Cicely Curtis has introduced restorative disciplinary practices during her two years as principal of R.B. Hudson STEAM Academy in Selma, Ala. PHOTOS COURTESY OF SELMA TIMES JOURNAL, SELMA, ALA.

Junior high principal Cicely Curtis doesn’t skirt from the challenges confronting Selma, Ala., her hometown and a city with a large number of single-parent families, rising crime, declining school enrollment and below-average test scores.

The community’s perception of the school she leads, R.B. Hudson STEAM Academy, doesn’t match the school’s harsh reality, Curtis says. The public generally considers the 400-student campus for 7th and 8th graders to be doing fine. It was not when she came on board about two years ago.

The school had spent seven years on Alabama’s list of failing schools and enrollment was declining, which pushed Curtis to take a hard look at her campus. She decided to dig up the root of the school’s problems, and that meant tossing out existing practices for disciplining students — including corporal punishment.

Kicking students off campus wasn’t improving student performance on state achievement measures, Curtis says. It didn’t change behavior. So Curtis and her staff, with a state grant and an outside trainer, took a careful look at restorative disciplinary practices such as peace circles. In a peace circle, a pair of individuals — be it two students or a student and a teacher — walk through a conflict, hear each other out and talk through skills to deal with future interactions.

“It’s really about the structures you put in place and your expectations,” says Curtis, who was a national board-certified teacher, of the academic and disciplinary changes she brought to campus. “It’s about that relationship you have, and that relationship you have is what helps you to shift the culture.”

In the space of a single year, discipline referrals to the school office dropped by two-thirds, Curtis says. Discipline pathways became clearer. And when a student doesn’t respond after a couple of attempts at restorative intervention, Curtis knows it’s time to shift to more intensive support, such as arranging sessions for the student with a professional counselor.

And expulsions? They’re not entirely gone, says Curtis, but they’re rare.

Racial Disparities

There’s a weirdly sensible notion among educators who talk about why schools are ditching zero-tolerance discipline strategies in favor of restorative justice or positive behavioral intervention supports (also known as PBIS): Expelling a student for truancy or breaking school rules is no way to teach them to attend class.

Recent education research suggests that discipline management and academic performance do not exist in siloes. They are inextricably linked. That’s especially true for children of color, who often face harsher disciplinary outcomes than their white peers.

A 2018 joint report by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Civil Rights Project’s Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA calculated that 11 million actual instructional days were lost in the 2015-16 school year due to out-of-school suspensions. That’s a problem, but the bigger issue noted in the report was the difference between races. If you looked at 100 students in each race, the Black students would lose 66 days of instruction compared to 14 days for white students.

Exclusionary discipline practices — choosing to expel or suspend students — were part and parcel of the zero-tolerance discipline movement of the 1990s. Gary Ritter, dean of the school of education at St. Louis University who has published research on school discipline reform, says the exclusionary model went too far. His review of studies on student discipline in a post-zero tolerance world, however, has revealed that good intentions — and new methods — sometimes fail to address the root problem.

“You might decrease the overall use of exclusionary discipline, but at the same time you continue to increase discipline disparities,” says Ritter, who agrees that efforts like restorative justice deserve further attention and should be studied in conjunction with academic performance.

Senior researcher Vicki Nishioka and her team at Education Northwest in Portland, Ore., one of 10 regional educational laboratories nationwide funded by the U.S. Department of Education, help school districts review their policies through the prism of equity. She says the inclusion of social-emotional learning in the Every Student Succeeds Act, enacted in 2015, marked a welcome change to encourage educators to build stronger relationships with their students.

“Somewhere along the way we forgot about the promise of what social-emotional learning has for strengthening academic outcomes and preparing students for life,” says Nishioka, whose work focuses on teacher-student relationships and equity in school discipline. “We need to go back and remind people that learning how to problem solve, learning how to set goals, learning how to manage conflicts, are all very important skills. And, added to that is now reaching across difference and learning about cross-cultural conversations.”

A sidewalk outside R.B. Hudson STEAM Academy in Selma touts the values promoted among students in the school district.

A New Message

In Selma, Curtis set aside a regular place and time each week for peace circles at her school. She found students very open to the idea of discussing conflict and making amends. Sometimes the peace circle was about a small infraction such as a skirmish between two friends or skipping of a class. Sometimes the matters were more serious. One case involved the siblings of two R.B. Hudson students who still had to attend school together after their respective brothers were involved in a street shooting.

In another case, two boys were placed temporarily in an alternative school following an after-school brawl. It marked the school’s only out-of-school placement last year. The boys also were required to do a peace circle, and the principal says she now considers them friends.

“It only makes sense when you think about it,” says Curtis, a 1996 graduate of Selma High School. “We teach everything else, those things you don’t know how to do. But when they committed an infraction, we’re so quick to punish them versus teaching them. In everything that we do, we need to educate them. That’s the whole message.”

Avis Williams, who came to Selma as superintendent in 2017, says off-campus tensions can’t help but resonate inside schools. There’s no place to hide from them. One big benefit of restorative justice is that students — in Selma, they are called scholars — can face that challenge and resolve it.

“That’s what I love about restorative practices. It’s about restoring relationships,” Williams says. “If it’s something that was a classroom issue, that scholar still feels welcome back in the classroom. He’s welcomed back into the community.”

A Shared Principle

The move to incorporate restorative justice into school district operations is happening in sundry communities. Often, it follows a school board and superintendent’s recognition that student discipline is not consistent across race. But that doesn’t mean all restorative justice efforts are linked to a single type of school district.

Selma City Schools, with 3,000 students, is almost entirely Black. San Antonio Independent School District is predominantly Hispanic. And places like Jefferson County Public Schools, a suburban system outside Denver, Colo., and Oregon City Public Schools, on the southern fringe of metropolitan Portland, Ore., are predominantly white districts.

All have chosen to abandon traditional discipline. What is common among all is the idea that racial disparities will be dealt with openly and honestly in the school setting. They also share the idea that equitable discipline can be part of a larger district goal to be more inclusive of diverse viewpoints.

That’s why restorative justice in Jefferson County, Colo. — the second-largest school district in the state and the home of Columbine High School — is coupled with voluntary training in implicit bias and being culturally responsive. Allison Meier, the district’s restorative practices coordinator, says the first way to talk out loud about racial bias is to accept it exists.

“In our district, we try to normalize having bias,” Meier says. “Like, if you have a brain, you have bias. When we normalize that, it makes it a lot easier for us to talk about when we see things happening, to say that’s a manifestation of the biases we have.”

For a teacher to admit to a student that he or she had a bias — and regrets an incident or behavior — can have a tremendous impact on a student, Meier says.

“I always remind teachers, ‘How powerful for that student to hear — whether it’s perfect or not — to hear you taking ownership,’” she says. “Most behaviors we see from young people, they’re copying from adults. If we never take responsibility for our own actions and what we contributed to a situation, we’re never going to teach students to do so.”

Principal Benjamin Kates rewrote the code of conduct at his middle school in Oregon City, Ore., before it was adopted districtwide. PHOTO COURTESY OF OGDEN MIDDLE SCHOOL, OREGON CITY, ORE.

An Equity Prism

Principal Benjamin Kates at Ogden Middle School in Oregon City, Ore., volunteered to rewrite his school’s student disciplinary policies for a graduate class at Lewis & Clark University.

“The opportunity was there to review our code of conduct through an equity lens,” says Kates of the code, which has since been adopted for districtwide use to govern the conduct of 7,200 students. “Our school board passed an equity policy recently, and this really gave me the chance to compare the two.”

Kates, a one-time special education teacher, thought his experience of eliminating barriers for students with disabilities would resonate in the rewritten behavioral code. So instead of mandates about dress and hair, the approved code outlines agreed-upon rights and responsibilities for students, describes behavioral interventions and compares punitive versus restorative discipline practices.

“It was really about making school more inclusive, rather than forcing kids to conform to whatever we need them to do,” Kates says. “How do we make school a place where any kid can show up and stay, so we can start to model the world we want to live in, which would probably be an inclusive world.”

Kates completed his work with the assistance of Nishioka and a team from Education Northwest. Some of the biggest changes he and his committee made to the code of conduct were to ditch the absolutes — the infractions that lead to an automatic suspension.

“Previously, our code of conduct was a kind of collection of board policies. Now it’s a much more robust document,” Kates says. “We narrowed the opportunities to suspend and expel students. And then we made the process for expulsion a much more thoughtful process.”

Being more thoughtful and direct with students also has required Oregon City to partner with more community groups, to provide wraparound support services for students. Developing an alternative to expulsion carried its own expenses for specialized social and academic services for students.

“You can’t talk about school discipline without talking about school finance,” says Kathryn Wiley, a school discipline researcher at University of California at San Diego. “I never would have said that a year ago. But it’s become increasingly important, I think, to connect that to the public narrative. The resource issues are connected to school discipline. You can’t just pass a policy.”

Systemwide Impact

In the 49,000-student San Antonio Independent School District, every department in the school district is expected to model equity. What started as an effort to create a student bill of rights now has extended to decisions in every section of the district, says Tiffany Grant, the district’s chief diversity officer and the superintendent’s chief of staff.

Tiffany Grant, district diversity officer in San Antonio, Texas, says every department now is expected to model equity in its operations. PHOTO BY DEBORAH SILLIMAN/SAN ANTONIO INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT

The only way to make change permanent — and not a fad — is to change adult behavior. It’s not just exposing teachers to training that encourages them to be inclusive. It’s a culture of inclusivity that touches every department in the school district.

“It’s also the rest of central office looking at their divisions and saying, ‘Okay, where does this work apply to us? And how do we approach our work from a racial equity and inclusive lens?’” says Grant, whose reorganized department used to be known as constituent services. “Who do we contract with? Do women and minority businesses have a fair shot? Who do we hire? And is it reflective of our population? You really peel back the onion.”

KIMBERLY REEVES is a freelance education writer in Austin, Texas. Twitter: @edwonkkimmy