honor that,” said Casey at the November meeting. “This is not at all a fix for everything.”
Fully implementing and seeing the results of RP will take years, but the district hopes it will build a strong community within East and other schools.
Image by Daniel Cefalo & Hammond Sherouse/The ECHO
