Some principals now offering ‘restorative justice’ instead of suspension

Chances are, when you and I were in school if we did something wrong like getting caught skipping class, we’d get detention or suspended.

That’s the status quo for principal’s office discipline: You do the crime, you do the time.

But that method of punishment is changing, albeit slowly, towards a more holistic approach.

It’s called “restorative justice.” It’s a lot more work for educators, but many schools that have taken on the challenge have seen positive outcomes.

One of those schools is Burien’s Big Picture High School. Principal Loren Demeroutis tells KIRO Radio’s Jason Rantz Show that a student originally introduced him to the approach.

“Even though I had been employing some restorative practices, I was still suspending,” he says. “Five years ago, we assigned over 700 days of suspension.”

Four years after adopting restorative justice, suspensions dropped from 700 to just eight.

Restorative justice works like this: When a student breaks a rule, they are given the option to participate in the program. If they agree, they go through an in-depth counseling session where they identify the problem and then list their “circle of allies,” these are friends, family or even their pastor.

Then, the student and their allies meet. Everyone shares how the student’s behavior has affected them and make a plan to change that behavior.

Of course, it doesn’t always work that cleanly.

“We had an incident where a student had opted into it and then decided he wasn’t going to come, but the panel met anyway,” says Demeroutis. “A circle of allies and people that cared about him were like, ‘How can he hear this message in a way that’s going to motivate him?’ His friend said, ‘Let me be the one to talk to him because he’s going to hear me and I believe this is going to be the right thing for him to do. It’s going to help him. I don’t want him to be like our uncles.’ And he convinced him to participate.”

We’re not just talking truancy problems. In that example, the student came to school drunk.

Principal Demeroutis deals with his fair share of students who struggle with substance abuse. He said he remembers counseling one student who came to school high. He surprised the student by offering him a chance.

“He actually laughed when I gave him the option,” says Demeroutis. “It didn’t feel like it was a disrespectful laugh but I asked him, ‘Can you help me understand why you’re laughing?’ He said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m not trying to be disrespectful. I just assumed you were going to tell me not to come back.'”

The program has been shown to improve academic success in schools across the nation, as well as change behavior.

At 10 Philadelphia schools where restorative justice was used, assaults dropped by 66 percent in one year and disorderly conduct plummeted by 72 percent.

“I remember one fight in the last three school years that students broke up, it didn’t even lead to a fight,” says Demeroutis. “The effects of it, it’s a culture shift. It creates a culture shift where you don’t even have to worry about a lot of the stuff anymore.”

According to The Seattle Times, which also looked into restorative justice, the problems with the program include time and money.

In a San Francisco school district comparable to Seattle, $900,000 has been spent training educators in restorative justice.

Some teachers are also slow to embrace the program because restorative justice calls for immediate counseling which can disrupt lesson plans.