Restoring Justice
“Restorative justice is a philosophy,” says Deborah Brandy the director of Student Health and Human Services at LAUSD. “It’s a way of thinking, it’s a way of being within a school or office.”
LAUSD added restorative justice practices to its School Discipline Policy and School Discipline Bill of Rights in 2013. By 2020, the district hopes to have all schools practicing restorative justice.
John Winslade, a professor of counseling at Cal State University San Bernardino, says, “restorative justice is about giving people who offend in some way a chance to speak to the harm that they have done to other people.”
In the past, if a kid acted up at school, suspension was a likely outcome. But as days lost to suspension grew district wide, it became clear that traditional punishment wasn’t working.
“There’s a growing divide between people in schools where kids are just sometimes written off. And then we end up with people becoming disaffected and they end up in the pipeline to prison,” Winslade says. “Restorative justice is an attempt to do something different.”
When students aren’t in school they can’t maintain continuity in their learning, and often just give up on the system. In many ways, suspension is a vacation for students to sit at home and watch TV or play video games.
Restorative justice in Los Angeles Unified schools is trying to lower suspension rates, especially for African-American males and students with disabilities who have been suspended at a disproportionate rate.
When students come back to school after being suspended, things rarely change and the same kids keep getting suspended over and over again. With restorative justice, the idea is to keep students in their seats learning, while also taking responsibility for their actions.
“Accountability is a key word in restorative practice in general,” Winslade says. And it won’t work if not all parties are on board.
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Director Brandy says that restorative justice gives students the chance to take part in making harms as right as possible.
“Kids feel like ‘wow, now I have a voice. Someone is listening to me whether I’m being a good student that day or if I’ve had a bad day.’ It allows their voice to be heard,” Brandy says about students.
At Dorsey, community-building is at the heart of its restorative philosophy. According to assistant principal Waters, culture circles are used in classrooms to discuss issues that may have arisen during the day.
Students sit in a circle and use a talking piece to encourage active listening. Waters says these circles build capacity and confidence and give students a voice when they “feel they’re never heard, especially when you have a disagreement between a teacher and a student.”
Director Brandy adds that these circles also allow for community building in that teachers can ask students how their day is going or what their goals are for the week.
“It allows for the teacher to build community within the classroom so that kids fell apart and connected to the teacher and their peers,” Brandy says.
(Assistant Principal Luther Waters/Photo by: Sarah McGrew)
Waters talks about how restorative justice sometimes just means checking in on someone when they’ve had a bad day or learning more about a student who struggles in school.
One girl in particular stands outs to Waters. She acted out in school and tended to reply to administrators with expletives. This particular young girl had been molested by her stepfather and was living in a group home.
Waters says, “when you get a kid like that and the notion is ‘oh, I’m going to suspend you and send you home,’ well she doesn’t have a home. And honestly she could care less.”
Eventually, with restorative practices, Waters was able to get her to open up about the struggles that were affecting her school life. “Using restorative justice, you can break through and change some kid's life.”
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Restorative justice considers the whole person and situation instead of focusing on an isolated incident.
Jennifer Tilton, a professor of Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of Redlands who teaches classes about restorative justice and the juvenile justice system says, “every offender I know has been a victim. There’s no kid in juvenile hall who has not been victimized by crime and not been victimized by violence.”
Restorative practices at schools like Dorsey aim to end the cycle of harms by building up trust in the community.
Tilton says, “instead of isolating that person, making that person outside of the community, repairing the harm is about reknitting the fabric of the community.”
Student Perspective
Such a big change in a school seems like it would be noticed by its students, but after talking to 10 students at Dorsey’s homecoming football game only three knew about the restorative justice program at their school.
The three that knew about the program, knew because they had community-building circles in some of their classes.
However, while not everyone knew about the program many expressed a fondness for the community at Dorsey.
Anaiah, a junior at Dorsey, says that there’s a community atmosphere within the halls of her school. “We do feel connected because we form many bonds with everybody,” she says. “[Teachers] always encourage us.”
Criticism of Restorative Justice
Not everyone is favorable of restorative justice. In a Readers React article posted to the LA Times in 2015, many expressed negative opinions about the new philosophy for discipline in LA schools.
Some comments say initiatives like this one are why schools have “deteriorated,” and that students are “defiant and disrespectful.”
A physical education teacher at Dorsey High School expressed his concerns with the restorative justice system based on his experience at his previous school last year.
“Our school was predominantly black,” he says. “[The district] said you’ve got the highest suspension rate in the district for African-Americans. Well, our school is African-American!”
By not being able to send kids home, he saw disruption in his classes increase and felt that teachers had been disempowered in a “monumental” way.
“It used to be that in school you could hold people accountable. Now I feel like all we do is advocate, placate, and medicate these kids,” he says.
The disempowerment of teachers and lack of accountability are common views shared by critics of introducing restorative justice into schools.
Getting stakeholders on board
The biggest challenge for Dorsey is getting people to buy in to this new alternative to traditional discipline.
Both Waters and Brady express that one of the biggest challenges in implementing restorative justice at school is the buy in from community members.
“You have to have buy in from the administrators, the teachers, the classified staff and the parents,” Brandy says.
Restorative justice doesn’t work unless all parties are committed to making it work. When there is just one person who decides not to participate in the circles, it throws the system off and makes the process less effective.
But Brandy says that when teachers see restorative practices working in other classes, they’re more inclined to want to get involved in the training and bring it to their own classroom.
“The big piece that helps with that buy in is when [stakeholders] actually see this working,” Brandy says.
For an example on how restorative justice has come to work on a bigger scale, the LAUSD community can look to New Zealand.
Restorative Justice in New Zealand
In the United States, the school to prison pipeline is prominent in discussions about juvenile incarceration. When kids get suspended they often get in more trouble away from school where they answer to law enforcement officers instead of school administrators.
In the LAUSD school system African-American males have been suspended at a disproportionate rate and make up a disproportionate amount of incarcerated juveniles.
Winslade is from New Zealand where restorative practices were started in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Who are the Māori?
Māori are an idigenous group in New Zealand who make up 14% of the population. For more, click or tap here.
“The same kind of issue was happening [in New Zealand] with increased levels of punishment and suspension from school and locking up in prison… of people who are of Māori decent.”
As Māori children were facing more punishment in school and from the justice system, families asked that they be given a chance to deal with the youth.
The Māori eventually started family group counseling, which people eventually realized had the same principles as restorative justice.
After implementing restorative practices, changes in the New Zealand youth justice system quickly became evident. “The number of people who had admitted to offenses were suddenly increased from about 50 percent to 90 percent,” says Winslade. “The outcome shows a drop in youth crime that was much more powerful, much more effective than punishment systems could ever produce or show.”
This drop in crime wasn’t just convictions, but reported crime as well. In this case, New Zealand can provide a framework for how LAUSD can continue to advance its restorative justice philosophy.