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JoAnne Wilcox remembers asking school social workers how to help her child through disciplinary problems. She received “glazed looks” —and was told, “I don’t know how to help you.” Now she hopes a new “restorative” system will help the “bullies” and the “drug dealers” succeed in straightening out.
Wilcox (pictured) has advocated for schools to adopt a program of restorative practices, which focus on supporting students who act out in school instead of suspending or expelling them. With the help of a new “innovation” grant, the city, the teacher’s union, and the school district are collaborating on a long-term plan to implement that vision, aimed at keep kids in the school system and out of the prison system.
The American Federation of Teachers recently awarded the New Haven Federation of Teachers a two-year $300,000 “innovation” grant, to go toward hiring a project director and training teachers and administrators how to implement restorative practices at a school level, said local union President Dave Cicarella.
Plugging School-To-Prison Pipeline
The overall plan is the latest in a series of actions the Harp administration has taken to prevent kids in trouble from being pushed into the streets, said Jason Bartlett (pictured), the city’s youth services director. Restorative justice is a continuation of Youth Stat, a series of regular meetings among cops, city leaders and community leaders to strategize to reach kids before they fall into violence.
Similarly, “restorative practices working group” meetings will bring together administrators, teachers, parents and other community members to brainstorm new protocols concerning expulsions as well as peer or community mediation, said Bartlett. They will work to determine why the student is acting out and work together to address the root cause of violent or disruptive behavior.
“Black and brown kids and urban youth are more directly impacted by suspensions and expulsions,” he said. Students who have been arrested are dramatically less likely to graduate from high school.
About 89 percent of 16 and 17 year olds involved in the juvenile justice system had been previously suspended or expelled from school, according to the state Court Support Services Division.
“Do we make schools whole by expelling 25 students … or do we set up a culture through the use of restorative practices that gets the behavior we want without expelling kids? [The latter] is a longer process but that’s where we have to go.” Bartlett said.
Another main goal of the collaborative process is to revamp the “homebound” program, which offers two hours of classroom instruction daily for expelled students. The city and district are seeking to get students who have been expelled full days of instruction through homebound, Bartlett said. Two hours per day is the state-required minimum.
The working group will meet twice a month for the next few months to figure out creative ways of restructuring homebound, such as offering career training in addition to academic instruction.
Teachers Training Teachers
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For more than a year, student discipline has been a major topic of contention at Board of Education meetings, hinging on the question, “What do we do about students that disrupt class on a regular basis?” said Cicarella (pictured)
The district has set arbitrary quotas on suspensions at schools with major disciplinary problems — a mistake, since teachers have no other tools to keep control of their classroom, he said.
Schools need to ditch the zero-tolerance approach of discipline in favor of practices focused on repairing the harm done and building trust within school communities, said William Johnson, the union-hired project director.
These practices are not new. New Haven has tried its hand at restorative justice over the past several years, including setting up a city-level juvenile review board. And individual schools such as New Haven Academy and High School in the Community have led the way by implementing peer-run mediation councils instead of top-down disciplinary tactics.
Johnson will meet with administrators and teachers to pinpoint a handful of schools to pilot restorative practices in the spring.
“Some would say, ‘Throw it into the five most needy schools,’ but we want a diverse sample,” he said.
Cicarella said he hopes the program will be self-sustaining after the grant is up in Sep. 2016, with knowledgeable educators training others in their schools.
“Repair The Harm”
A crucial part of the process is showing teachers how to model the behavior they expect from their students, said Joe Brummer, associate executive director of Community Mediation, which has spent more than 20 years working with the school system.
Restorative practices is a “personal paradigm shift that individuals have to make work,” which entails “moving away from punishments as a response to behavior problems. Sometimes when you punish kids, it’s only furthering their pain,” he said.
Teachers learn strategies in “nonviolent communication,” meaning they focus on ways to “de-escalate” student misbehavior, instead of making it worse, he said.
Standard disciplinary practices are often based on double standards; the average adult is allowed a bad day or two. “Kids have a bad day and we punish the crap out of them,” Brummer said.
He gave an example of how students in one school worked to “repair the harm” inflicted after a violent confrontation.
Two eighth-grade girls started throwing punches in the library, witnessed by the rest of the grade. “All the other kids were pissed because they were all there preparing for a debate tournament, and the two girls were key to the team,” he said. “Being suspended means they’re not on the team.”
After the girls returned from suspension, the eighth grade gathered for a “restorative circle” discussion to determine how students were impacted by the incident. One student responded that he was upset watching his friends fight, especially since a 4‑year-old in the library had witnessed the event and was “scared to death.”
Other students said they were worried they had sent a message to underclassmen that aggressive behavior was acceptable. In the end, the two girls worked together to go to the other grades to explain what had happened and why it was not O.K. to emulate, Brummer said. They came up with a way to take accountability for their actions.
Police or school resource officers can play a key role in this process, as they do in City Youth Stat, by referring kids through the restorative justice system instead of the criminal justice system, he said.
Brummer warned against responses that seemed restorative but were actually just punitive — for example, juvenile review boards that exclude student involvement when determining how that student can repair the harm done. “That’s just a punishment,” he said.
“The first step is to take the money and do a basic training for folks about what restorative practices and restorative justice are, so everyone’s on the same page,” he said.
“Retreat Restores!”
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Wilcox (pictured) said she understands skeptics of restorative practices. “I joke about it being hippie lessons,” she said. “For some people, it’s a bit too crunchy granola. I had to make it my own.”
Wilcox headed a parent task force last spring charged with examining school discipline and finding alternatives to frequent suspensions and expulsions. She understands that punishment has been culturally normalized as a response to unwanted student behavior. But that doesn’t make it right.
Megan Ifill, parent advocate and mother of two high school students, said schools have a “really bad habit of criminalizing naughty behavior.” Part of that is cultural, with some parents favoring teachers who look like them and who use the firmer disciplinary tactics they are accustomed to, she said.
“Parents like strong, black” teachers who know how to discipline, but that “crosses the line when it’s punitive,” Ifill said. “Is the kid nurtured enough in the classroom? If not, that’s a failing teacher.”
Ifill retired from her job at McKinsey consulting to become a “full-time mom” in 2003, spending a lot of time in her children’s classrooms. As the classroom parent for her son’s kindergarten class, she saw that process of criminalization firsthand, as one of her son’s peers was repeatedly targeted for his misbehavior.
“Once the boys got into it. He got suspended, but my son didn’t,” Ifill said. She said the teacher kept “glaring at the child like he was an ax murderer.” He was held back in first grade and eventually pushed out of his magnet school into a neighborhood school, she said.
Ifill (pictured) ran into the boy once when he was older and, by that point, taking classes through the adult education program. During their conversation, he referred to himself as a former “bad kid.” But she quickly corrected his words: “I said, ‘No, you’re not. I remember your teacher. You were in a hostile environment five hours a day.’”
Prioritizing the hiring of teachers and administrators who are from the community could improve the quality of these day-to-day interactions, she said.
Restorative justice can also be embraced in the home. Wilcox wants to pull together a group of parents and families to “build a community out of restorative practices,” starting with a retreat called “Retreat Restores!” at Common Ground to give people a “wide range of tools” to be better parents. “Blaming parents” does nothing, she said.
Wilcox said she hopes people from different neighborhoods will attend the retreat and bring the methods back to their communities, allowing for varied implementation, depending on need. She applied for a $2,500 grant to start the parent coalition, which she said is “not nearly enough.”
“I’m looking for parents whose kids are the bullies,” Wilcox said. “The parents who are at wit’s end.”
They are also the ones least likely to raise their hands and step into the spotlight. Wilcox knows from personal experience that “talking about what happened openly” can be difficult and complex. “No one’s raising their hand…and saying, ‘My kid’s a bully!’”
She said she hopes to find those parents through the teacher’s union, utilizing connections formed through Youth Stat.
Wilcox said that a student acting out is “waving red flags. All that is is a kid saying, ‘I have a need that’s not being met.’”
"Parents like strong Black teachers.."
Wait..what?