Restorative Justice Tribunal

And Ways to Derail Jim Crow Discipline in Schools

Zachary Scott Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000383317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Métodos experimentales en la educación

Learn how to implement a restorative justice approach that reduces suspension and expulsion rates, without compromising school safety and classroom order.

Author Dr. Zachary Scott Robbins, who has turned around schools in Boston, Massachusetts, and Las Vegas, Nevada, explores the assumptions that underpin school policies that lead to high rates of suspensions and expulsions, especially for African-American students. He shares his experiences using Restorative Justice Tribunals and Restorative Justice Circles, which strike an effective balance between serving consequences to students who misbehave and providing them with therapeutic wraparound supports.

This powerful book will help school leaders avoid discriminating based on race, national origin, or disability; will improve school climate; and will help teachers spend less time on discipline, so they can have more time for instruction and preparing students to graduate.

1

Welcome to Your New School

Getting the Lay of the Land

Cheyenne High School has always been a school of historical importance to North Las Vegas. It was built, in part, in response to a failed court-mandated school integration plan. The court order addressed elementary schools, but the community was demanding more from the school district. New high schools were being built throughout the valley to keep up with Las Vegas’ exploding population but none on the northside. After 42 years of waiting and after years of Black families watching their high schoolers get bused all over town to go to school, the school district built Cheyenne in 1991. Cheyenne was the pride of North Las Vegas and easily accessible to African-American students and families on the northside of town.

Unfortunately, Cheyenne has not enjoyed sustained academic success. Cheyenne has always been a tough school, residing in what became one of the most challenging areas in Las Vegas. Because a lot of the construction in North Las Vegas, like much of the Las Vegas Valley, is relatively new, poverty looks different. One may never suspect by looking at the homes and apartments around Cheyenne that the school resides in one of the oldest gang enclaves in the valley or that 90% of Cheyenne’s students live in poverty. Gang activity sometimes spills over onto the school campus. The history of sustained underachievement and tough students heavily influences the narrative about teaching, learning, and working at Cheyenne.

Cheyenne’s narrative of tough students and underachievement didn’t sway my belief that all Cheyenne students could learn. My upbringing was similar to Cheyenne students’. Similar to my students’ experiences, my family struggled financially. I remember being in the back seat of my dad’s car, sandwiched between massive containers of water that we took to family members’ homes when their water was shut off. My grandmother ran a ‘shot house’ to supplement her social security income. Shot houses are places where people illegally sold liquor to patrons. Things got rowdy in the shot house, and I remember going to grandma’s living room window to watch grownups fight outside. My friends and I grew up conscious that gangs would jump any of us for looking at them the wrong way or saying something they deemed disrespectful.

While my students’ experience in school was more heavily influenced by gangs and gang violence, my school experience was influenced more by racial tension. I grew up in Hampton, Virginia, and attended Francis Mallory Elementary School, which was named after a confederate naval officer. Next, I went to Jefferson Davis Junior High School, named after the president of the confederate states. Then, I graduated in 1990 from Bethel High School, which was named after the confederate army’s Civil War battle of Big Bethel. The classes in these schools were tracked by ability level, and the faculties were predominately White. The historic attitudes toward Black people invoked by these schools’ namesakes correlate with the academic expectations these faculties seemed to have of Black children. Many teachers did not expect superior academic performance from Black students.

My experience of growing up poor, immersed in an underground economy, and being unsupported by schools radicalized me. It radicalized me to ensure schools respond to all students’ needs, regardless of students’ families’ financial situations or family circumstances. My fortune of earning college degrees and becoming a school principal inoculated me to any narrative that students were so hardened by life that they didn’t value school. To me, the narrative of tough Cheyenne students who did not care about education or their futures was ridiculous.

When I first encountered staff members at Cheyenne, it was clear this narrative of hardened students who didn’t care about school affected staff members’ beliefs about Cheyenne students’ potential. This belief influenced the degree that the staff pushed students to do the best work they could. While there were strikingly clear pockets of excellence in the school, Cheyenne High had devolved into a haven for horrific teaching where people with low expectations could find solace. I’ll never forget the day one of my staff members—who was working to implement change—came into my office exasperated. That staff member was upset by a conversation she had with a highly respected 20-year veteran and influencer on staff who, reportedly, railed against programmatic changes occurring on campus. This attitude was despite a coalition of teacher leaders who supported whole-school improvement changes.

Reportedly, the 20-year veteran said, “I don’t know why he’s trying to get these kids to do so much. It’s never going to work. They’re never going to do it. I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing.” The report confirmed several other accounts I had heard of this particular staff member being a ‘hater.’ After that year, this 20-year influencer transferred to another school, and the following year, Cheyenne’s graduation rate and standardized test score pass rates soared to the best in the school’s history. Of course, there is no causal relationship between those scores, graduation rates, and that staff member leaving, but it is ironic.

Viral Low Expectations

When I first took over as the principal of the school, my supervising administrator said, “Don’t change anything,” despite the school having low graduation rates and abysmal test scores. Of course, I didn’t listen to that supervisor and did what I knew to be instructionally sound and what was right for the children.

A few weeks passed, and that supervisor called me in for a supervisory conference because several staff members complained that things were changing. Well, things were changing! The school had a 65% graduation rate. It had failed to provide students with a free and appropriate public education for years. During the supervisory meeting, my supervisor threatened to issue me a disciplinary ‘write up’ if I continued to make changes.

Shortly after the threat, two Caucasian assistant principals openly shared racially offensive thoughts about me, all within earshot of their support staff who were people of color. They said, “He only got his job because he’s Black.” They completely disregarded that the nearby middle school from which I had been promoted had the best achievement levels in that school’s history.

At Cheyenne High School, teachers of students with exceptionalities routinely told families at Individualized Education Plan Meetings, “Don’t worry about getting a regular diploma. You don’t need a regular diploma to walk across the stage at graduation.” They systematically convinced families of academically capable students with special needs that finishing high school with certificates of attendance rather than earning enough credits to earn a diploma was acceptable.

And the behavior management order of the day was to suspend, suspend, suspend, and expel students to maintain order. These were the things happening in the school I inherited. So much had to change.

As Challenges Resolved, New Problems Emerged

With prayer, networking, and a little luck, my supervisor retired, and that was the watershed moment that allowed me to start genuinely collaborating with staff to turn my school around. Based on the achievement of the years before I assumed leadership, Cheyenne was assigned a ‘turnaround school’ status. In my opinion, that designation was God working in mysterious ways. The turnaround status allowed me to transfer up to ten staff members out of the school at the end of every school year that my school had the turnaround designation. For three years in a row, I removed ineffective staff members. Many found jobs in different schools before I could ask the Human Resources Division to involuntarily transfer them to open job positions in other schools in the district. This benefit of the school turnaround process allowed Cheyenne to transform the definition of instructional excellence.

Over the next year, Cheyenne’s graduation rate jumped from 65% to 78%. This climb was one of the most substantial increases in achievement for a high school in my school district’s history during the standardized testing era. Soon after that, Nevada removed standardized testing as a condition for graduation, and our school’s graduation rate increased to over 90%. The community began to reinvest in the school’s success. Things were going well, but we still had a significant problem. Cheyenne High School was suspending and expelling African-American students five times more frequently than their Caucasian peers. Admittedly, that could be considered a trivial figure compared to other schools that were suspending African-American students seven to ten times more often than White students. Regardless, this was a problem.

Nationally, African-American boys and girls are suspended and expelled much more frequently than their peers of other races (Camera, 2020). However, Black males have particularly staggering disproportionate rates of out-of-school consequences. The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice rang the alarm on this problematic trend back in 2011 and again in 2014. The lack of policy change and inactivity of school leaders in addressing the matter suggests that it is a non-issue for many districts.

But the suspension rate at my school bothered me to my core. I was one of only three African-American principals at a comprehensive (mainstream) high school in the entire state of Nevada. There was no way in the world I could be a Black principal and be okay with continually jettisoning Black kids out of school. I felt that it would make me no better than school leaders who intentionally throw Black and brown kids out of schools.

Regardless of the district context regarding the suspensions and expulsions of African-American students, my ‘house’ wasn’t in order. We were putting too many Black and brown kids out of school, and I couldn’t have that on my conscience. I had to do something different.

I’ve never believed in store-bought programs or remedies, so for me, that was off the table as a solution. Then I investigated this approach to behavior management named ‘restorative justice’ working in the court system that some schools around the country were adopting.

My dissertation work had a substantial education psychology component to it, and I’ve always believed in therapeutic approaches to achieving long-term behavioral changes in students. Hence, the theoretical underpinnings of restorative justice intrigued me. At first glance, it seemed the way restorative practices operated in court systems would not work in my school. However, it was also clear that restorative practices could be molded into an approach that could help students and impact school climate in positive ways.

Reference

Camera, L. (2020, October 13). School suspension data shows glaring disparities in discipline by race. Retrieved from www.usnews.com/news/education-news/articles/2020-10-13/school-suspension-data-shows-glaring-disparities-in-discipline-by-race

2

Wading into Restorative Justice

Reflecting, Planning, and Getting My Mind Right

I remember sitting in my home office, wondering how I was going to launch restorative justice in a way that would stop African-American students from being suspended five times more frequently than their peers. To get my mind right about restorative justice (RJ), I read everything I could find on the subject. I read research studies, court documents, books, and magazine articles. I browsed the internet and read school districts’ website accounts of how they rolled out restorative practices. I even read what companies and consultants that were selling RJ services to the public were pushing. Most of what I found focused on Restorative Justice Circles.

Origins for modern Restorative Justice Circles are rooted in New Zealand’s Family Group Conferencing (Barn & Das, 2016).¹ Family Group Conferencing dates back to 1989, and it was a response to the disproportionate number of Maori children being removed by the court system from their homes and placed into state care. Family Group Conferences empowered participants to collaborate on solutions to concerns. In a majority of child welfare cases, Family Group Conferences had to occur before any court proceedings could begin. Family Group Conferences was essentially a diversion program.

Modern-era Restorative Justice Circles function similarly. The Circle brings people together to address behavior that has caused a ‘harm’ to someone in the community or to the community itself. The Circle typically has a facilitator who leads the discussion. Participants collaborate to understand a harm’s impact on others. Before the Circle concludes, participants in the Circle agree on how to resolve the situation, repair the harm, and they evaluate the Circle process. Like the Family Group Conference model, Restorative Justice Circles divert students from out-of-school consequences.

After every article, report, or reflection I read about restorative justice, I arrived at the same conclusion. There was absolutely no way on earth restorative justice would work in my school if I did it in the way the literature was describing it. A lot of what I read about restorative justice chronicled how RJ worked in the criminal justice system. This made sense because restorative justice has roots in the criminal justice system (“RJ in the Criminal Justice System”). However, many aspects of the criminal justice system models of restorative justice could not work in my school. We couldn’t compel offenders to participate in restorative justice like the courts could, so that approach wasn’t going to work. In the court system, a restorative justice court judge can mandate that an offender attend counseling, drug treatment, or pay restitution, along with any other actions the court accepted in a restorative agreement to repair a harm. Courts have these options and wraparound services available to them. Most schools don’t. Mine definitely didn’t. We did not have a phalanx of school psychologists or social workers available to students or their families. Also, offenders in the court systems are motivated to honor their restorative agreements in order to avoid jail time and to have their criminal cases dismissed. While avoiding out-of-school consequences can motivate students and families to participate in school-based restorative justice, participating in restorative justice to avoid a suspension or expulsion is hardly the same as participating to avoid jail time or a criminal record. Thus, I did not feel the justice system brand of restorative justice would work in my school.

I also felt it would not be wise to ask teachers to pause classes to run a Restorative Justice Circle every time a student misbehaved in class. Even if teachers could become skilled enough (quickly enough) to effectively facilitate Restorative Circles, the disruptions to learning would be too numerous. I also could not ignore the fact that some of the students in my school terrified their teachers. It just was what it was. It is one thing to hear stories about students who are hardened by life or to see caricatures of them on television. It was an entirely different experience for teachers to work with the fictitious caricatures’ real-life embodiments. Some of my students were fearless, could care less about adult authority, and only responded to teachers’ reasonable requests if teachers spoke to them in certain ways. Some of my students responded viscerally and aggressively when they felt teachers were ‘out of line’ in how they attempted to maintain order. When students felt their teachers crossed a line, were disrespectful, or embarrassed them, students sometimes cursed their teachers out or (on rare occasions) threatened to harm them physically. I felt it would be unreasonable for me to expect these teachers to have—or even slowly develop—the skills to run Circles in their classes after turbulent moments with these students.

In the classroom, every moment counts. The moments count even more when students enter school multiple grade levels behind in their academic proficiency, like most of my students. My performance evaluation is based—tangentially—on how students perform on the American College Testing (ACT) and Advanced Placement exams. Students’ credit sufficiency also factors into my performance evaluation, as it should. I needed teachers to maximize every instructional minute available to students. It would have been crazy for me to ask my staff to stop school (some...