The Rebirth of Circle

Since my last post, we've had two staff circles. One on Friday the 22nd and one on the 25th. Since then, I've learned to not schedule circles on Fridays. People are just done with the week and want to get out. Sitting mindfully in circles requires discipline and dedication. The meeting on the Friday was good because there were returning faces, (LS, CFG, and me) and then there were two different people (BS and SDS). NL and JC just had to cut out. I understood. SDS has never sat in a circle before and so it was good to bring him in and have him get acquainted with the process. The circle was really positive and we seemed to make a commitment to have more circles among the staff and also that we needed to have a rebirth of circles. We needed to make the process more organic and less forced....we needed to get staff into circles.

I can tell my Native American coworker, BY, is totally checked out of circles. An interesting problem has occurred. Backstory: BY was saying that the Native kids at our school were offended by the circles and that they didn't want to do them. Circles were sacred to their religion and students' misbehavior and disrespect within the circles were disrespectful to them. BY was obviously also not into them at all. He and some students spoke with other leaders in the local Native community and they came by the school to sit in the circle. CFG is new to the school and was running the circle and found that everyone just shut down. She felt like she got backdoored and the circle police was brought in on her. Then after a staff meeting some of us were sitting around and discussing the state of circles and we decided to scrap the Thursday circles that we had been doing with the kids. The problem was that CFG wasn't there and no one told her about it until Thursday. She had planned to do things with the students and felt backdoored again.

Anyways, after all this had happened is when we started to do staff circles again. I should note that CFG is our new restorative justice site coordinator, so it was kind of fucked up the situations that she has been placed in.

The circle that we had this last Monday was larger and so that was positive. I was able to bring in the 2 tutors and their site coordinator from the afterschool program and AV showed up. This one was again attended by LS, BS, SDS, CFG, NL, JC, and I. The more people that we can get involved in the circles program the better. I want to bring one of the Black male tutors, UL, into the community and culture of the school and he seems open to it. He has developed a rapport with a number of the Black kids and they need a positive role model like he is. He is also interested in sitting in circle with JC and me when we have one with the young black kid, IF, I spoke of before.

So now circles are going to be more organic. My goal is to get the teachers to start leading them. I had left the Monday circle early to go to another meeting and asked AV what he had thought of the remainder of the circle. He said he started getting antsy around when I left and I gathered from what he was saying that he thinks CFG talks too much. CFG does have a tendency to speak at length, so I told AV that he should lead the next circle. He said he didn't want to step on any toes and I said I would talk to CFG. She was down for it so AV is going to lead the next one. That AV is willingly going to step up and lead a circle is great news. He can be real pessimistic and cynical sometimes so to have him wanting to lead a circle is good news. It's funny, we got trained in circles about a year ago but it took us until now for the staff to actually start having staff circles. I think that right there was the essence of why it didn't work. Part of what makes circles effective is that it gives self empowerment to the participants. We as a staff gave our power away to "site coordinators" and left things in their hands. Not that the site coordinators weren't or aren't good people. It just that we had to take responsibility for our community and not just expect some outside power to fix things for us. It doesn't work that way where I work. We have to make things happen ourselves. The site coordinators must help us find our own power.