 Good afternoon and welcome to the second webinar in our two part series on creating schools that are both physically and psychologically safe for students and educators. We're taking up the question of what can we do to protect children in a world that is becoming ever more unsafe. Children across the country now are having to do drills every year in the event of mass shootings and violence in their schools. There's also the threat of increased bullying and psychological trauma as students are contending with various kinds of racism, anti religious discrimination, LGBTQI discrimination and other forms of psychological trauma. We in our first webinar dealt with the research about school safety and what research has found is actually effective. And in the chat you'll see a link to that webinar which is available for you to view recorded. What we found in the research is that there's actually relatively little effect of metal detectors, or school resource officers, and a big increases in safety when you have the right kinds of mental health resources, explicit teaching of social emotional skills, personalization for students, and restorative practices. And today we are focusing in on restorative practices, which are grounded in the science of learning and development, which show that students are most likely to demonstrate positive and more productively when their school climate and relationships are well designed around community around feelings of trust safety and belonging. When they are unable to become an accountable member of a community reflecting on their behavior and making amends and explicit teaching of respect, married to being cared for and learning to care for others. So to do this is a major question. There is hopeful evidence from schools. There is hopeful research on how these practices matter. And that is what we are taking up in our agenda today. And I now have the pleasure and honor of introducing. Well, I'm now going to move to our presentation our moderator, and we hope to be joined shortly by Senator Chris Murphy from the great state of Connecticut. And when he joins we will introduce him properly at that time. So I want to introduce our moderator for today's discussion Dr Jerry House, who will introduce our speakers and our panel. Dr House has been a pioneering educator for many decades. She was district superintendent for 15 years first in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then in Memphis, Tennessee. During her tenure in Memphis she introduced district wide change and successfully redesigned schools based on the whole child models that we now know foster student success. Her work was actually featured in any number of books, including one by Peter Senge, others by Phil Schlegte and Rosa Beth Cantor. In 1999, a time when very few women were leading major urban school districts. She was named the ASA national superintendent of the year, the Tennessee superintendent of the year. And she's won many other major awards, and she later launched and led the Institute for student achievement, which enabled amazing transformations of high schools in New York and elsewhere, from low performing schools into academically rigorous and personalized schools that enable students to graduate prepared for success in college and careers. I've been in a number of these schools. My research was led by one of our panelists, Carolyn Quintana, and documented by LPI. They are truly remarkable. Jerry has served on many boards and I'm honored that one of them is the Learning Policy Institute Board. So please help me welcome my dear friend, and a great educator, Dr Jerry House. Thank you Linda for that very generous introduction. We now turn to our discussion about what restorative practices are and the conditions under which they can be successful. I want first to introduce Dr Sarah Cleveland, a senior researcher at LPI, who will guide us through a presentation of what restorative practices are and why they are so important. And following Sarah will be a presentation by Dr Sean Darlin Hammond, an assistant professor of community health sciences and bio statistics at the University of California at Los Angeles. And Sean recently completed an extraordinary large scale study on the impacts of restorative practices on student well being an achievement. Sarah, turn it to you. Thank you Jerry. We'll get afternoon everyone. I'll be grounding our discussion today with an explanation of what restorative practices are. But I want to first address why they're needed. Restorative practices are an alternative to punitive disciplinary environments. These are environments that exclude students when their behavior doesn't meet expectations. We know from research that exclusionary discipline like suspensions does not actually make schools safer, but instead is associated with negative outcomes for students. Suspensions are known to increase alienation and disengagement to undermine overall school climate to reduce academic progress and to increase dropout rates. Disproportionality of disciplinary outcomes is well documented. This figure comes from a report from some of my colleagues and it shows suspension rates dating back to the 1970s. You can see from the graph that the United States has had high rates of exclusionary discipline for decades with rates that are higher for black students, Native American students and Latinx students. And research tells us that this is not because these student groups are misbehaving at higher rates but instead because they are punished more severely than other students for similar behaviors. Because of their known negative effects, efforts are being made to reduce suspensions and restorative practices are an important alternative to exclusionary disciplinary environments. So what are restorative practices? I like this definition from the Schott Foundation. Restorative approaches proactively build healthy relationships and a sense of community to prevent and address conflict and wrongdoing. One of the most common misperceptions about restorative practices is that they are primarily used to address conflicts and problems. When actually restorative practices are used much more broadly. They can be used to build a sense of community and schools to teach interpersonal and communication skills to proactively meet student needs so that misbehavior is less common. And also to repair harm when when conflict does occur. One of the restorative justice coordinators that I used to work with in New York City used to say, you can't use restorative practices if there isn't already a relationship or community in place to restore, which makes a lot of sense to me and it means that most of the time restorative practices should be used to build in school relationships to build community and that occasionally they can be used to repair harm. So these tools implement restorative practices using a tiered system. So the bottom, the bottom part of this triangle tier one these are practices that are for all students in a variety of school settings examples of this might be community building circles for opportunities for all students to learn interpersonal and conflict resolution skills. So in this segment tier two, these are practices that are for smaller groups of circles examples are conflict mediation and problem solving circles. And then at the very top of the triangle this is tier three these are practices that are used to support individual students. An example of this might be a reentry circle these are circles that are used to welcome students back to the school community after some kind of extended absence. So this is an LPI brief about restorative practices we describe a reentry circle for a student returning to school after, after a long period in a juvenile justice center and you know we sort of describe the ways that that circle helped him come back to the school community positively and reconnect with his teachers and and and peers. Restorative circles are a cornerstone practice of restorative of restorative practices. Did I say that backwards, restorative circles are cornerstone practices are cornerstone restorative practice. So they can be used for lots of different purposes, community building to help students connect with academic content, and to address conflict so I had a chance to visit some students at Fremont High School in Oakland and they told me about language circles at their school. These are community building circles that are facilitated by students in several different languages so the purpose is really to give students a chance to connect with one another, while, while speaking their native language. So that's that's one example of a community building circle circles are typically a structured practice so you can see in the photo here that students are using a talking piece in this case they're using a soccer ball. And students know that when they hold the talking piece that's their chance to speak when they when they're not that their job is to listen. And circles are typically facilitated by a trained facilitator that could be an adult at the school or a student. They can use to address harm, or to repair harm facilitators typically draw on a what's called the restorative line of questioning so that includes questions like what happened, what were you thinking when this happened, who was affected by what happened, and what needs to happen to make the situation right so you can see that embedded in this kind of practice are lots of opportunities to teach students communication and problem solving skills. So now I'm that is a very brief overview of restorative practices. But and now I'm going to turn the mic to Sean who's going to talk about their impact on student outcomes. Thank you so much Sarah for that wonderful introduction to what restorative practices are, and how they can be impactful for students in communities. I want to start by giving you a bit of an overview of my orientation to this work I mean there are a lot of experts out there who are going to talk about restorative practices. I want to know why people have the opinions they do. So, while earning my JD, I worked as a legal advocate in juvenile courts and I saw firsthand what happens and students are funneled from cycles of exclusionary discipline into juvenile involvement. And the impacts on my clients who are primarily students of color some with special needs on their educational opportunities and on their mental health were shocking and I was really hopeful that there was something we could do to intervene upstream of these cycles of exclusion. I found the same time to begin working as one of the code rectives for Berkeley high schools restorative justice program, and there I had a front row seat to see the power of the transformative alternative that restorative practices can be and you can see me there in the picture with hair no less, helping to run a conflict resolution proceeding. So we were creating new pathways for students who are on the verge of exclusion, and I saw students who went through our restorative process, not only understand the harm they cause and repair that harm and take steps to make sure they didn't make the same mistakes again. But I also saw them develop a better and more nurturing relationship with themselves and with their peers. They often became members of our programs to help others in their school community go through our restorative process, when mistakes were made. So after seeing the harms of discipline and the power of sort of practices, I worked as an education law attorney for a number of years, and started to understand the legislative and regulatory landscapes that determine the school practices that students are being exposed to. Then I earned my PhD in public policy to gain the tools needed to understand the many impacts of exposure to restorative practices on outcomes like racial disparities in discipline, but also school climate and student mental health so we'll be talking about a lot of that today. Last week I actually attended a really I think powerful conference today conference in San Francisco that brought together some of the experts in the restorative practices k-12 space, and we actually had a few restorative circles. So I'm being very invigorated about the topic right now. Today I'm really looking forward to discussing the impacts of these practices of view. But before we do, I want to add to understanding about not just discipline, but discipline disparities black white disparities in discipline. So next slide please. So this chart is based on the most recent federal data and shows the out of school suspension rates for white and black students in various contexts, white students are in green, black students are in blue and the lines separate different contexts and subpopulations. So for example, when looking at students across the country generally about 4% of white students are suspended, but about 12% of black students are suspended so black students are three times more likely to experience a suspension. What you'll see in sort of the sawtooth pattern here is that across context and subpopulations, black students are two or more times more likely to receive an out of school suspension. And that's true when you look at male students, female students, special education students, poor students, wealthy students, students in traditional schools, magnet schools, charter schools, students in elementary middle and high schools and even students in preschools. We actually have a report coming out that documents the pervasiveness and consistency of these disparities relatively soon. But I think it's important to be aware of them so we can start to think about where these disparities come from. So next slide please. So I think it's important to remember that what we call discipline is the phenomenon wherein a school punishes a student to try to change that students behavior. We actually have discipline without misbehavior. So long as there's some punish, the only thing that is needed is a scholastic response to perceive misbehavior. So where do black white disparities in discipline come from. Are they just reflections of black white disparities in misbehavior so Sarah already mentioned before that, you know there's evidence to suggest that's not the case and indeed studies from psychology, sociology and economics have consistently racial disparities in discipline are largely caused by racially inequitable treatment of black and white students. So Jason Akona Fua and Jennifer Eberhardt two of my favorite co authors did amazing work in this regard in 2015. That was foundational because it showed that even when teachers review the same incident of misbehavior. If they think the misbehaving student is black, they want to punish that student more harshly. So this really is about something happening in how we respond to students. And that means that the intervention point isn't about student behavior. It's about the scholastic response. But I want to take a moment to think about what that inequality of treatment means for black youth. What do you think they feel when they become aware that they're being treated differently and being excluded more often, just because they're black. How does that impact their mental health. And what do they, what can we do to address this inequity and avoid the attendant harms. Next slide please. Well, we don't need to guess the harms of racial disparities in discipline. Many including myself have actually explored the question and consistently found that for students generally and for black students in particular exposure to discipline and discipline disparities, not only increases defiance and misbehavior quite ironically given the goal, but it saps educational opportunities. It creates trajectories of incarceration. It engenders depression and disconnection and even suicidal ideation. So the stakes are pretty high. And the question then becomes can restorative practices provide a transformational alternative that can be more nurturing and protective. So next slide please. So if you ask many in Oakland, the answer you're going to hear is yes. And that's because in Oakland in the 2010s restorative practices played a huge role in transforming the educational ecosystem experienced by many black youth. So these two quotes come from Darius and that's a pseudonym to protect their identity. Darius is a former Oakland unified student who had I had the pleasure of interviewing a few years ago. And he explained to me how restorative practices helped him go from being in a state of precarity to being a leader for change in his community. So he remembers the moment when he was expelled from school and dropped out like this. I dropped out of school. Actually, they kicked me out because I didn't want to give them my hat. It was real zero tolerance. I was expelled for defiance for putting a hat in my backpack instead of giving it to them. And I had had bad experiences since preschool. So it was easy for me to be like, forget this. As a teenager I was thinking, you don't care about us anyway. You just get paid checks for a student in a seat. So after dropping out, Darius spent time in a gang and eventually he was arrested, and he was given two choices. He'd either go to jail, or go back to school at a school called Ralph Bunch Academy, a school that just so happened to be one of the earliest adopters of restorative practices in the US. So he chose school and he was skeptical, understandably given his experiences since preschool with cyclical exclusion. Everything changed though after he started attending circles at Ralph Bunch. So he said, it was the first time in my life I ever wanted to be at school. Like, we got circles today. I got to go. I wanted to be in class, do projects, interact, be one of the first students called on. I felt good being up here. Without restorative practices, I'd probably be dead or in jail too. And the quote continues, after I graduated, I realized I could bring this to homies to change my community. I was like, this is what I want to do. I had already lost four friends to the justice system, four sentenced to 10 to 15 years under the age of 20. I had seen four murdered in the same year. I wanted to save my friends' lives. So I think what we can see here is not only how powerful the stakes are, but also how powerful the transformative potential is. But we can't set policy based on the experience of one person. So the question that I have that has taken up a lot of my life for the last half decade is can we determine if restorative practices really work for students broadly for black students to reduce racial disparities and to transform school environments. Unfortunately, well, I should say the first thing we need to do to understand it if restorative practices can have the impacts we hope to see is to figure out which students in schools are gaining exposure to these practices. Unfortunately, we can glean clues from the California Healthy Kids Survey. The survey covers hundreds of thousands of California middle school students, and we can use the data to understand levels of exposure to restorative practices using an eight item scale which touches on the extent to which they are seeing three things in their schools. I'm not going to say all eight of the things in the scale just touch on the three sort of major sub points. One is whether they're experiencing relational repair practices that guide students to reconnect after there has been some harm. That's kind of like what Sarah was mentioning in the tier two practices. Another is community building practices that give students the tools they need to deepen community bonds. You can think of that as sort of like tier one stuff. And then the next is the extent to which this broad implementation, so students of all backgrounds benefit. So that's kind of getting at whether this tier one and tier two stuff is being experienced by students of all backgrounds, not just certain students. And you'll see why that matters a little later. So what do we find when we look at these measures? Do we see that students who have more exposure to restorative practices actually fare better? Next slide, please. So our models suggest strongly that they do. Specifically, students who have more exposure to restorative practices are much less likely to be exposed to discipline. This is true for all students, for black students, for white students, for Asian students and Hispanic students. But you may recall that I spoke earlier about the harms of discipline disparities of black students experiencing more discipline than white students and knowing that if they're raised and drives this inequity. Well, it turns out that students who have more exposure to restorative practices also do not exhibit racial disparities in discipline. You can see that in this chart because what we're looking at in the sort of light blue is a black discipline rate or the number of days suspended. It's the same whether we look at the display or the day suspended. You can see that as we get towards more sort of practices to the right. That discipline experience is getting lower and lower, right? And similarly, when we sort of compare that to the red, which is white, we see that it crosses, meaning that at the highest levels of exposure, we don't have a discipline gap anymore. Imagine what that means for the black students in terms of their relationship with themselves, with their peers and with their school and for their mental health and well being. So the potential benefits don't stop at discipline. So next slide please. We also found that for students of all backgrounds, more exposure to restorative practices was also related to better performance on standardized tests of English language arts and math, and that more exposure actually meant smaller racial disparities in academic achievement. But there are a lot of other outcomes that can help us understand students experiences beyond disciplinary and academic outcomes. Students in schools are not really getting grades at avoiding suspensions. So we find when we track what happens in schools that increase their utilization of restorative practices over time. Next slide please. Next slide please. There we go. We see that these schools saw incredible benefits across a range of outcomes. They saw significant declines in victimization, misbehavior, depressive symptoms, gang membership, substance use rates, sleep deprivation rates, physical illness rates and significant improvements in GPA and school climate. So I'd be wondering why increasing the exposure to restorative practices of the utilization of these practices might be related to these health outcomes. So this is me speaking as a scholar of health and education. When students experience less stress, when they feel more connection, their, their systems are actually able to adapt to their scenario a lot better their immune systems function better. They're not themselves able to sleep better because they're not dealing with high levels of cortisol and they're able to secrete the hormones that allow for sleep and rest much more easily. And that results in less sleep deprivation, less illness and definitely less depressive symptoms. So to me I'm not surprised to see this but I know for many who are in this sort of health and ed space this may seem a little bit strange. But it's not just a matter of what happens when schools become more restorative. There's also the question of what happens when schools abandon these practices. And what we find is that schools that evidence abandonment of restorative practices saw significant and market declines in school climate and many other measures. This is a critical finding particularly in this moment where many schools are shifting back towards punitive practices. You know our model suggests that this retrenchment towards the punitive and the exclusionary is as harmful as progress towards restorative practices is beneficial. And for me, thinking of the students that I once worked with in juvenile courts, it's hardly surprising, punitive environments are incredibly stressful, they can feel dehumanizing and essentializing, they can sap one sense of connection, they can cause harm. So how can we implement restorative practices in a manner that ensures sustained and stable growth towards creating a restorative climate. Next slide please. I have a student who is one of the leaders of the International Institute of restorative practices provided some insight when I chatted with him a few years ago. He said, it has to happen across the whole school. All the adults in the building have a responsibility to have a relationship with children and build the culture restorative practices are not just one person's responsibility success require staff commitment across all levels. It has to be continuous meetings and professional development days. You know to shift the culture of the school, the work has to be everybody's work, it has to be become part of who everybody is in the school, it has to be core to everything they do. And that is no small feat, but the benefits according to our models of making this transition are incredibly potent, and the risks, according to our models of not making this transition are incredibly severe. With that, it's my pleasure to pass things off to Dr Jerry house to lead our panel discussions. Thank you, Sean and Sarah, for your very informative and relevant presentations to help set the stage for our discussion today. Before I introduce our distinguished panelists. We just got an announcement that Senator Murphy was unexpectedly called to the Senate floor and won't be able to join us today and he sends his regrets. So now, it's my pleasure to introduce the distinguished panelists. Tatiana. Part of G is the restorative justice facilitator at Fremont High School in the Oakland, California, United School District Unified School District. And she's also a contributing author to the little book of youth engagement in restorative justice intergenerational partnerships for just and equitable schools. Over the past decade, Tatiana has innovated methods for strong tier one implementation towards positive and nurturing school communities. Outside of the classroom she serves as a trainer, educator and peace builder addressing systemic oppression, youth empowerment and alternatives to the criminalization of harm and wrongdoing. She's been recognized for her work and participatory performance with people in and outside of prison. Pedro Nagara is one of the nation's leading scholars on issues related to race inequality and education. Prior to serving as the Dean of the Rossi of School of Education at the University of Southern California. Pedro was a professor of education and holder of endowed chairs at UCLA, NYU, Harvard University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He served as an advisor to the governor of New Mexico and education policy and worked as an advisor to the State Departments of Education in Washington, Oregon, New York and Rhode Island, as well as with several large urban school districts throughout the country. In 2022, Pedro was appointed to President Biden's National Commission on Hispanics, and he is, and he was asked to serve as the co chair of the state of California's black student achievement task force by the state superintendent. Carolyn Quintana serves as the deputy chancellor of teaching and learning for New York City public schools. As deputy chancellor, Carolyn is dedicated to holistically reimagining how New York City students learn, which is a top priority. She held the position of senior director of social, emotional, and academic development at the Institute of Institute for Student Achievement. In that role, she focused on developing practices, resources, and systems to support students success. Carolyn's career in public education began as a ninth grade ELA teacher in Bronx, New York. She then became a district literacy coordinator for the White Plains New York City School District, and later led the rebuilding efforts of Bronxdale High School in the Bronx. Following that, Carolyn worked as a new principal support coach, providing guidance to new school leaders across New York City. And we also welcome Sean Darling Hammond back to the panel discussion. So I think you would agree that we have a very experienced and distinguished list of group of panelists with us today. And I'd like to begin, Carolyn and Tatiana, the discussion with the two of you. You both have experience implementing restorative practices in your school communities. Both Sarah and Sean have given us a glimpse of what happens in schools that implement restorative practices. So I want to take that further and have you give us some more pictures of what those practices, what those practices look like in action. You know, if we were to visit your schools, what are we likely to see and hear. And then as the second part of that question, we know that implementing restorative practices is not an off the shelf quick fix program. So in your work, what have you identified as the necessary conditions that schools need to put in place to successfully implement effective restorative practices. So why don't we begin with you, Carolyn. I appreciate it. So I think there's a combined answer in there. And I love that Sarah started with having to have a community that we care about there to be those feelings of trust and safety and belonging. And we know that those lead to strong academic mindsets as well. And so part of that is that a school has to have a leader that has committed to creating that kind of an environment in their system. There's clear and consistent messaging time for adults to meet where they get to have explicit teaching and opportunities to work with one another classrooms where we have made it okay to make mistakes and learn so that young people already have a sense of what that means in my math classroom in my ELA classroom so that when it comes to doing that for other purposes, that you already have that established as part of the way that things work. So when I first started building out these practices more officially right we had been doing a lot of this before it had some of these names and when we started building out more officially. I made it a point to always show my teachers what it is that I wanted to see so we visited other schools that were doing this well. So I asked folks, you know, fortunately we got somebody here Tatiana in just a moment we'll be talking to you about what happened in Oakland Oakland was working on this work well before we were in New York and so I could ask for videos from Oakland to be able to show what these practices look like and I was trained as well. So I could model and and have language to talk about this work. We started with early adopters and making sure that there was plenty plenty of training for that. And then the very specific pieces were about making decisions about the purpose behind each role that already existed in our school so Sean mentioned hats. What did hats do to take away from the way that a student might learn in our school and it turns out that they didn't have an impact. And in fact that hats were part of what clothing kids were funny thing is, and folks who came to visit noted it when we stopped. So leasing essentially whether or not students were wearing hats, they weren't a problem anymore. They simply weren't an issue and so there wasn't the need for kids to end up in some sort of punitive disciplinary place. We also made it a point to have fun. We had community meals field day staff or students events, we even did things like fairs for the community where our students created different rooms for different age groups to go through. And we structured things like community service days that were built into the school year. We also made it a point to move clubs from the end of the day to during the day so that every child could have an opportunity to be part of a community. And then really specifically you heard Sean talk a little bit about community courts. We actually started youth courts with specific parent responsibilities, staff responsibilities and peer participants who at some point actually became trainers. I think Tatiana will probably talk to you a little bit more about some of the practices specifically and you'll hear about some of the things that happened in classrooms. I think one thing that's important is when we had those practices let's say for example, apology we didn't just say that's something that we want to do because we read about it in a book. A student actually offered to give an apology to a custodian when they had gone into the the auditorium and had actually tossed a trash can around. And instead of saying well we're just going to do a random apology letter he actually had offered to do that as part of what he wanted to do to repair the harm person to person. And instead of doing things like we had received some feedback you know you can just give them tasks to do like papering the bulletin boards well that's not connected to the community or to the person that they had harmed. And so we have the kids actually provide us with suggestions for what to do so in this particular case. Children, the young people offered to go into the lunchroom and let freshmen know about respect and about cleaning up and walked around to each table and reminded them for a whole week they had offered to do that. For the custodian as a personal way of showing that they understood one what they had done but to what it meant and so I think that it's those pieces right it's not a matter of saying, check we do this thing check we do this thing but what does it mean to Jerry, specifically when we talk about person to person. Yeah. Yep. Thanks so much for this conversation. You asked Jerry about the what's happening right what are some of the practices what do they look like. And I think one thing I want to uplift is the, the work of students who maybe are drawn to leadership to want to educate who think of themselves as peace builders that here at my school in East Oakland we do that we have a group of students that are able to self regulate and model how to be in community. And we also pair that with a tier one approach where everybody, regardless of anything other difficult difficulty in their background when they come to Fremont. We have the experience of learning how to listen of being in an intensive space where they are asked to be their best selves, and we slowly chip away at all the ways that we are not able to be to humanize other people and to empathize and to teach empathy very slowly and carefully with that attention to the fact that people dealing with intense trauma the trauma of poverty, violence in the community, and in their lives are not going to automatically be able to to even want to talk to somebody that they don't already know. So the conditions for allowing a school to move forward on restorative practices and sort of peace it's we, we need to have the commitment and the acknowledgement that it's not easy that there's no formula that we're making the road as we walk it and that similar to what Carolyn and others have said around leaders there has to be that vision that this is what we want to do that people in our community need to be humanized and treated with dignity, and it's not going to be perfect to talk in the hallway I earlier today I had to break up a fight people are angry they're carrying not just their own personal stories but their family stories cultural stories and experiences of oppression. How do we hold them with love and and remind them that back in the day maybe they know they knew what it was to actually listen to deescalate and to connect with someone else. There's the kind of constant eyes on on the various hot points right that are that break up a community, and then ongoing training and exploration, involving parents in addition to student leaders, so that there's more buy in we talk a lot about teacher education and making sure that the teachers feel supported in RJ you sometimes will see a student advocacy focus disproportionate to working alongside adults and I'll just say that everyone is part of this picture, and we need to include and welcome and extend our hands to the educators who are really caretakers for our young people in saying that this is for you to this is for all of us. I can talk for days so thank you. I want to add just one piece to that I know this is one of my questions but I just came back as I mentioned from this two day conference on this sort of practices. And one of the papers that was presented was a summary of insights from facilitators and coordinators of restorative programs around the country. And one of the things they consistently said was, if you want the entire school to feel like this is something they're bought into and create that political will that administrators which is to say superintendents principles those at the top have to show up to restorative convenings to restorative interactions, so that they're signaling that this isn't just something that they wrote down and are expecting someone else to do, but they're actually invested in this they are part of this culture transition. And that really resonated with me because what a difference from how we think about the hierarchical ordering of our school societies, and what the role of an administrator is and what a difference that would make for a student to see their principal sitting shoulder to shoulder with them, thinking about how to grow their community. So. So are we talking about school transformations, similar to what you did at Bronxdale. Carolyn which takes a longer period of time or is it possible to implement restorative practices without the long term holistic school transformation that some schools pursue and some folks think that you have to have that. That's the order for restorative practices to take home. Sean, maybe since you, why don't we throw that question to you first, because you talk about this principles and teachers and all needing to be involved. How do you get there schools have the academics they have the mental health issues that they're dealing with. So, where what's the starting point. The starting point is to accept that it takes time right so there is a thing called a restorative readiness scale researchers utilize it all the time to get a sense of whether school is ready culturally to make the transition towards becoming a restorative environment. And one of the core aspects of that scale is the commitment to shifting from punitive and carceral logics to restorative logics, which takes time. The teachers will have internalized as we all have that punishment controls behavior, like I'm a parent that's something that I have to untrain myself of all the time. And I think we all have to untrain ourselves to realize relationships create connection and connection is what actually fosters the sense that I care about and want to invest in my community and creates the behavioral outcomes that we want, but also the sort of mental health outcomes. So it's investing in that long term cultural and even psychological transition that it's not going to happen overnight. And it's really working with teachers and professional learning communities and coaching postures to help them make that transition because it's not going to happen overnight. There will be a lot of temptation to go back to old habits. If you've taught a certain way for 10 years now suddenly someone saying when a student misbehaves do this not that your instincts are going to be misaligned with this new expectation. It takes time. It takes support. It takes encouragement and it takes real coaching and training. Pedro, I want you to join in on this discussion. In spite of the research and the positive outcomes of restorative practices. There's still a lot of concerns being expressed about the focus on restorative practices that it's too soft on discipline that it doesn't necessarily hold students accountable for the actions, especially when those actions cause harm or they disrupt or disrupts other students ability to learn. And they argue that with this increasing with the increasing episodes of school violence that schools need more metal detectors more armed security and more school resource officers. Nearly two thirds of secondary schools in the US today report employing a school resource officer. Now you've worn many hats in education advising state and district leaders. So what would you tell these leaders and parents specifically about the use of school resource offices since two thirds of the schools already have them and others are thinking about them. And what is the role of SROs in school safety. Is it a good return on schools investment. Jerry, great to see you and I'm glad to be part of this discussion. I've been writing in the chat throughout because I've been hearing that I wanted to respond to so let me start by saying that it's essential for schools to be safe places. It's essential for them to be orderly places. No one can learn in an unsafe or disorderly environment. A friend of mine was killed in Oakland last year, a member of the staff by outsiders who came to the school and shot at people. So this is not a small matter. And we should not pretend that in a in a community that has a problem with violence that you can get rid of security guards. You can't. That would be irresponsible to the members of the children and to the staff. At the same time, I think that it's important to realize what role do secure those SROs play. There should be there to support teachers in helping to maintain a safe and orderly environment. When I worked with in Oakland several years ago, one of the schools I worked with in West Oakland decided to hire a 63 year old grandmother as a SRO. And it worked perfectly because she had something that most SROs don't have, which is moral authority. She had the relationships with the community that are essential to maintaining a safe environment. And that's why it's important that we not just think of restorative justice as a new kind of discipline. It's about a culture shift about creating an environment where people know each other, trust each other, work together. There absolutely must be consequences for misbehavior. If there are no consequences, you're going to get more disorder. The question is, are the consequences meaningful? The punishment for not doing your work should be more work, not less work. Getting sent home to play video games is not an effective form of discipline for most kids. So if you simply tell principals lower the suspension rate, then what happens? They'll say, okay, I'll let the kids run wild in the school. If you said to the principal, you've got to be more creative on how you address discipline and fractions when they occur. Then they have to think like a parent. John, you tell your kids if they act up, get out of the house for three days and don't come back, or do you say you're not going to get to watch TV? You're not going to get some of the things you like. You take away privileges. This is common sense. But in a lot of schools, that's lacking. So let me just tell one story from New York now about hats, which came up earlier. This is a school I visited in Queens, beautiful school, and walking through the hall with the assistant principal, and I see a student wearing a hat. I said, you allow students to wear hats? He said, sometimes. And he called the student over. He says, explain why you're wearing the hat. The student rolled his eyes. He said, that was going to take a while. He said, explain. He said, well, we had a town hall meeting because kids were wearing hats and we become a source of friction. And a group of Muslim girls said they should have the right to wear headscarves because it's their religion. And we took a vote, and everyone voted that they should be able to wear their headscarves. And then the kids who were hip hop kids said, well, we should be able to wear hats. And we took a vote, and there was no agreement. So a group of teachers and students met together and said, you can earn the right to wear a hat. Never in class, but only in the hall. To wear the hat, you have to be better on your GPA and you have to have good attendance. Without that, so when you see a kid wearing a hat, it means that they have demonstrated that they can a responsible member of the community. The point of the story is that you need buy-in from the community. If you don't get buy-in from the kids, from the teachers, it's not going to work. Buy-in creates an environment where the relationships are strong and where the kids will tell you if there's a problem brewing and warn you there'll be a fight after school today. Sean, did you have a response to or want to add on to what Pedro just talked about? No, I completely agree with that notion that I wouldn't send my kid out of the home for three days. No, I think it makes sense that there are these sort of common-sensical things that we forget about when we get into business of controlling young people rather than enriching them or thinking of them as one of our own. And when we get back to that sense of what would I do if it were my kid? How would I try to nurture them in this situation? The answer often isn't to push them out. Yeah, I saw you here. I wanted to add, so two things. One is Pedro, I appreciate that that particular example was built by the community for that specific community, right? And it's different from the examples that we've already shared before. And so that that's what's really important, right, is that you're thinking about what that community believes in, wants and can do. The other thing I wanted to mention though, Jerry, is I've seen a number of schools where, you know, they're not making decisions about do I need a school safety agent or not. They're making decisions about what role do these folks play? How do I incorporate them into the training? How do I take them to see what restorative looks like? How are they part of, because many of our agents are actually members of the local community, they know and they understand, they know our families, they're often neighbors, right? And so it's really, really helpful if they too have been trained and understand what it means to know students well and to think about creating safe and caring and welcoming communities in this way. And so I think really important, again, Pedro, that you said not to get rid of them entirely in some spaces, there may be a need for them for whatever reason, whether it's a perception piece or because there actually have been large number of weapons that have been found, but to make sure that wherever we have agents in place that they are a part of the community and understand what it means to be restorative too. Sean, the research regarding the high percentages of black students and students from low income families and students with disabilities having less exposure to restorative practices is, you know, quite disturbing. You know, what proactive measures can schools begin to take to ensure that there is, that restorative practices are available to all students in an equitable manner. So I'll take a second to shout out the report, which is where you'll find those results. So I didn't cover everything that's in the very, very long report, but one of the things that we looked at was who has access to restorative practices. And in a follow up piece that I'm writing now, I look at within schools, who has access to restorative practices and consistently what I'm finding is the black of the school, the lesser sort of practices they get exposure to. And even when you look within a school, white students have more exposure to these practices and black students. So what does that mean? And what can we do? So I think the first thing, if we really want to create a change and also to reassure parents, you know, and reassure community members that their children, no matter how they look will be treated with respect and dignity and have opportunities for the enrichment that comes from these practices is to build trust through honesty and change. So the first step is really honestly districts in schools need to look at which students are gaining exposure to these practices, and which are not and why. My work shows as I mentioned that there are these disparities within districts between schools and within schools between students. But then once you've taken that hard look, the next step is change. We need to make sure that teachers who reach all kinds of students are receiving training and coaching in these practices. And we need to make sure that teachers are using these practices when interacting with students of all backgrounds. You know, that's probably partially a matter of combining restorative practices with cultural sensitivity training and bias training and things that allow teachers to look at students of all backgrounds as individuals, not amalgams of stereotypes. It requires taking a hard look at why we treat some students differently. These racial disparities and discipline don't emerge from nothing. They emerge from biases, unfortunately. We start to attend to that seriously and think we want to create a place where as Pedro put it, everyone feels safe. And it's orderly for all when we create that environment when we're serious about that. That also means being aware of why we treat certain students differently. And we combine that with restorative practices. I think this guy is a limit. Okay, let me just take a slightly different take than Sean provided there. And again, I'll bring up New York City. So I was at a hearing several years ago in New York, and we took the schools that had the highest suspension rates and we brought the principals in before a hearing before the city council. And the question was one of them was boys and girls high school in Brooklyn, which I'm sure Carolyn knows. Question was, why do you have such high suspension rates and this is a predominantly black school. The principal said, he says, I have high suspension rates, because I lack other tools. If you gave me counselors, if you gave me social workers, I could respond to the needs of kids differently. His school at the time had more incarcerated kids, or at least formerly incarcerated kids, more homeless kids than any other school. What we have to be acknowledging here is that when schools don't have resources to address the non-academic needs of kids, their psychological, emotional needs, the needs that kids have for mentoring and support, then what ends up happening is kids act out, they're angry about what's happening in their lives or with their peers, and then schools rely on what they've always done, punish the student, kick them out. If you want schools to respond differently, they need resources to address the root cause of what's behind the behavior problem. And that's what we're not doing in school. We focus on the behavior, not the cause of the behavior problem. And when you do that, the problem doesn't go away. It sometimes gets worse. It's so interesting hearing that piece of your report and your research, Sean, that white students are getting more exposure. I work in a school with hardly any white students, right? And this is the reality of segregation and racial capitalism. And in order to have these schools where people are having all of the resources available to them, you also have to have a school like mine, which is begging for crumbs. You know, in terms of our systemic inequities. And I think it also goes to sort of what is the implicit bias or our own ways of treating children and how they misbehave and the normalization of a carceral response, a punitive response to poor kids, traumatized kids, kids that are just grappling with a lot. I just want to add that. And it's interesting, you know, in Oakland, we are also seen as this model. There's a lot of research that's been done here. And so how dare that be true that we are, you know, initiating this stuff and then it's being taken and not being given back. I mean, this is a real, a real problem. And I appreciate the spotlight here to just sort of say that also folks are struggling here in Oakland, you know, and elsewhere that, you know, we made the effort. We have a part of a community, a parent led initiative to force the schools to do something different. And look, we're in the news and we're not also given enough to do to really and adequately respond in a restorative way we need to not just put conditions in our schools, but in our neighborhoods, because what happens in the neighborhood bleeds into the schools and it goes, you know, in and out of the gates, and the security officers we call them now culture keepers which I think is a great rhetorical shift. But those are our community members who oftentimes went to the schools in Oakland into the very schools where they're protecting. So how do we, you know, actively work with them and our neighbors to create safety. And this is to the question of what recommendations do you have we talk a lot about what the schools have to do, but what about policymakers Pedro brought up the question of lack of resources. And engagement of the community. So what recommendations do you have for policymakers for more for practitioners for the community to be involved. And we can start with any one of you who wants to talk about those areas. I, you know, I spoke about the funding, you know, we're we're vulnerable to budget cuts into politicians and other sort of, you know, the whims and the fads and the trends. I come from a generation I mean I'm not, you know where we call it RJ and people are now calling it RP we're sort of practices, but what are these various acronyms and we all know what I'm talking about an education. So how can we be creative document our work, get those testimonials and do I mean, you know I talk a lot of shade about capitalism but be an entrepreneur for restorative justice. Right like if our state agents aren't going to secure the funds to have a consistent facilitator or other staffing to make sure it all happens. How do we look elsewhere and be creative here in the Bay Area we have the tech industry. Folks like to talk a lot about about about Oakland kids about any of our kids. How do we, you know, sort of reflect the mirror back and and demand what we're owed speaking about a lot of different things here but you know at a fundamental point, feeling that we are entitled to to more than what we're getting and how creative can we get in in just accessing those funds and shifting the the paradigms. That's, that's absolutely right. And I think that there are ways for schools to think about you know if you're not going to be provided something then then how do you create it from within but you still need the resources. And you know, in certain communities you need more resources that are in the form of human beings or manpower, then you do in the form of technical pieces like curriculum and things like well you need those two but you know the support that needs to happen in the practitioners. The one thing I will say is when in systems where there isn't that kind of buy in where the system as a whole has decided that they don't believe in the work so that I think there are two things that need to happen and one is how do we amplify the research that the outcomes, the benefits of it, so that you can actually show the transformation of schools that has happened when you implement this, because it's a mindset it's an approach it's not a, it's not as you mentioned Jerry something that you buy off the it's also not either RJ or RP it is a whole school thing, and you may start with small things but you have to have it throughout and people have to believe in working in these ways and building relationships in these ways so there needs to be. I think Sean like amplifying the report and so much more about why this matters, so that the people making decisions about funding and policy actually can see it and pay attention to it. And then the other part that is the entrepreneurial part from an educator perspective is also to attach it to the big initiatives that people are paying attention to. So if we're paying attention to pieces like right now we're paying attention to technology AI and all of those things right in what way do you connect this to what it means to be in spaces where you have to be discerning where you have to be. You know you have to connect with other people right in what way do we connect it to literacy initiatives and what way do we connect it to. You know I mentioned in the chat earlier that my students who were not my top students who participated in any of these roles became some of my best askers of questions and delivers of speeches and supporters of others and so how do you help ensure that wherever you are when you're attaching it to how you help kids become more career and college ready. In addition to the part that we know and believe in that is, this is how kids learn best. This is how people work best. This is how you create longevity for staff, and you create healthy whole spaces for students. I think we have to find the other entry points to. Justin from one of. Sorry, Jerry go ahead. I was going to just add one thing to what Tatiana and Carol are saying. Tatiana I think what you mentioned about the sort of pernicious pendulum of politics and how we get away from that and the alluring pool of panaceas is really important for policymakers to attend to you know typically when we see funding for these kinds of school responses. We'll give it a year and see if it works if we don't see discipline disparities go down or if we see any, you know downcreep and academic achievement will abandon it will try something else. And the reality is culture change takes time you know one of the things that folks in our sort of circle of restorative researchers and practitioners talk about a lot is how it can take as many of five years to really see a cultural root, a cultural change take root and bear fruit. You haven't gotten the political will to sustain funding the commitment to keeping going with the journey, even when it's hard which is going to be it's culture change right. Then you're going to have abandonment which as I mentioned in my report can be incredibly harmful. You know imagine being a black student, and one year suddenly you're being humanized. It's this big restorative transition. And the next year it's, it's a SRO is that are just on you for every misbehavior you do because there's been this shift away towards a new period of approach, imagine the cognitive harm the mental harm that that exerts. So if we really want to do this right we have to be willing to take the time to do it all the way. Okay, any other comments about that question. One of the, one of our participants said that asked the question can someone speak to the role of support staff custodians bus drivers janitorial staff. Yeah, well I'm in, I'm a classified staff right restorative justice facilitators what we call it here and some of my colleagues are hourly so the custodial staff and the lunch, you know the cafeteria workers are hourly. So where I see that get in the way is having them participate in, in trainings around circle keeping so teachers often get trainings and circle keeping, and we haven't consistently been able to bring in classified staff, including those culture keepers the, you know the security or even case managers to be there. And those folks as we all know are oftentimes the people that students go to when they are upset, they need some emotional support or they also they're just around they're in our community and I think, however, a school manager can budget it or make it happen to have more of an inclusive training space so that a trainee is not just teachers teachers absolutely of course and who are the, this wealth of other adult, carrying adults on campus, almost like deputizing them into a role which I think they would, well, you know, put it in their job description make sure that they're getting compensated but you know, to be able to just empower folks to be more connected I think that buying would happen will kind of flow a little more automatically to Thank you to all of our panelists for their comments for their presentations with Sean and Sarah. This is our second webinar in a two part series on creating schools that are both physically and psychologically safe for students and educators. You can learn more by watching the first webinar in the series which Linda spoke about. And there's a link in the chat. The webinar recording the one today the PowerPoint and the resources will be available on the LPI website. So I want to thank again our panelists and thank all of you for joining us today.