Growing pains

We've been having some problems with our restorative justice program. The circles have become a chore and students are not liking them. I think perhaps that we have been too ambition with the process and that it hasn't been an organic growth. We have foisted restorative justice circles upon students and told them to go be restorative while we ourselves have not embraced the process as a staff. We are telling students to go and do something that we ourselves do not do. Of course it won't work if that's the case. We had a circle among a few staff today after school and that was the first time that I have sat in circle with the staff pretty much since we got our training. I think there was one time that we tried to do that in the staff meeting but that was it. It was refreshing to be in a circle with people that wanted to be there. I think that we need to change ourselves before we can ask students to change. We need to be the leaders that we want them to be. We have to model the behavior that we would like to see from them. I think that a problem with many of the students is that they either have few models of good behavior or a many models of bad behavior. We would like for them to sit calmly, but they are not used to calm.

It was really important for the participating staff to have a forum where they could vent their feelings and concerns and feel heard. We get so busy and caught up in our work that we don't take the time to check in and see how the others are doing. We don't get time to just be with ourselves sometimes. There was a lot of crazy shit that went down yesterday and I found myself scrambling to deal with that and then I worked myself up into a lather.

I would like to see circles no longer be a forced dynamic and instead that we as teachers sit in circles together, but also to just take small groups of kids and work with them in a circle together. The circles were meant to be something that was voluntary and by making them nonvoluntary they lose the essence of what they bring to the table.

We have this one young Black kid that I think in particular would benefit from circles. He just recently had a staff meeting, hasn't been following through with what he said that he was going to do, brought out a knife in the school and started carving up the table, and doesn't seem to get the ramifications of what he has done. His dad isn't a part of his life as much as he should be and the kid gets high way too much. Throw a possible learning disability on top of that and it's a recipe for disaster. To be able to pull this kid aside and talk together with him I think would be the perfect way of implementing circles. It would be smaller and more intimate to just have him and a few of the teachers and his friends to run the circle. That is the space that I think that we could get some good work done.