Then again, Mr. Musa, 24, was a Roosevelt student not too long ago. He graduated in 2017.
He is talking with senior Jackie in a second floor hallway. She is animated, her purple and white braids falling across her baby blue N95 mask as she explains a problem. She is the president of the K-Club and there was an incident among members. The K-Club, she says, is about all things K-pop, from Korean music to food to movies to fashion. Mr. Musa laughs — he thought it was the “Kulture Club.”
As a restoration facilitator, Mr. Musa’s job is to listen to problems and help students find solutions. Talking with Jackie that morning was the first step (a “prerestorative conference”) toward a formal “restorative circle.” Restorative circles are a group activity meant to help repair harm and restore relationships. (...)
Before the pandemic, armed officers known as “school resource officers,” or SROs, from the Des Moines Police Department would patrol the school hallways. But during the summer of racial justice marches and protests after the police murder of George Floyd, students, parents and community members spoke out against SROs at Des Moines School Board meetings. In the end, the police contract with the schools was terminated. After scrambling to make remote schooling work during the long, mournful slog of the pandemic, Des Moines Public Schools (DMPS) were left to find a way to reimagine school safety — and fast.
The district moved quickly to implement restorative practices, an increasingly popular educational model for school safety, violence prevention and mediation.
The 2021 – 2022 school year was a huge opportunity with the highest of stakes: DMPS could become one of the only districts in the nation to succeed in concurrently removing SROs and implementing restorative practices, or the district and its students could be thrown into crisis.
Restorative practices (RP) derive from “restorative justice,” which is used to bring together, in mutual agreement for mediation, the victim and the perpetrator of an offense. The goal is typically restitution for harm caused while helping the perpetrator restore community ties.
In education, “practices” is often swapped in for “justice” because it involves children who aren’t in criminal proceedings. Formal conflict resolution, after a dispute or rule-breaking, does play a role, but RP is also proactive, explains Anne Gregory, a Rutgers professor and one of the nation’s leading RP experts.
One core proactive practice is “check and connect.” This might be as simple as having teachers and staff say hi to each student as they enter the school, or asking a student between classes how their day is going. When there’s an issue, students can then sit down with a trusted adult to build “their own insight into themselves and what’s driving their behavior,” Gregory says.
Gregory emphasizes that relationship building is a two-way street. These micro-interactions of “check and connect” also change how teachers see students. They undermine “overgeneralization [and] negative stereotyping” and create space for understanding, Gregory says. When a student has “attendance problems,” for example, the right mindset involves “thinking about and understanding what’s going on for the family of that student that morning in getting out the door” — which is a “very different approach,” Gregory adds, from “sending a police officer to your house the fourth time you’re truant.” (...)
Organizing and protests after George Floyd’s murder led school systems around the country to reconsider the use of SROs. Some moved money to restorative practices. In Los Angeles, under pressure from students, the school district cut its school police force by a third, and the city reinvested tens of millions from the police budget into school mental health counselors and restorative justice-trained “climate coaches.” In Chicago, an existing anti-SRO campaign by parents and youth activists got a lift from the protests — and the backing of the teachers union. The city agreed to empower local school councils to remove SROs, leading to a citywide reduction from 180 to 59, and schools reinvested the money in positions including social workers, security guards and restorative justice coordinators.
Des Moines went further.
During the summer uprising, the school district held a series of town halls to seek advice about how schools could be anti-racist. One overwhelming priority emerged: Get rid of SROs.
The armed SROs had the power to arrest students. They could respond to any incident on the school radio, whether requested or not. The school had no control over whether a particular student would be charged with regards to any particular incident.
“Seeing the way that police officers interacted with people that looked like me, I just had an automatic defense,” says East High School graduate Lyric Sellers, who is Black. “I just didn’t feel safe with them at all. And I knew that was true for a lot of students.” (...)
The protests and the town halls inspired Sellers, then a junior, and East High School senior Endà Montalvo-Martinez to liberate the city’s schools from oppressive systems — which, to them, meant ousting SROs. Sellers and Montalvo Martinez worked with the Iowa Department of Human Rights to compile racial data about in-school arrests in Des Moines. Those findings were released at an October 2020 school board meeting and revealed that, between 2015 and 2019, the number more than doubled, from 273 annually to 590. What’s more, Black students made up 53% of all “complaints” (juvenile justice system terminology for “arrests”), despite accounting for only 20% of the student body.
And, even starker, an ACLU report released that month found that Black girls in Iowa were nine times more likely than white girls to be arrested. (...)
With growing concerns over the school-to-prison pipeline (including the role of SROs) and racism in school disciplinary practices — especially after a damning 2014 Obama administration report — the restorative model is spreading through the education world as well. In 2016, a third of U.S. public schools reported using restorative circles; by 2020, that number was 60%.
by Andy Kopsa, In These Times | Read more:
Image: Michael Hiatt
