The film carefully and truthfully focuses on the lives of a few teenagers living in adverse family situations, as well as the initiatives taken by them and their teachers to respond in a trauma-informed way to their learning challenges. The young people and their teachers together engage in learning about the Adverse Childhood Experience study. The school opens a free health clinic. Teachers and administrators look beyond the surface behaviors to try to work with students in deeply humane ways, honoring their dignity and humanity, engaging in loving rather than punitive responses to discipline issues.

The story of Lincoln High School’s success is not one that feels easy to replicate, and there are some missing pieces.

• At the school in Washington, one teacher takes into her family a student abandoned by her family. Others engage at all hours with students who are struggling. How do we ask of educators and caregivers the level of attention and commitment that those teachers and administrators showed? How does a school honor both the teachers’ needs for boundaries and the students’ needs for attention and care?
• All the adults in the film are European-heritage people, as are most (but not all) of the students. What would this initiative look like in a predominantly indigenous or African-American or immigrant community/school? It’s worth complementing Paper Tigers with the work of Restorative Justice for Oakland Youth, an African-American-led organization working in predominantly African-American schools in California. See made in 2013 describing their work with Restorative Circles in Schools.
• The ACE study itself was done with primarily white, middle-class people in California, asking about individual experiences of adversity but not looking at systematic dignity violations or cultural or identity-based trauma. What would it look like if it accounted for adverse experiences of racism or systematic discrimination?

For anyone interested in exploring more about how to deepen trauma-informed approaches to discipline/student support or apply restorative justice in educational settings, check out EMU’s upcoming Restorative Justice in Education (RJE) Academy June 27-28, 2016, here. Key RJE presenters, schoolteachers and administrators who are working with restorative justice in schools will share their insights on developing RJE cultures in school settings. And we’re screening Paper Tigers!

Joseph Luciani, MA ’13, has spent the last year leading a restorative justice pilot program in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school system in the United States.

Luciani coaches all the teachers at one Los Angeles school, Augustus Hawkins High School (AHHS), enabling them to run community-building circles with their students at least once per week. He also facilitates circle processes to address disciplinary matters at the school, providing an alternative to traditional methods like suspension. In a low-income neighborhood in South Los Angeles, AHHS students – about 70% Latino and 30% African American – are often dealing with the effects of domestic violence, gangs and poverty in their lives. (Luciani is employed by the California Conference for Equality and Justice, which runs the pilot program at AHHS.)

One goal for the restorative justice program at the school is to interrupt the “school-to-prison” pipeline. Luciani points to data showing that students who are suspended are more likely to drop out of school and become involved with crime. By using restorative justice principles as an alternative method to deal with disciplinary problems, Luciani and his colleagues aim to keep students in school as much as possible, heading off the long-term negative consequences that suspension can set in motion.

According to a preliminary analysis of the program, 124 circle processes involving 1,144 participants were held at the school between September 2013 and March 2014. That total includes 48 community-building circles and 76 conflict and healing circles. Anecdotal evidence from teachers, Luciani says, shows that the community-building circle processes have helped create better learning environments for students.

“Everybody really bought into the process because they saw the transformation that restorative justice was bringing,” said Luciani.

Circles are also becoming a part of the school’s culture, and have even been initiated by students who become aware of conflict.

“The great thing is that it becomes natural,” says Luciani. “If something is happening, it becomes the response: ‘Let’s have a circle.’”

The restorative justice pilot program at AHHS is an early step toward an ambitious goal set by the Los Angeles Unified School District: to implement restorative justice programs across the district by 2020.

Deborah Brandy, school operations coordinator for the district, said that implementation will begin with restorative justice training at all the division’s hundreds of schools. Central office staff will then provide ongoing support to teachers using circle processes and other restorative practices now being put to use by Luciani and his colleagues at AHHS. Several other schools have also begun similar pilot programs.

“The schools that have begun implementing the restorative practices … have seen a difference in the behavior of the students, in terms of feeling more comfortable communicating with peers and with adults,” Brandy said. “If there is a need or an issue, they feel comfortable coming to an adult to discuss it prior to taking action on their own.

“Those skills are critical for helping students become more successful in schools, as well as in society,” she added.

Luciani applauds the district’s commitment to restorative justice, but cautions that it will need significant investment to succeed. Suspending a student is an easy, five-minute process, he says. Facilitating a circle process can take hours, and requires having qualified facilitators already in place. ��— Andrew Jenner

Long a pioneer in the field of restorative justice, EMU will become the first in the country to offer restorative justice programs housed within a graduate education program. Beginning this fall, students in the MA in education program will be able to pursue an interdisciplinary concentration in restorative justice in education (RJE) by taking courses through the education department as well as EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.

The education department will also begin offering a 15-hour graduate certificate in RJE for students who aren’t pursuing a master’s degree.

“Restorative justice offers a completely different model of addressing classroom discipline problems that focuses on building effective relationships both between teachers and students, and among students,” said Kathy Evans, an EMU education professor who has led the development of the new RJE programs.

While the theories of restorative justice were originally developed as an alternative approach to criminal justice, they have increasingly been embraced by teachers looking for more creative ways to address classroom behavior and create better learning environments, said Evans, who anticipates wide interest in EMU’s new programs.

“People are hungry for good instruction about what restorative justice looks like in schools, and how they can be better prepared to be restorative justice educators,” she said.

To make the RJE programs more accessible to students from out of the area, some courses will be offered online or in other alternative formats such as on weekends or as week-long, intensive summer courses.

A successful example of restorative justice in schools was featured in a recent cover story in YES! Magazine by Fania Davis, a past instructor at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute. The executive director of Restorative Justice for Oakland (Calif.) Youth, Davis writes that restorative justice programs in some schools have been so successful at reducing suspension rates – by 74% in one case – that the school board has endorsed use of restorative justice throughout the city school system.

In January 2014, the federal departments of education and justice also threw their weight behind restorative justice in the country’s schools. The agencies issued a joint letter telling teachers and administrators to address the disproportionate rates at which minority and economically disadvantaged students are suspended – suggesting, among other things, the use of restorative justice practices to address discipline problems and create healthy learning environments. With that mandate will come even more opportunity for graduates of EMU’s new RJE concentration or certificate programs, Evans said.

“The new programs in restorative justice in education are an excellent example of the mission of our graduate programs, which is to meet needs in the world with our unique combination of expertise, perspective, and values,” said graduate studies dean Jim Smucker. “This concentration is a result of two graduate programs working together to offer something that is quite unique to the field of education, and something only EMU’s combination of expertise and values can provide to the world.”

Over the next several years, faculty from the MA in education program and the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding will begin developing new courses, with the goal of eventually creating a full MA in RJE program, Evans added.

For more information on the new programs, contact Evans at kathy.evans@emu.edu or 540-432-4590. — Andrew Jenner

justice, n. Etymology: < Old French justise, -ice (jostise) uprightness, equity, vindication of right, administration of law, jurisdiction, court of justice, infliction of punishment, gallows, judge, etc. —Oxford English Dictionary online

The customary way of thinking of justice – usually tied to determining what kind of punishment is appropriate for a particular wrongdoing – is not the way that justice is viewed at the Center for Justice and Peacebuilding. At CJP, many faculty, staff and students are advocates for “restorative justice.” In this essay, Brian Gumm explains the roots of restorative justice. Gumm is a licensed minister in the Church of the Brethren, who is in his final year of earning two master’s degrees at EMU: an MA in conflict transformation and a master’s of divinity. This paper is excerpted from a talk Gumm gave to the Student Learning and Global Justice Conference in the Washington D.C. area on April 8, 2011.

From humble origins

Restorative justice is a values- and principles-based framework that attempts to address incidents of wrongdoing by asking three questions: (1) Who has been hurt? (2) What are their needs? and (3) Whose obligations are these?¹ In its early days in the 1970s and ‘80s, before it was even called “restorative justice,” the field’s practitioners saw the Western criminal justice system as implicitly asking a very different set of questions when addressing wrongdoing: (1) What laws have been broken? (2) Who did it? and (3) What do they deserve?²

When contrasting these two sets of questions, it’s quickly seen that the starting points for restorative justice and the criminal justice system are fundamentally different. One assumes a powerful system where the other assumes relationship. One focuses on an individual, the other, a community. Finally, one prescribes punishment where the other seeks restoration. But these are boring, abstract ways to talk about restorative justice, so let me tell you a story. It’s a story first told to me by the “grandfather” of the restorative justice movement, my mentor, colleague, and friend, Dr. Howard Zehr. I lovingly call this the “creation story” of restorative justice.³

One night in in the spring of 1974, in a small town in central Ontario, two teenage boys got drunk and went on a vandalism spree throughout the town. The two 18-year-old boys smashed windows, damaged vehicles, defaced church signs, and even pulled a boat out of a driveway and into the middle of the street before going back home and passing out. They awoke the next morning to police knocking on their door. The boys were charged with vandalism of 22 properties.

Mark Yantzi, who had begun working with the local probation office as a (MCC) volunteer, and David Worth, another MCC volunteer involved with the justice system, ended up on the case. One of them suggested that it “would be neat” to have the offenders in this case meet the victims of their vandalism face to face instead of simply sending them both off to jail, to which the other replied “why not?”⁴ Along with their pre-sentence report to the judge in the case, the two Mennonite probation workers suggested their wild idea.

Much to everyone’s surprise, the judge accepted their suggestion. So the two Mennonite probation workers took the two young men around Elmira, Ontario, knocking on doors, meeting their victims face to face, and apologizing. Within three months the men paid back all their victims. This experience radically reoriented the life of one of the boys, Russell Kelly, who had lost both of his parents and was struggling with substance abuse issues before this. He eventually entered college to study law and security and became a volunteer mediator with in Kitchener, Ontario.⁵

Let’s explore our three restorative justice questions using this story. First: Who has been hurt? The obvious answer is the 22 people or families whose properties were vandalized. But wait a minute, we also heard that one of these boys, Russell, had lost both of his parents before he was even 18 years old, and was coping with drugs and alcohol. Does this not sound like someone who is hurting? So any justice process that is restorative will quickly show how easily lines are blurred when you shift from blame in an isolated incident to identifying pain and brokenness in a community that has experienced wrongdoing.

Once we have an idea who has been hurt in a situation, we ask: What are their needs? The people whose properties were vandalized had their sense of safety and security shattered, as were their plate glass windows from rocks thrown by the boys. These people needed to feel safe again in their own homes and neighborhoods. And what of the boys? We know from Russell’s experience of losing his parents that he likely needed the experience of a family which he’d since lost, the need to feel connected and supported.

Lastly, we’ll ask: Whose obligations are these? As members of the community, the boys had an obligation to help restore their victims’ sense of security and safety, but the victims and the wider community hopefully feels – even in the midst of their distress at the violation – a sense that these boys are one of their own and might be successfully brought back into relationship through the justice process. This last bit on community obligations is tricky business, as we are so conditioned to think of justice as a one-way street. But at the same time you can’t command someone to suddenly begin thinking and acting restoratively in this way.

Punitive “justice”

Through his survey of literature covering post-Enlightenment legal traditions and prison systems, David Cayley helps us see that the penitentiary system that developed in 18th and 19th century America had its roots in early modern European monastic orders that practiced particularly harsh forms of punishment, including solitary confinement and physical mutilation.⁶ But as even the word “penitentiary” shows us, it goes back further than that. What made such an idea conceivable in the first place? Cayley makes the claim that “the idea that crime demands prosecution and punishment seems no more than common sense to us today. But it cannot be found in Western society before the 12th century, when modern conceptions of law first made their appearance.”⁷

In early European society, law was “embedded in social life rather than embodied in special legal institutions.”⁸ If this sounds familiar, it should. Pre-modern practices of law and justice were inherently social. This sociality began to shift in Europe, however, in the 11th and 12th centuries when the Roman church began to assert itself over-against ruling authorities, resulting in a long and conflictual, often violent, social-economic-political battle.

Results of this power struggle produced among other things: the Inquisition in the 15th century; the Protestant Reformation in the 16th; and the so-called “Wars of Religion”⁹ in 17th century Europe. These helped give birth to the Enlightenment intellectual project and its political progeny, the powerful Western systems we inhabit today: the modern nation-state and democratic capitalism. Mixed up in all of this was the developing idea that crime is primarily an individual matter rather than social, and therefore the solution is also individual, namely punishment.

What I’ve just tried to do is to take a quick sprint through Western history from the medieval period into the early modern period in hopes that it can become at least conceivable that the whole cluster of thoughts and practices encapsulated in a phrase like “crime and punishment” or a word like “penitentiary” are not givens, but are rather products of messy history in which the church is very much enmeshed.

The Anabaptist angle

Before I start explaining what Anabaptism is, I want to recall that the two probation workers who had the crazy of idea of making the two boys apologize to the victims of their vandalization were Mennonites.

I think it’s no accident that these two Mennonite men would conceive of such a thing in this strange new work in which they found themselves, and that it didn’t just come out of the clear blue sky. Rather, this idea was the fruit of a peculiar strand of the Christian tradition.

The Anabaptist tradition, which eventually formed into groups including the Mennonites, began in 16th century Germany, roughly contemporary with the beginnings of the Protestant Reformation. While there is no single “myth of origin” for the Anabaptist movement,¹⁰ one of the more straightforward and observable dimensions was their dawning conviction – based on a deep engagement with the Bible – that the rite of baptism was to be a person’s own conviction discerned in the fellowship of believers. In other words, they became convinced and practiced adult baptism, which in that generation meant re-baptism, the source of the word “Anabaptism.” In Reformation- era Europe – the highly volatile climate described earlier – such a move as adult baptism was political from the word “go.” For both Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany, hand in glove with provincial governments, the practice of infant baptism served not only a spiritual function but a civic one as well, namely being registered as a citizen to your territory and, if you were an able-bodied man, being subject to inscription into your prince’s wars.

Simply put, the Anabaptists were not only heretics but treasonous heretics at that, which earned them death by drowning, burning, hanging, and my favorite: being put in a cage and hung from a church steeple. My point is to underscore the importance of the martyr tradition in Anabaptism, especially among Mennonites even today, nearly 500 years later.¹¹

Early Anabaptist conflict within the fellowship was handled with deference to Jesus’ own instruction in Matthew’s gospel, namely Matthew 18:15-18, which for generations Anabaptists would call the “Rule of Christ.”¹² With the restorative justice creation story in view, let me offer you the first few sentences of the Rule of Christ: “If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that ‘every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses’” (NIV).

Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that this verse, so important to early Anabaptist experience, could have somehow helped spark the imaginations of the two Mennonite probation workers on another continent a few hundred years later?

Circling the globe

Let me make a few things clear as to what I am not trying to say in all that’s preceded. I am not trying to colonize restorative justice by claiming that it’s solely a “Mennonite thing.” Doing so would be ignorant and irresponsible considering the directions that the field has taken since the 1970s.

Another thing I am not trying to say is that the communal/relational attitudes inherent to restorative justice are necessarily new. In fact, if anything, I hope I have shown through my glimpses into history that they’re actually quite old. When my mentor, Howard Zehr, tells this creation story and his later work in articulating the field, he’s quick to point out that non-Western people who come to know restorative justice often say quite matter-of-factly, “Well, of course! That’s how we’ve handled wrongdoing all along!” or “That’s how our elders handled these situations!” Indeed, a communal awareness as it relates to handling wrongdoing is a very, very old impulse, and that it’s so surprising to Westerners only underscores how our societal imagination has been captivated by the habits of individualism.

In short, restorative justice is a “return to the teachings” approach for understanding and repairing harm in communities and societies. The movement has swept the globe, with unique and culturally sensitive applications being developed for criminal offenses, societies transitioning out of violent conflict, disciplinary matters in educational settings, and the lingering effects of historical harms, such as slavery.

Notes

1. Howard Zehr. , Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2002, 21.
2. Ibid.
3. This story has been told by Howard Zehr countless times and has been recorded in a handful of restorative justice books. I’m drawing on the account from Gary Nyp. Pioneers of Peace: The History of Community Justice Initiatives in the Waterloo Region, 1974-2004. Kitchener, Ontario: Pandora Press, 2004, 13-15.
   
4. Ibid., 15.
5. Barb Toews, , Little Books of Justice & Peacebuilding. Intercourse, PA: Good Books, 2006, 9.
6. David Cayley. . Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1998, 138.
7. Ibid., 123.
8. Ibid., 126, emphasis mine.
9. Cf. William T. Cavanaugh. . New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
10. Cf. Thomas Heilke. “Theological and Secular Meta-Narratives of Politics: Anabaptist Origins Revisited (Again).” Modern Theology 13, no. 2 (1997): 227-52.
11. Cf. Thieleman Van Bragt. . 2nd reprint ed. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2001; and . Edited by Kirsten Eve Beachy. Scottdale, Pa.: Herald Press, 2010.
12. Ervin A. Schlabach. “Rule of Christ among the Early Swiss Anabaptists.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 52, no. 3 (1978): 265.

The children of prisoners, however, have been a hugely overlooked group until recently. As the book cover notes, “Every night, approximately 3 million children go to bed with a parent in prison or in jail.” This means that almost every schoolteacher in America is likely to have at least one child in class who fits this description.

What Will Happen to Me? (Good Books, 2011) contains poignant photos by Howard Zehr of 30 children whose parents are incarcerated, along with the children’s thoughts, plus some reflections by their caregivers. Co-author Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz has compiled practical suggestions on such topics as “staying in touch,” “adjusting to a parent’s return,” and “self-care for family caregivers.” One of the main objectives of What Will Happen to Me? is to alleviate the sense of shame and isolation felt by the children of prisoners and to support their resiliency. The book also contains a valuable “bill of rights” for the well-being of these children.

The need for new approaches to school discipline came to the attention of tens of thousands in the nation’s capital when The Washington Post ran the headline “Fairfax school disciplinary policies scrutinized after apparent suicide.”

It was January 22, 2011, and the opening paragraphs of the newspaper article read:

The apparent suicide of a 15-year-old high school football player in Fairfax County has sparked concern about the school district’s disciplinary policies, which critics say are overly punitive and often debilitating for students.

The concerns come as students at W.T. Woodson High School mourn the loss of Nick Stuban, a former sophomore running back on the junior varsity team. Football players wore their homecoming jerseys in memory of the well-liked teen Friday, and many other students wore black. Nick’s death followed a disciplinary action that some parents and school activists considered unnecessarily harsh. A school spokesman defended the district’s policies as appropriate and in line with state law.

Nick had been suspended two months previously for buying a legal drug at school called JWH -018, often called synthetic marijuana. Nick tried the drug at home, but the drug-seller, another student, apparently pointed him out to school officials.

Nick was banned from Woodson and thus cut off from his social circle, including the Boy Scout group to which he belonged. He eventually was permitted to enroll in another school, but on what would have been his sixth day there, January 20, he killed himself at his home.

Nick’s father, Steve Stuban, says the punishment contributed to his son’s death in that it robbed him of his support system, his identity and his friends, which caused him to sink into a deep depression.

The Post reported that in 2009 another Fairfax County high school football player, 17-year-old Josh Anderson, committed suicide as he awaited a hearing on a second marijuana offense.

On March 10, 2011, the Post ran a story about a 13-year-old girl undergoing a disciplinary process which had kept her out of her regular middle school for nearly two months. Her offense? Having acne medication in her school locker.

School to prison

In newspaper blogs in Texas this past year, Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Wallace Jefferson is widely quoted as having said: “More than 80 percent of adult prison inmates are school dropouts. Charging kids with criminal offenses for low-level behavioral issues exacerbates the problem.” Whether Judge Jefferson claims these words or not, the observation is correct.

Annette Fuentes, author of Lockdown High: When the Schoolhouse Becomes a Jailhouse (Verso, 2011), wrote: “In California alone, there were more than 700,000 out-of-school suspensions in the last school year. And Texas had more than half a million.

“Each time a student is excluded from the classroom, it puts his or her education in suspension,” she wrote. “Suspensions lead to the school-to-prison pipeline. The harsh discipline of zero-tolerance policies puts the most vulnerable kids, disproportionately African-American and Latino students, at greatest risk of dropping out of school. And from there, excluded from education and with limited prospects, they are at greater risk of falling into jail.”

“Zero tolerance” refers to the way many school districts moved to absolute penalties and increased punishments for violations of weapon, drug and some other policies. Zero tolerance accelerated following the gun-killings of 13 in Columbine High School (Colorado) by two students in April 1999.

Turning the tide

Fairfax County Public Schools comprise the 11th largest system in the United States and are often a bellwether for the nation in education, given the system’s relatively wealthy tax base and prime location in the shadow of the nation’s capital.

A dozen or so restorative justice practitioners in northern Virginia, some of them trained at CJP, are trying to turn the tide in Fairfax County schools toward more humane, effective, and lasting results. CJP-linked practitioners include Vickie Shoap, the first “restorative practice specialist” hired by the Fairfax school system (beginning July 2011); Joan G. Packer, a district-court certified mediator formerly employed as the “conflict resolution specialist” by Fairfax schools; Packer’s successor Kristen W. (Packer retired in 2010 after 32 years of service to the schools); David Deal, vice chair of the Restorative Justice Project under Northern Virginia Mediation Service; and Natalie Thompson, who also works with the Mediation Service.

Packer supervised , MA ’10, for an internship in the spring of 2010 doing restorative presentations, trainings and interventions within the Fairfax school system. “In 2002, I graduated from Woodson High School” – Nick Stuban’s school – “so this felt like coming home to me,” said Buescher.

One of the highlights of his one-semester internship, Buescher said, was participating in a two-day workshop on restorative practices attended by some of the administrators of Westfield High School (the largest in the state) and staff from five other schools.

Starting with the enthusiastic backing of Westfield vice principal Dave Jagels, Deal said there has been a gradual increase in referrals to facilitators trained in restorative practices. “A single case was handled at the end of the 2007-2008 school year,” he wrote on his website, . The next year, there were seven cases handled. Then the third year, 2009-10, 34 cases, with other schools joining Westfield in making referrals. This grew to 80 cases in 2010-11.

Increasing interest in applying restorative practices to schools was reflected in the third biannual National Conference on Restorative Justice in June 2011, where 18 percent of the sessions (13 out of 71) pertained to restorative justice in school settings.

In one of the sessions, Barbara McClung of the Oakland (Calif.) Unified School District explained: “The paradigm shift from zero tolerance to restorative discipline helped to successfully reduce fights and defiance, while lowering suspension rates by more than 80 percent.”

Nashville revisited

In an odd way, it was someone from the Oakland, California, school district that caused Chris Peak, MA ’11, of Nashville, Tennessee, to enroll in the master’s program at CJP. On an airplane several years ago, Peak happened to sit next to attorney Sujatha Baliga, an alumnus of EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute and a key player in the shift to restorative discipline in Oakland’s schools. As the two chatted, she handed him a book by restorative justice pioneer Howard Zehr and told him about Zehr’s place of employment, CJP.

Jumping forward, Peak is now enrolled as a full-time master’s student at CJP. For his required practicum, Peak arranged to return to the conservative, private Presbyterian school from which he had graduated in 2003. He recalls that he spent much of his early teen years in trouble at that school – he now understands that he was angry over his parents’ divorce, but the anger came out in unhealthy ways. “I took on the identity of rebel and misfit,” he says.

Peak had a simple goal in returning to his old school: To show them how they could align their values – their professed love and concern for each child – with restorative practices, rather than retributive ones, which he felt hurt him years ago and no doubt many other young students before and since.

“They gave me 90 minutes for a teacher in-service, but they stayed for two hours. They didn’t want the session to stop. ‘This is what Jesus wants us to do,’ they declared.”

Unexpectedly, Peak found himself addressing gaps in the wider culture of the school. “I found the teachers didn’t feel cared for by the system, and the administrators didn’t feel cared for either, especially not by the church above them. So it wasn’t surprising that the students didn’t perceive themselves to be in a caring atmosphere.”

Centering himself on the Christian values that all subscribed to, Peak led components of the school and nearby church to take the time to sit in facilitated circles and to open their hearts and minds to each other.

“There had been no time set aside to simply communicate – local ownership of anything is time consuming,” he said. In just a couple of months, everyone was noticing positive changes in behavior and relationships. Says Peak: “They were developing a culture of care.”

[For further reading: (2005) by Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz and Judy H. Mullet // (2008) by Ron and Roxanne Claassen // “School-Based Restorative Justice: Ten Lessons Learned,” a paper by David T. Deal posted at ]

As school districts across North America – indeed perhaps across the world – struggle with how to enable students to study productively in safe, respectful school environments, more school personnel are checking into restorative justice and asking themselves whether the practices of “RJ” could be applied in their environments.

Certain school districts in Virginia, Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, California and Colorado are among those leading the way in the United States in shifting to a restorative, community-based approach to handling conflicts within school systems.

One of the first “how to” books published in the United States was (Good Books, 2005), written by Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, director of Mennonite Central Committee’s (and a frequent adjunct instructor at EMU), and EMU psychology professor Judy H. Mullet. The book was edited by EMU restorative justice professor Howard Zehr.

More recently, (MA ’08) has produced a fascinating, transparently honest summary of the steps taken and the lessons learned when she and other RJ experts worked to permeate the principles and practices of RJ through one of the largest school districts in Canada, School District #35 in Langley, British Columbia. Her book is titled Educating for Peacebuilding – Implementing restorative justice principles and practices in a school system (Fraser Region Community Justice Initiatives, 2010).

Below are 30 excerpts from the book. It is available for purchase from (CJI), a non-profit that has grown from seeds planted by the Langley Mennonite Fellowship Church in the 1980s. CJI works in all types of communities in British Columbia, including those within the criminal justice system. For more information, visit .

• Give careful thought to the terms you use and be intentional in how you use them… We decided upon “Restorative Action” [RA] after considering several alternatives. “Restorative Justice” seemed too closely associated with the criminal justice system. “Restorative Discipline,” while used by many respected colleagues, struck us as emphasizing wrong-doing and being associated with top-down decision-making… “Restorative Measures” sounded too legal. However, one of these terms may work for you. Just be sure to think through the message that you want to send. (p. 52)
• We avoid the terms “victim, offender,” or “bully,” as we don’t want to label students. Instead we say “kids,” or “students involved,” or “the guy that made the threat,” or simply “Ashley.” (p. 52)
• To make any progress, identify the senior administrators in the schools (principals and vice-principals) and at the school-district level who are interested in implementation. Not just “sounds like a neat idea” interested, but “I get this and I will do what it takes to get this into the school” interested. (p. 32)
• If you are committed to a certain school or district, start pitching the idea to school trustees, parents, and teachers until you have a critical mass of pressure. (p. 32)
• Seek out the teachers, students, and parents who are already interested and do not need much convincing. You will know who they are because they often respond to your pitch for restorative justice with comments such as: “This is what I already do intuitively! This makes so much sense! This should have been happening when I was a student!” …. These champions will form your core group of supporters and help your outreach work later. (p. 33)
• A model that has emerged and seems to work well involves designating one “point person” for each school. Anyone in the school community who is interested in any aspect of RA — including those who want to refer a situation — can approach this point person for assistance… For a point person to be effective, ongoing efforts must be made to ensure that he/ she is known, accessible, and up-to-date on the workings of the RA team. (p. 38)
• Even when schools are enthusiastic, they often experience initial difficulties and resistance to spending the necessary amount of time, energy, and resources on implementing RA. We try to frame it as “front-end loading” — an initial input of intense energy and focus, coupled with the hope that an RA team in the school will be a positive presence for change and lighten the load for everyone over time. See if you can find ways that make the initial training easier to support and understand for all involved. For example, students have given us feedback that it is useful for them to have a letter to show their teachers which explains the program and explains their absence from class in more depth. (p. 57)
• [From CJI’s 2003 annual report] Our team is realizing that implementing restorative peer mediation teams is not necessarily the primary measure of success or focus of the project. We are constantly reminded of our goal to help shift school culture, which can take many forms. In the elementary schools, many strategies are underway. We are involved in four elementary schools… Staff from each of these schools participated in a 16-hour training held from October to January… The aim of the elementary training was to “educate the educators” in RA and give them some basic skills for working with their students. This training was extremely well attended (32 staff from the four schools) and well received. (p. 20)
• [From CJI’s 2005 annual report] Although our programs and training methods are designed to be sustainable without our supervision and intervention, we are aware that many schools can use additional support and “t���dzܲ��������Ǵdzپ��Բ�” in implementing an effective RA program. (p. 22)
• [From CJI’s 2007 annual report] Dialogue circles — also known as peace circles — were initiated as a way for students to discuss important issues in a safe, non-judgmental atmosphere. Last May, two dialogue circles were held at Palm Elementary School with a group of 10 Grade 2 girls as a way to discuss the issue of inclusion on the playground. This was our first attempt at holding a dialogue circle and it was not only a lot of fun but a great educational tool to use with the girls. (p. 25)
• [From CJI’s 2008 annual report] Restorative dialogue circles were initiated at Victory Secondary School in spring 2007. Working with the school’s youth care worker, we facilitated four circles on the topic of drug and alcohol use and its effect on individuals as well as on the school community. Students responded positively and requested another series of circles. The next set of four circles was held in fall 2007. We had good initial response from students wanting to participate, with eight or nine students, mostly boys, consistently attending each session. The topic for this set of circles was on drugs and violence. More student-based requests led us to hold another set of four circles in spring 2008. (p. 27)
• [From CJI’s 2010 annual report] “At the elementary level, so far we have trained 10 students and one staff at Watson Elementary to be “Playground Pals.” This is the elementary equivalent of the secondary program, Conversation Peace. As a result of this initiative, these elementary students are now helping other students get along in the playground. (p. 31)
• In time we identified some effective strategic principles, the most important of which was: work with your allies. Others included: make it fun, make it accessible, involve students, and seek student input from the beginning of program development. We tried to make it about building relationships and helping schools see how what we’re offering helps them achieve their existing goals, mandated or otherwise. (p. 32)
• [Successful programs] empower young people by making sure they buy into the process willingly rather than feeling forced to participate in a face-to-face dialogue with someone they are in conflict with or have been hurt by. This is a real danger in school settings that have a culture that imposes top-down authority from adults, especially if they begin to unilaterally “enforce” RA. (p. 32)
• Sometimes RA programs become equated with “mediation programs,” which in turn are seen as being focused on problem-solving only. In this case progress may be made on a problem, but the underlying causes and accompanying bitter feelings remain. (p. 33)
• While it is possible to get started without any funding, it never hurts to have some. Sometimes a school district will make some money or in-kind support available, but not necessarily right away. Apply for grants that support youth initiatives, safe schools, and crime prevention and anti-violence initiatives. If you are part of the school administration, you may be able to creatively reallocate human and material resources. (p. 33)
• Once we had been running the RA program for five or six years, we received some financial support from the school district. We have also been fortunate to receive support from individual schools for matters such as providing relief teachers when classroom teachers were in the RA training. Other programs rely heavily on in-kind contributions — their rent, supplies, or even training materials are provided by other sources such as the school district or the local police detachment. Whatever the case, creativity and persistence are required. (p. 34)
• Getting small, one-time grants or funding is possible as many grants are available for supporting youth and anti-violence initiatives on a pilot-project basis. However, getting sustainable funding is often a life-long task. (p. 34)
• We quickly realized that schools found it difficult to schedule time for the training sessions, and so we adapted our schedule to fit theirs. Some chose to do it all at once — four days straight — while others opted for once a week or once every two weeks. Some schools were creative and did the training as a weekend retreat off-site. The key is to remain flexible with the training schedule or approach. (p. 35)
• We designed Conversation Peace so that according to the situation, adults and youth could train together or separately. Most of our training sessions have youth and adult participants together, an approach that everyone involved seems to enjoy. (p. 37)
• In some ways our model succeeded by simply creating a space where students could speak openly to each other to sort out problems, rather than having to relate in ways their friends might expect (e.g., showing bravado, making rude comments, intentionally shunning, and starting a fight). (p. 35)
• Pizza and doughnuts at lunch-time meetings are seen as a major perk and keep students involved and excited. I’m not sure if any research supports this, but it works. (p. 47)
• An enjoyable and successful part of this program involved including secondary-school student mediators in training as mentors for the elementary-level mediators. The secondary school students loved it and the elementary school ones were in awe. (p. 62, reworded slightly)
• In our RA program, we receive many referrals for interpersonal conflicts that result in classroom disruptions or complaints from parents. Others include: name calling, minor threats, email/internet misconduct, exclusion, minor harassment, and minor assaults and fighting. Many of these are successfully handled by the student mediators. We also take on more serious cases that include property damage and vandalism, persistent harassment and intimidation, plagiarism and systematic cheating on assignments, bringing small “weapons” (such as a pocket knife) to school, and cases of assault. In these situations we often use adult facilitators from CJI and/or trained school staff and district counsellors. (p. 38)
• After six years of implementing RA in SD35, we finally saw it become part of the district’s policy. The mandate to train an RA team in every secondary and elementary school first appeared in the Langley School Board’s 2006-2007 Strategic Plan and remains a part of their current plan. (p. 50)
• A Ministerial Order was released by provincial Ministry of Education in 2007 stating that Provincial Standards for Codes of Conduct require focusing on consequences “that are restorative in nature rather than punitive.” (p. 51)
• Explore how to make research and evaluation a priority from the outset. Programs similar to ours have conducted successful evaluation by engaging with a local university and creating a partnership that met their research needs while providing an exciting project for a grad student. (p. 58)

Long-time practitioner Dan Basham looked back at his four years of working on restorative action programs in British Columbia schools, and came up with a list of nine lessons. Here are three of them from Educating for Peacebuilding (pages 73 and 74):

1. Work towards strengthening existing relationships before trying to forge new ones. Don’t neglect the individuals who have supported us. Keep them as priorities on a day-to-day basis.
2. Be available. School staff members are working in a high-stress environment and are sometimes forced to multi-task as they handle serious situations. We should be available when they phone for help in order to avoid days of frustrating telephone tag. Being available helps create a trusting working relationship that can have a calming effect. If administrators know that help is at hand, they can take that one item off of their to-do list.
3. Emphasize what Restorative Action (RA) is, as opposed to comparing it to punishment or what it is not. Some administrators and teachers fail to see that their school’s interventions amount to punishment. Then, when I compare RA to punishment it causes a defensive reaction, making it more of a hard sell and more difficult for them to understand. Some educators see RA as a challenge to their authority and are afraid that it will make them obsolete. Others feel that they are being criticized for how they are doing their job. No wonder they are not open to RA.

Reprinted from Educating for Peacebuilding. © Catherine Bargen. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

The transition from schoolteaching to restorative justice practitioner was not a big leap for Rebecca Stone (MA ’11). She had worked in a therapeutic boarding school for two years and grasped the skills and methodologies helpful for addressing problems with special education students. She was patient, affirming, flexible. A good listener.

All of which stand her well for the hours she spends with middle and high school students in and around Charlottesville, Virginia, working case by case, often before school begins and at the end of the school day, to help students address the messes in which they find themselves and to make amends as needed.

Since the founding of in 2002, Stone is its first employee to meet many of its school-aged clients in the schools that they attend.

In 2001, (MA ’04) became the first full-time director of Central Virginia RJ. Saunier was lucky. Charlottesville, the hometown of Saunier and of the University of Virginia, already had a core group of “movers and shakers” interested in pursuing alternatives such as restorative justice.

The region’s criminal justice planner had assembled a “restorative justice task force,” consisting of a key judge and a half-dozen prominent players within the criminal justice system, including an assistant commonwealth’s attorney. To this day these individuals remain core members of the task force.

“I had the benefit of growing up in a community that has a culture of openness to doing things differently,” said Saunier.

Even though the interest and will were present, the funding was not – or at least, it had to be patched together from grants that were not large enough or long-term enough to enable Saunier to work with the security of a solid salary and assurance that his organization could operate beyond a year or two.

“Nobody is doing restorative justice as a lucrative career or highly prestigious profession,” said Saunier. “All of us are motivated by the belief that RJ is healthier for everyone – for the victims of crime, for the offenders, and for the communities torn apart by crimes. Healthy communities built on strong relationships produce less crime and wrongdoing.”

In fiscal year 2010, Central Virginia RJ served 190 people. The results were impressive. Juvenile offenders who went through RJ processes had a 10 percent re-offending rate, compared to 25 percent for the state of Virginia. The victims served expressed 100 percent satisfaction in the outcomes, in confidential post-intervention surveys. Eighty-two percent of the clients fully completed their agreed-upon accountability steps.

And demand keeps growing: More than 200 people were served in fiscal year 2011.

Asked for a story on how RJ has helped in Charlotteseville, Stone offered this one:

Two teenage boys were hanging out at a bus stop when a UVa graduate student and his girlfriend walked by. The girlfriend was whistled at, and a plastic bottle was thrown the couple’s way. The grad student verbally reprimanded the teens, and one of the young men punched the grad student, breaking his nose.

Stone and other staffers spent almost six months laying the groundwork – that is, meeting with all parties to prepare them – and then facilitated a circle process which included the teenagers, their closest adult family members, a former teacher of one teen, and the victim of the assault.

The teens expressed genuine remorse – one had tears in his eyes, after listening in the circle to his mother speak about how saddened and disappointed she felt upon hearing that her son would attack someone like that. The teenagers agreed to split the $520 bill for the grad student’s medical treatment and lost wages. The grad student expressed satisfaction at the end, saying he felt more secure and hopeful for the boys’ future.

I have seen many negative, harmful incidents go through restorative processes and come out the other side with transformed students and community members. This is not something people involved in student discipline are used to seeing.
–Josh Bacon, Phd, Director of Judicial Affairs, James Madison University

In just three years, Josh Bacon has mobilized some 50 administrators and staff members in nearly a dozen departments sprawled across the 665-acre campus of in Harrisonburg, Virginia, to embrace restorative justice practices when dealing with each other and with students.

Bacon says it is not a difficult “sell.” One person gets hooked on restorative justice and tells another person and soon a group evolves to attend a restorative justice short seminar, with some continuing to multiple-day trainings.

“The point is, RJ [restorative justice] works,” says Bacon. “And lots of other interventions used for years with students don’t.”

Here’s how Bacon himself came to RJ:

After more than a decade of ushering misbehaving students at JMU through hearings on their conduct, sanctions, and other legalistic steps, Josh Bacon was ready for a change in 2009.

“I went into educational leadership and student affairs because I cared about young adults and their futures,” he says. “But that’s not how they perceived me – they saw me as the ‘bad guy,’ somebody there to enforce the university’s rules, somebody who wasn’t on their side.”

So he took a course at EMU with restorative justice pioneer Howard Zehr. Before the semester was even over, he started applying Zehr’s teachings to his student judicial work.

“One of the biggest oversights in my [previous] work was not engaging the victim; my office was almost entirely offender focused,” recalls Bacon.

Bacon found that he saw astonishing results if he asked the victims of offenses, the perpetrators of them, and affected community members to sit in a facilitated circle and, one by one, share their thoughts on the harms done and the ways those harms could be “put right.”

“I’ve been amazed by how these circles work,” he says. “I’ve never felt so connected to people. It’s almost magical, spiritual, sitting in a circle, passing a talking piece, listening carefully to each other, going deeper. Every one of the students has risen to the occasion.”

Bacon has used restorative justice processes with 20 cases so far – “I keep waiting to see when one will go bad”– from a couple of guys in a fight, to 15 people occupying an entire dormitory floor who needed to sort some problems out.

Here’s an example of a relatively simple case handled by Bacon:

There were these two students who knew each other as freshmen. Fueled by alcohol, one guy assaulted the other.

A year later, the victim contacted me, only coming forward because he had heard about restorative justice. He didn’t want a judicial proceeding; he just wanted to stop ‘living with this thing as I have been for the last year.’

I conferred individually with both parties and made sure that they were both ready to sit with each other and respectfully talk about what had happened. That took maybe six hours total. They each were encouraged to bring one support person along.

The victim wanted to know why he was targeted for an assault – not knowing why, he had been living in fear of possibly another one. The attacker explained that he had been upset with other things in his life and that he would never attack again. He had once been assaulted himself and he knew what it was like.

The victim received a heartfelt apology. I have never seen or heard college students talk like this to each other about a serious issue. The dialogue got to a much deeper level. Both left the meeting feeling like a load had been lifted from their shoulders. The meeting itself only took an hour.

If I compare that to what is involved in a formal judicial hearing – often attorneys present at $1,000 an hour, family members, witnesses, police officers and so forth – it is obvious which approach works better with fewer resources used.

Bacon’s fresh approach to discipline has rippled out into many offices and departments dealing with JMU’s 19,500 students, including those concerned with substance abuse, off-campus life, residence life, clubs and organizations, fraternity and sorority life, the health center and even university planning.

Bacon and his collaborators at JMU have come up with a draft “vision statement” for a “university community that is dedicated to living restoratively.”

In a nutshell, the seven points in the draft describe a university where a student learns to live healthily and healingly in community from the day of freshman orientation through his or her time in residence, to handling conflicts in the classroom, on the playing field, and among friends and family members.

For example, Kristen Muncy, an official in the JMU office of student activities & involvement, now devotes a day of the annual week-long “Presidential Leadership Academy” – targeted at the leaders of student government, clubs, Greek societies, and athletic teams – to restorative justice training.

As a sign of JMU’s commitment to RJ, the university has just hired its first, full-time “coordinator of restorative practices,” based in Bacon’s office. The new person is Chris Ehrhart, a 2011 graduate of EMU’s master’s in conflict transformation, with a focus on restorative justice.

In March 2010, 20 JMU officials, including the senior vice president for student affairs and university planning, joined 50 administrators from 11 other universities at EMU’s first symposium on restorative justice in college settings. About half of this group stayed for three additional days to undergo intensive training led by Bacon, Shay Bright of Colorado State University in Fort Collins, and David Karp of Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In March 2011, a three-day RJ training for campus conduct administrators was repeated at EMU, with 25 attendees from eight universities, including far-flung University of San Diego in California, Carleton College in Minnesota and University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Again, Bacon and Karp led the training, along with Lorraine Stutzman Amstutz, co-director of the office on crime and justice for Mennonite Central Committee, and Dr. Carl Stauffer, EMU restorative justice professor.

Now Bacon plans to offer RJ training to campus conduct officers from around the region, meeting at the Baltimore campus of the University of Maryland in the fall of 2011.

“I believe higher education is just beginning to discover the potential of restorative justice practices in creating educated and enlightened citizens,” he says.

[Josh Bacon, PhD, holds degrees from Clemson University in Educational Leadership, with a cognate in Law, and from Salisbury University in Education Administration, with a concentration in counseling. He codirects the College Student Personnel Administration masters program, in addition to having judicial and teaching responsibilities. Bacon is enrolled in the graduate program at CJP “just because I like learning about this stuff – I don’t need another degree!”]

In the summer of 2010, a Massachusetts man who had just retired from 33 years of policing – the last 17 as a police chief – did an odd thing for relaxation and rejuvenation: he enrolled in Howard Zehr’s restorative justice class at EMU’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute (SPI).

Chief Len Wetherbee already knew quite a bit about the subject. While serving as chief in Concord, Massachusetts, he had read books by Howard Zehr and knew of Barry Stuart, a long-time judge in Canada who had written about the restorative ways indigenous peoples respond to “criminal” matters.

But now Wetherbee was interested in learning more about the university that had educated a bright, energetic woman he had helped recruit in 2008 to be executive director of in Massachusetts.

Her name was (MA ’04) – she had previously worked with in Charlottesville, Virginia, but landed in the Boston area when her physician-husband got a position with Tufts University.

“Chief Wetherbee called me throughout the week at SPI,” Larson Sawin recalls with a smile. “I suspected he’d be wary of the ritual components of SPI, but the coursework caught his imagination. He said the days went so quickly, five o’clock would roll around and he felt like the day had just started.”

At first, some of his SPI classmates were skeptical that police – often considered a fundamentally coercive force – could play a positive role in RJ processes. If only they had known the full scope of what was happening in Massachusetts.

Beginning in 2000, Wetherbee led his department to use restorative processes for juvenile offenses such as vandalism, trespassing, shoplifting, and bullying. The department encouraged the development of a group of trained volunteers to handle these matters, with an officer sitting in on each case.

The results were so positive, neighboring police departments got wind of the experiment and became interested too.

By the time Larson Sawin was hired in 2008, Communities for Restorative Justice had 80 trained volunteers handling referrals from police departments in two communities northwest of Boston.

Three years later, volunteers now number 100, and 10 communities are in the mix – including the urban communities of Cambridge and Arlington – with more communities knocking on the door. Offenses now include violent crime, offenders with records, and adult-initiated offenses.

“More of our police partners understand that restorative justice must treat the victim’s needs as central. If the victim wants restorative justice, it shouldn’t matter if the offender is 16 or 60, or that he broke into someone else’s house last week and therefore has a rap sheet,” explains Larson Sawin.

As an example of a successful case, Larson Sawin told of a swastika spray-painted on the side of a school building. The community wondered if there was a sleeper cell of neo-Nazis lurking about. When the young men responsible were caught, they agreed to participate in a circle process with members of the synagogue. They heard stories of childhood years spent in Nazi Germany and about all those who perished under that symbol. This encounter proved transformational for the young men.

As for the future, “we’ve got miles to go,” says Larson Sawin. “Any theory of change must include ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ strategies. While more communities are embracing this approach, we’re working towards statewide legislation. With folks like Chief Wetherbee in our corner, I know we’ll get there.”