News & Announcements
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Dignity in Schools, a national organizations that unites parents, youth, advocates and educators to support alternatives to a culture of zero-tolerance, punishment and removal in schools, reports on its National Week of Action Against School Pushout:
"The Fourth Annual National Week of Action took place from September 28 to October 5, 2013. Over 60 organizations in 22 states joined the Dignity in Schools Campaign to 'Push Back Against School Pushout' in our largest Week of Action to date. Students, parents, teachers and advocates lifted their voices to demand an end to school disciplinary policies that push students out of school and down a pipeline to prison and low-wage jobs.
"During this year’s Week of Action, we raced against the U.S. government shutdown clock with our SparkAction alert urging members of the Senate to support federal school discipline reform. On September 30 our message reached 150,000 people on social media via Thunderclap. Over the course of the week, almost 2 million Twitter posts (tweets) used the #SchoolPushout hashtag and our Facebook posts reached about 13,000 unique users. We also added a Dignity in Schools Tumblr page and an Instagram account to share photos of actions and events across the country!"
Each day of the week featured a theme like Solutions Not Suspensions, Counselors Not Cops and Restorative Justice.
Read about the week in a post that highlights events from across the country day by day.
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- Written by Joshua Wachtel
Eigen Kracht (Dutch for “Our Power”) is a non-profit organization that has done an incredible amount of grassroots work throughout the Netherlands to make the family group conference (FGC, which in North America is known as Family Group Decision Making or FGDM) the go-to process for empowering people and their communities of care to find solutions to some of their most pressing problems. Eigenkracht has trained community volunteers throughout the country to interface with social services and other government agencies, to coordinate with families, and come up with plans, particularly with regards to caring for children at risk of placement in the social welfare system. But Eigenkracht has always argued that FGC may be used more widely, whenever a family needs to make a plan requiring the support of its larger community of support.
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In this piece, journalist Robert Koehler unearths one of the roots of the restorative justice movement in the work of an indigenous community in Manitoba that reached "deep into their souls and into the roots of a lost way of life, to save their children and the future."
Sincere thanks to Koehler for allowing us to repost this piece in full.
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The Sycamore Tree Project, a world-wide program of Prison Fellowship International brings groups of crime victims into prison to meet with groups of unrelated offenders. They talk about the effects of crime, the harms it causes, and how to make things right. In a recent project in Queensland, Australia, victims of crime met for eight weeks in a program aimed to help both victims and offenders explore the impacts of crime, with the goal of fostering healing and change.
Reporters Terri Begley and Emma Sykes write:
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Bryce Stucki, a reporter at The American Prospect, takes a look at Growing Fairness, a new documentary by Teachers Unite that critiques punitive school discipline policies and suggests they be replaced by restorative practices. He writes:
“Education was where my heart was,” says Tyrone Sinclair in Growing Fairness, a documentary showcasing the impact restorative-justice programs can have in our nation's schools. Sinclair says he was expelled from school at 16, became homeless, and then ended up in jail. Now, he organizes young people in Los Angeles. “I knew that wasn’t the place for me,” he says of prison. “I love to learn every day.”
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A Fairfax student during a restorative circle simulation from a video about the FCPS Restorative Justice programPoised between the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and Washington D.C., Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS), is a progressive and diverse school system on the edge of change. FCPS has initiated a system wide implementation of restorative justice processes in our schools which aims to transform how the FCPS community handles harm and wrongdoing. Several schools in this 200+ school system, the 11th largest in the country, have been exploring the use of restorative justice since 2004 to respond to discipline issues through pilot programs at two large high schools and various trainings for staff.
In 2011, Vickie Shoap, a veteran RJ facilitator in Virginia’s criminal justice system, was hired to develop and manage a system-wide RJ implementation that would educate schools about this valuable tool and train school staff to facilitate RJ processes. The goals of this initiative are to build a culture of support for conflict resolution, including restorative practices for classroom management and restorative justice processes for discipline issues that offer school administrators an effective disciplinary option other than suspending students. FCPS hired a second restorative justice specialist in 2013, Dan Wichman-Buescher, a graduate of Eastern Mennonite University. Shoap and Wichman-Buescher are responsible for training school staff in restorative practices, facilitating RJ processes and training restorative justice school teams for long term sustainability of RJ in FCPS.
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Bryan Cohen, writing at Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, reports on a new program to be piloted shortly in Seattle, Washington, to keep low-level offenders out of the criminal justice system.
Andrea Brenneke, who was involved in organizing a restorative circle for a high profile case involving the murder of a Native American carver by a Seattle policemen, will serve as director of the City of Seattle's new Restorative Justice Initiative.
Cohen quotes Stephanie Tschida, president of the East Precinct Advisory Council, who said: “It’s a good idea for some of these residents who deal with a log of ongoing drug dealing and loitering. It could be more constructive avenue to people voicing similar concerns over and over again.”
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(left to right) IIRP Assistant Director for Communications Laura Mirsky, Director of Communications & Technology Ben Wachtel and Vice-President for Advancement Linda Kligman during a restorative circle team builder (photo by Assistant Director of Technology Steve Orrison)The IIRP teaches others to implement restorative practices, but we also, through a process of continual reflection, strive within our own organizational structure to operate restoratively on a number of levels.
I work in the Advancement, Communications and Technology department. Here we conduct our weekly check-in meetings using a series of circle questions, even as some of us, like me, phone in our participation in the circle by conference call. I also have regular monthly “supervision” meetings (again by phone) with my supervisor, Laura Mirsky, assistant director for communications. These meetings are an opportunity for me to reflect on my work, discuss challenges and get suggestions from Laura. In terms of the “social discipline window,” supervision is very much a “with” process, rather than a top-down “authoritarian” process.
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IIRP President Ted Wachtel spoke at a restorative justice conference at Utah Valley University in autumn 2012, and the talk has been posted on youtube. Wachtel speaks informally for the first few minutes about his personal journey that led him to start schools to help at-risk youth improve their behavior. In his prepared talk, which starts at minute seven, he interweaves powerful stories of restorative conferences and research results to illustrate a variety of basic restorative practices concepts. Parts of this talk essentially are a "reading" from Wachtel's new book, Dreaming of a New Reality.
See the video at youtube.
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When it comes to responding to inappropriate behavior on the college campus, a small but growing number of professionals responsible for addressing student conduct at colleges and universities are recognizing the potential of restorative practices to help young adults take responsibility for their behavior and set a new course.
Rafael Rodriguez, Assistant Director of Redstone Campus & Community and Leadership Development at the University of Vermont (UVM), discussed a conduct case he heard a couple years ago involving two first year men who were documented three times for using drugs and alcohol by resident advisors (RAs) in the first week of the academic year.
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