Angie Sullivan teaches impoverished children in Las Vegas. She believes that restorative justice could help them, but only if it is funded.
How do you kill a bill without voting against it?
You take something important like restorative justice – which should be wraparound services and not give any funding. Wraparound services make a huge difference for students. This program is just buzzwords without the services and supplies. Restorative Justice requires money.
Folks need to talk about the wraparound services part of restorative justice.
364 campuses – one teacher to practice and train others = $29 million.
Double that for the basic need supplies you will need to stock up the pantries. Another $29 million
Many teachers keep snacks, bathroom supplies, deodorant, clothing etc in our classrooms for kids. This forces us to take from our own family money and time to address basic needs of students in our path. Nevada Legislators have zero problem demanding that of us and then everyone can complain because we did not give enough.
Nevada taxes folks to run Vegas schools – it taxes teachers everyday.
Restorative justice requires: – food pantry-clothing distribution – weekend supplies- community connections for housing, electricity, gas-help for the family -therapy- medical help (dental, vision, mental health, nutrition) – coordination with social workers, counselors, psychologists- whatever else a student needs help with to them feel safe and secure.
When you do not fund the wraparound services and just focus on expulsions – you make the problems worse.
Expulsions are the end result.
Restorative Justice is supposed to be about wraparound services.
Waving a wand and saying no one gets expulsed – will trap kids on campus.
Does trapping a violent kid on campus solve any of the issues that would have caused the expulsion?
Kids usually get expulsed for guns, knives, fighting and physical violence. If youth are at that point – a team of folks should be involved to try to actively prevent that behavior.
Violent youth or youth acting out in a manner to be expulse – are acting out with good reason. They are still young and could be helped. Trained professional help.
Maslow Hierarchy of needs – youth cannot learn if traumatized, angry, or mentally unwell. They need wraparound servives and professional help.
Teachers with 50 kids in a classroom cannot help the kid who needs an expulsion level of restorative justice. It is supposed to be a trained team with supplies and protocols everyone follows. Not a lonely overwhelmed inexperienced classroom teacher.
Forcing schools which are not equipped to support students to keep them on campus and possibly in the very situations that trigger them – is actually cruel.
The solution cannot be no expulsion and no services too. Just hang out and everyone will ignore the violent kid?
This bill requires a lot of money or it will allow cowardly politicians to:
-Say they did something when they did not do anything-Blame teachers for not caring about students when in reality we deal daily with too many things to name – Harm students and wonder why it did not work. – Complain loudly when disenfranchised communities still see their children headed from school to prison.
Restorative Justice is expensive because meeting youth needs is expensive.
Telling a mental health staff member who already has a caseload of 3,000 kids to train us all to be restorative will not lead to the results folks actually want.
I’ve had the CCSD restorative training. It did not help. It was a joke. The level of trauma some students are trying to process is difficult to describe.
We all know the kids in trauma. Staff do not want to teach kids who physcially attack them. Students do not want to be friends with violent peers. The acting out from trauma usually traumatizes others. If there is no help for that student, or teacher, it ends badly.
Staff will call the police and press charges. Or we will invoke contractual rights to not have to teach a violent student. The student will bounce from location to location ostracized. No one should be beat up physcially at their job (teaching or learning) even if the child is traumatized. Staff quit because they are told to endure physical violence from students. Until you have been punched in the face, kicked in the groin, and bit until you bleed and need stiches – it is difficult to describe.
Perhaps folks do not realize how violent and dangerous some CCSD elementary schools have become with large numbers of youth in trauma.
I assume middle schools and high schools are worse because the students are larger.
If you want restorative justice- send money.
If you do not send money – we will all sit through another useless professional development. We will use the buzzword restorative justice. We will not expulse kids – but they will not have what they need to overcome the issues. And kids will continue to be lost because we simply could not help. We wanted to – but did not have the resources we needed.
The Teacher,
Angie.
She writes:
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Our school was planning to make small groups with staff and students for SEL circle discussions or whatever. Everyone included: admin, the counselor, social workers, SPED teachers, regular teachers, etc. We would all have about 6-8 students and meet once a month or whenever necessary or whatever. I never thought it would work because when you’re talking about 13+ staff members who all need to be in sync to do these breakouts you realize that it’s simply not possible. Someone or two will have a need to cancel and that’s that, the whole ASSUMPTION of restorative justice and peace circles is small, adult moderated groups. I agree with all of the OP, and until that planning includes the necessary layer/s of staff then we should be going back to sending home the worst offenders. I said it: SUSPENSIONS, bring em back.
There is justice, and then there is restoration. They are two different things. Justice means impartiality, fairness. Restoration means returning something to a previously unharmed state. Public school students in the 21st century United States have never in their burgeoning lives experienced a previously unharmed state. Their schools and neighborhoods have been systematically deprived of proper resources due to a combination of rejection of civil rights legislation, and plundering and tax evasion by the over-privileged few. One cannot expect restoration take place by simply putting students in a “restorative justice” circle and having them share their feelings. Would slavery have been acceptable if inter-generational captives sat down together in circles and talked about how they felt?
Some semblance of restoration cannot be achieved until all public schools are fully supported, and no longer attacked by the corporate libertarians controlling both political parties in every nook and cranny of the country. Yes, there should be wraparound services for all, just for starters. Privatization-based segregation also needs to be ended, once and for all. That must mean an end of school rankings.
But restoration is not enough; there also needs to be justice. Justice is fairness. There cannot be justice without equality. Until the wealthy start giving back instead of hoarding, there will be no equality. No equality, no justice. No justice, no peace.
What do we do in the meantime when a student harms others? We must simply do the best we can, and be as kind and understanding as we can, understanding that it is not the fault of anyone in a public school that the quality of life in this country has been so badly degraded that one man has enough money to launch a car into space just for kicks.
Unfortunately this is the norm for “restorative justice.” Schools implement it and no, they do not accompany with gigantic new spending on wraparound services. It is a disaster in my experience, basically a recipe for a huge increase in bullying with the added requirement that bullied students be required to apologize to their tormentors.
Moving away from harsh discipline is the right idea, but it’s not enough. Nothing takes the place of full funding.
I thought restorative justice started out as a peer led conflict resolution program. From what has been said here, it sounds like it has morphed into a full blown social service agency within the public schools. That’s a ridiculous burden to place on teachers and schools! When did it become okay to claim that schools should handle the social service needs of their surrounding communities, especially when there has been no stomach for funding those services within the community at large? If you want to house certain services within a school as a community hub, then fully fund and staff it from the community.
It’s still a peer led conflict resolution method.
So all these other services have just been piggy-backed on to it?
“You take something important like restorative justice – which should be wraparound services and not give any funding.”
As I remember it, the process required willing participation from the “combatants.” In my situation teachers volunteered as silent support, and students volunteered to undergo training to become the advocate/counselor to lead the process. One of the counselors served as coordinator. If there was any expense, it was to pay the counselor coordinator for administering the program.
Wrap around services–healthcare, food, housing, etc.–were separate issues, some of which was handled in-house and most of which was outsourced to the appropriate community agencies. Of course, I am talking about a high density urban/suburban environment, so delivery of services would most likely be much different that in a rural community., but I still think it is hypocritical to heap all the responsibility for “wrap-around services” on a school district and then blame it for all shortcomings of a program the schools are neither trained nor resourced to handle.
I completely supported the restorative justice program in the high school where I worked, It was so important to model conflict resolution that didn’t start with punches but with (civil) words. There were incidents where restorative justice was not appropriate; there were students that reeked of barely contained anger that needed much more intensive intervention.
Lol, there are no “other services.” It’s just a change in discipline policy. Teachers and students basically handle it all.
Angie Sullivan’s description sounds like it is incorporating a lot of community services. I don’t care how many teachers you are training, it doesn’t cost $29 million to run a peer justice program.
Restorative justice, like so much in education, is a grand name without the grand thing.