Your kid's in trouble at school. What should the response be?
Imagine this: your kid gets in trouble at school. Big trouble.
The school then tells you it could respond in two ways.
It could suspend your student for a few days, leaving you to find child care and your kid sitting on the couch instead of in class. Or, the school could require your student to face the harm he or she has caused and to make amends.
As a parent, what would you choose?
This scenario is playing out more and more in school districts across the country, with schools embracing new discipline strategies to combat a surge in suspensions that disproportionately affects students of color and those with disabilities.
Jefferson County Public Schools is one of those districts. It is entering its third year of a nearly $2 million pilot program in the discipline strategy known as "restorative practices."
At the heart of the strategy is the belief that students are more likely to change their behavior when they understand how our actions affect others.
The practice has already shown success at Waggener High School, one of nearly 20 schools that have received restorative practices training. There, suspensions have dropped by nearly a third, with the strategy deployed in daily classroom discussions and in resolving tense conflicts — including one last year that threatened to tear the school's football team apart.
Rather than solely issuing consequences after a student misbehaves, restorative practices aims to prevent misbehavior by building trust among students and authority. A student is less likely to disrespect a teacher, for example, if they believe the teacher cares about their success.
When students do transgress, they're challenged to acknowledge the harm they've caused. Whereas in a traditional discipline system a student may return to class after a suspension without ever reflecting on their behavior, restorative practices would create an opportunity for that student to face the consequences of their actions — and a chance to make things right.
District officials hope incorporating restorative practices will not only decrease suspensions, but will lead to greater equity in doling out punishments.
Restorative practices "creates a space of inclusiveness for all students," said John D. Marshall, the district's chief equity officer.
By strengthening relationships within school communities, Marshall said the approach will allow teachers and administrators to "see the person, not just the behavior."
Building trust at Waggener
When the Jefferson County Board of Education voted in 2016 to invest $5 million in tackling behavior-related issues, one of the approaches that received firm backing was restorative practices.
“To do this properly requires an insane amount of investment in people and money,” said Katy DeFerrari, assistant superintendent of school culture and climate. She added that the district failed to successfully implement previous initiatives because it tried to do too much, too fast.
This time, the district chose to first build expertise across 18 "pilot" elementary, middle and high schools.
One of those is Waggener High.
Nestled in a quiet St. Matthews neighborhood, Waggener enrolls hundreds of students from outside its attendance zone. Half of Waggener's 912 students last year were black and more than 70 percent of all the students qualified for free and reduced lunch, district data show.
Last December, students and staff greeted each other by name in the school's hallways. And inside a junior English class, teens tossed a palm-sized ball back and forth.
The students, seated in a seminar-style circle, exchanged giggles with each bad pass or failed catch. Behind them, a colorful poster displayed rules of the circle: Only when students held the squishy globe “talking piece” were they supposed to speak. Otherwise, they were there to listen.
Throughout the 2017-18 school year, the teens met in such circles to tackle a variety of topics, including race and gender issues, teacher Ben Roberson said. On this day, the topic was adulthood.
As students passed the ball, Roberson rarely chimed in, instead allowing the teens to drive the discussion.
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Speaking confidently, the students took turns sharing personal details about their insecurities and worries. When one student said that maturity isn't guaranteed with adulthood, her peers agreed.
Eventually, Roberson called for the ball and opened up too, telling the students about the struggles he's faced while establishing his career as a teacher.
“I didn’t feel successful because I compared myself a lot," he said.
Across Waggener, students have the opportunity to participate in a circle discussion at least once per day. Every student — even those who may normally go through an entire class without speaking up — has the opportunity to share his or her thoughts.
And though these circles have nothing to do with discipline in a traditional sense, they’re a part of restorative practices.
DeFerrari, who previously served as principal of Waggener, said one of the "raging issues" facing the district is that a majority of students are suspended not because of conflicts with their peers, but because of run-ins with adults.
Roberson, the teacher, said those conflicts can hurt his students’ academic achievement.
"We’re in a culture right now with so much tension and so many divisions, especially between authority and young people," he said. "Students don’t learn from people they don’t trust.”
Circles help bridge that divide, Roberson said.
He and other Waggener teachers have been trained to use “affective language” when interacting with students. Such statements are intended to help a person understand how their actions affect them or those around them.
For example, rather than telling a student to stay in her seat for sake of compliance, a teacher may explain to the student that every time she gets up, she’s making it more difficult for her peers to concentrate and learn.
Roberson said that using restorative practices in his classroom has actually made the teaching part of his job easier.
"Rather than being another thing on top of what we’re doing," he said, "it facilitates greater ease and greater connectivity in the classroom, which is really — if we’re teaching for the right reasons — what we should be striving for anyway."
Criticism of the approach
Critics contend that by doing away with suspensions, kids are are being let off the hook. They also charge that alternative discipline systems leave teachers struggling to manage unsafe and unruly classrooms.
At the federal level, there is a push from conservatives to rescind Obama-era guidance that recommends the use of restorative practices in schools.
Those critics say the 2014 federal guidelines hamstring school officials from maintaining safe schools due to fear of violating federal civil rights law. That's because schools can be penalized if students of color are suspended at higher rates than their peers, even if the school's discipline policies aren't written with discriminatory intent.
But supporters insist such measures are necessary to combat disproportionately high discipline rates for students of color and those with disabilities — a problem affecting districts nationwide, including JCPS.
In fact, black students accounted for nearly 68 percent of the district's out-of-school suspensions during the 2017-18 school year but made up less than 37 percent of the student population, according to preliminary district data.
DeFerrari, the assistant superintendent, said some people may be uncomfortable with the new approach simply because it’s different than what they experienced in school.
“You have to research what works. We have. And that’s it,” DeFerrari said, noting that research shows exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions, contribute to the so-called "school-to-prison pipeline."
Over the last generation, the district’s demographics have changed and its approach to educating students needs to change too, DeFerrari said. Schools incorporating restorative practices still suspend students — especially if it’s a safety issue — but they now have another strategy available to deal with misbehavior, she said.
"We’re not talking about schools filled with passive kids that are just compliant and have the same cultural experiences and norms” as past generations, she said.
Persistence pays off
Given the initial results at Waggener High School, the approach appears to be working.
The school issued nearly 30 percent fewer suspensions during the 2017-18 school year than it did the previous year, according to school data.
"We’ve just really changed our thinking," principal Sarah Hitchings said. "We’ve changed the idea that suspending kids changes behavior."
Not only did the school see an overall drop in suspensions, she said, but there also were roughly 1,300 fewer behavior “events,” a category that includes minor transgressions, such as cutting class.
Getting to that point wasn't easy, Hitchings said.
In October, the school's progress with restorative practices started to backslide.
The honeymoon was over. Suspensions and other punitive consequences were on the rise. Student and staff morale plummeted.
Rather than giving up, Hitchings said the staff addressed the problem head-on at a faculty meeting.
“If we go back to the old way of doing things — ‘I need you to get out,’ ‘I just need you out of class,’ ‘I’m just going to suspend this kid for three days’ — we’re going to get the same results,” Hitchings recalled discussing with her staff.
In response, Hitchings said Waggener rallied behind the new approach and, by mid-November, the school’s culture had rebounded.
The result, she said, is that fewer students are missing class time.
And though it’s too early to tell whether the school’s use of restorative practices will have an effect on overall academic achievement, Hitchings expects that students spending more time in class — with teachers they trust — will pay off.
“We know building relationships is huge," she said. "It’s the whole ballgame.”
Preparing for adulthood
Looking to replicate Waggener's results, the district is expanding the program. By the start of the 2019-20 school year, at least 30 schools will be trained in restorative practices, with JCPS expecting to train even more schools in the years ahead.
Marlon Kimble, a Waggener senior last school year, said participating in a restorative circle prevented conflict with a fellow football player from getting "bigger and bigger and bigger."
After an off-campus incident between the two boys, Marlon's teammate "sucker punched" him one day at school, he said.
The other boy was suspended, but the length of his punishment was reduced in exchange for a commitment to participate in a restorative circle with Marlon and the rest of the football team.
The circle wasn't easy.
With a restorative practices expert and the school football coach supervising, the boys spent nearly four hours overcoming their pride and working through their issues. By the end, Marlon and the other boy agreed that they could co-exist but didn't necessarily need to be friends.
"I felt relief," Marlon said. "I was tired of the whole situation. I felt it all needed to be done."
The boys concluded the circle with a team huddle and a symbolic breaking of bread — in this case, pizza.
Looking back on the conflict, Marlon said he believes the circle was the right thing to do, even though it meant the other boy received a shortened punishment.
"Suspending kids is not really the way to do it because they're not really learning anything from their mistakes," he said. "They're out of school for three days, they're getting behind...It's actually harming them by suspending them because they're not at school learning."
Though it took the boys a while to talk out their problems, Marlon said they went into the process knowing how effective circles work thanks to the discussions they had been having regularly in their classes.
They knew to only talk when they had the talking piece. They knew the circle was a safe place to share their feelings.They knew everyone had to commit to the outcome.
The experience, Marlon said, will be important for their futures.
"If you take the approach of a circle, it’s more mature," he said. "It's also leading kids to adulthood."
"You're not going to fight someone as an adult, you’re going to talk about it."
FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL
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