Ep 3: Punishment and Schools
We can all agree that all the children and adults in a school should feel safe and should actually be safe. But when violence or the threat of violence happens, how do we get safer schools?
In this episode, we explore how students want–and are creating–safer school for themselves without relying on punishment. We visit Martín Urbach and the Circle Keepers, a restorative justice and community organizing program for young people. We speak with two students who tried to start a restorative justice club at their high school. We also talk to Ashley C. Sawyer, Esq., an education justice advocate and adjunct faculty at Brooklyn Law School. She talks about the role of punishment in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline.
We all want safer schools. What are the skills and resources we need to get there?
Useful Links
The Circle Keepers were our primary guest for this episode, along with students from Bard Early College High School and attorney and adjuncy law professor Ashley C Sawyer.
How can we make schools safer? Here’s some research on restorative justice in schools that Ashley mentioned, and another study from NIH. She also mentions research that supports culturally relevant curriculum to improve student safety and wellbeing; read more in this 2022 article in School Psychology International or this 2023 review. Ashley also mentions the Advancement Project, a racial justice organization that has been leading the fight for police-free schools, amongst other campaigns.
Here’s some additional reading:
From NYU Steinhardt: Disrupting School Pushout
From NY Law School: A, B, C, D, STPP: How School Discipline Feeds the School-to-Prison Pipeline
From the Learning Policy Institute: Fostering Belonging, Transforming Schools: The Impact of Restorative Practices
From Vera Institute: A Generation Later: What We've Learned about Zero Tolerance in Schools
From Princeton’s Institutional Antiracism Accountability Project: The Powerful Potential of Restorative Justice in Education
Transcript
Kathleen P (Host): This is the Problem with punishment podcast. Spoiler alert, the problem with punishment is it doesn't work. But the bigger problem is that we turn to punishment in every aspect of our lives, from our families to our neighborhoods, our boroughs, our city. We keep expecting punishment to make things better, when for the most part, it makes whatever problem we're addressing worse. Every time punishment fails, it hurts. Some people have taken the pain of that failure and turned it into purpose. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño, and I'll be talking with a range of New Yorkers who have experienced firsthand the failure of punishment and who found or created something better to do instead. From gun violence to child abuse to drug addiction, New York can lead the way in actually solving some of our most pressing problems. But first, we have to talk about the problem with punishment.
Kathleen P (Host): This is our episode about the problem with punishment in schools. Now, when we're conceiving the podcast, we talked about how important it was to go places in New York and see what was, what was, what talked specifically about going places where there was harm or danger or harm or danger had happened, places people didn't feel safe. You know, we have an episode about punishment and gun violence. We have an episode of The Problem with Punishment and Addictions. You may have heard it all seemed doable. The only place that filled me with dread was when I realized that we were going to have to go back inside to New York City High School. I myself am entirely a product of the New York City public school system, and like any person with personal experience, you read the media like high school is not my favorite place. You know, if I remember correctly from my own youth, and also based on the expressions of the faces of teens that I interact with now, young people would generally describe the problem with why school sucks as being because of the grown ups.A man on our best days were useless. On our worst days were monsters. And you know, I've gotten older. And now I think as adults, we're like, oh, it's. It's the students, these young people. And the problem might not just be the grown ups, and it might not just be the young people, it might be the way the schools community is set up, which is to say, a lot of the time school is not set up as if it's an actual community by and for the people in it, but we need our schools to be safe. So what can we do about it? You know, is punishment going to get us there?
Kathleen P (Host): We're going to start this episode in a high school in Brooklyn. I went in on a random Tuesday. I entered during class time. You know, that kind of eerie quiet you encounter in the middle of the day? Then the bell sounds loud enough to wake the dead, and a wave of humanity starts running, rushing through all the spaces, the hallways, the classrooms, the cafeteria. We weaved all the way through. I was pretty much riding the wave until I landed in the music room with a bunch of teens sitting in a circle eating pizza. These were teens that had signed up for a program called Circle Keepers because they wanted to be part of making their school more of a community, and they spend their lunch periods learning how to solve conflicts. So I asked them to introduce themselves, and I asked them to share one thing they were into. And here's what a few of them said.
Maria: My name is Maria, and I'm 15 and I love pizza.
Shay: Hi, my name is Shay. I'm 17 and I like dance.
Ashley: My name is Ashley. I'm 16 and my favorite subject is history.
Amber: My name is Amber. I'm 19, I'm a culinary major and I'm one of the youth activists in the organization Circle Up.
Kathleen P (Host): Martín is an adult who's leading the circle. He's a music teacher at the school, and he's also the founder of Circle Keepers, the community group that's bringing these kids together. The Circle Keepers program is training young people to become Restorative Justice practitioners. I mean, righ, it's a practice, and they work with kids from schools across the city. We got to meet more of the youth that they're working with when we went to another circle training that they were having in Manhattan on a Saturday.
Martín U: I'm Martín, otherwise known in my schools as Mr. Martini. But Martín is my name.
Kathleen P (Host): At the Manhattan Circle, one of the students, Jahari summarized pretty well what we heard from a bunch of the youth in both circles in terms of how much they were policed at school.
Jahari: I feel like the biggest problem with like how people are policed in school--obviously school is there for education, but also most children in their like teens will spend like majority of their time there.
Kathleen P (Host): One thing I heard pretty consistently in both the circles we sat in, in both Brooklyn and Manhattan, was from students like Cammy, a 16 year old high school junior from Brooklyn. You know, they had all seen a lot of harm, physical harm, emotional harm, bullying. And they were pretty clear that punishment was not preventing these things from happening.
Cammy: I have a friend who beat up another kid and like his sister, joined in to help beat him up. It was it was pretty bad. And I think afterwards, like, they were suspended in school for a few days and that didn't really do anything. I feel like it was more like taking the time after to realize like, oh, like when like talking with other people, like, that was really bad. And I feel like just being locked in a room for like, the whole day, not doing anything didn't help at all.
Kathleen P (Host): Youth in both circles had a lot of examples of times that punishment hadn't worked, and also a pretty emotionally astute analysis of why punishment wasn't working. This is Shayelle from the Brooklyn circle.
Shayelle: Especially when you get punished. You kind of just find loopholes on how to do the thing that you're doing without getting punished, and it doesn't actually teach you the root of the issue. And I feel like especially the root of the issue, if you don't know why you're doing it or you do know why you're doing it, and people are punishing you without knowing why you're doing the thing you're doing, it doesn't solve anything.
Cammy: Yeah, I agree. If my kid comes in with like a bad attitude or something, if you're more inquisitive about it and trying to find out, like why? Or just like, ask them, like, if I just leave you alone, will that help a little bit today? Instead of, like, automatically getting in trouble or like send them out of the classroom, which is going to make them even more like, mad or have have like a worse day.
Maria: I also feel like when the kid already knows, like what the punishment is gonna be like, it's sort of become numb to it. Like they already know what the consequences are going to be, so they don't really care if they do it again over and over.
Kathleen P (Host): I was surprised when the topic of dress coding, which I did not know was a verb, came up in the circles. Now, as part of the research for this episode, I did talk to a lawyer who we're going to hear more from later, but I want to give you just a little peek at what she had to say about this.
Ashley C Sawyer: Thank God you got here safely. You were able to get up in the morning and you made it here. And so when schools come for young people about, oh, your skirt is too short or your shirt is see through or you have leggings on, you're going to get in-school suspension because you're violating dress code. That's punishment.
Kathleen P (Host): I was like, how is this a thing? But the students had a lot of experience with it and a lot of really painful stories.
Jahari: Pants And shoes. I remember at ninth grade I wore Crocs and I had to leave class to get the shoe pass.
Emma: We have a dress code, but like the people who are being dress coded, like the teachers who -- they're very picky about who they pick up about the dress code. Like, mainly like the people that are getting dress coded are like Black students. And there's a group of white girls in my school who don't follow the dress code--to put it lightly--and they don't get punished,
Shay: But they can't get enough in my school. There is just like a uniform we have to wear. But most kids, they don't really wear the uniform. And honestly, I feel like it's sexist when it comes to like, dress coding. Because some kids, some females and males. Some females who work towards us here sliding under the knees and they say, oh no, that's too short for shorts. Well, males have the same type of shorts, but they don't get dress coded. Where females who are like, like crop tops says they're showing too much of their shoulders. But if a guy wants to wear like a tank top there, you're not showing your shoulders. It makes no sense.
Jahari: I would like to discuss, like when I was in elementary school, they were incredibly strict with, like, the dress code. We're like first graders. And it was checking literally our undershirts, our socks, our belts. Like, literally, it was like, no, that's the wrong color. "I'm gonna have to call your mom. I'm gonna have to, like, get a whole, like, situation." I was like, I can't even wear, like, the right color. I can't even wear, like, socks. They check your socks. I never known a school that were so focused on, like, your feet.
Taj: I'm so glad you brought up dress code, because that's what I had in my head.
Kathleen P (Host): This is Taj, who was one of the adults who is part of the Circle Keepers program and was in the second circle that we did with the Circle Keepers youth.
Taj: And the dress code implementation throughout schools is very interesting. I know when I was a student I had friends with larger bodies who were dress coded for things that smaller young ladies were not just quoted for, particularly in the summer months. It's 95 degrees. My arms are not going to be covered, bro. Y'all don't have air conditioning. I'm hot. And also, like, I went to a specialized high school. I was a Black face in a predominantly non-Black space. And also in addition to the body types--like she was saying, right. The implementation and the enforcement on Black and Latino girls versus all white and Asian counterparts.
Taj: Like literally my best friend got dragged out of school by school safety because her skirt was too short. Mind you, the skirt was to her knees, which is the protocol, but they wanted to fight with her about it. Also, this was in summer school and the rule in our school at that time was three absences, you fail. You could be a straight A student. If you missed summer school more than three times, you fail. She already had two absences, so she was trying to explain to school safety, "if I miss another class, you're going to fail me." This is summer school, right? Like I won't get another opportunity to get these credits. I have to go to class."
Taj: And instead of trying to work something out with her or getting her a pair of sweatpants from the SGO store, which was two floors above us, they said, no, we're going to cuff you. We're going to drag you out of the school. She missed the class. They failed her, and that's just one like and that's an extreme example.
Taj: But also, I think it's something that's very common in terms of like she and someone else were describing, like how implementation is different based on who the student is. And I know for myself as a parent also, I've sent quite a few emails about things like dress coding and also just the way that discipline works in general. Like if a child misses homework, you're--really you should be asking why? And if a child is missing school regularly, I get it. You have an attendance protocol, but a seven year old can't get themselves to school, and a 15 year old who just lost a parent, school is not their priority, right? So, like, what are the things you put in place before you get to a place where you are doing things like detention, suspension, superintendent suspension, calling ACS on people. Right? And I think these things are deeply interlinked. And I also think that children are trained to be bullied by schools. You know, it doesn't matter what you have on your feet. That has nothing to do with how you learn, right? But you also understand, if I come in with white shoes and they told me to wear black shoes, it's going to be a problem.
Taj: And I think one of the first things that is stolen from kids is that self-expression through identity via their clothing, and that's already, on some level--subconsciously, right--training you to conform. Right? So, like, I know it's not a big deal for people, but in my mind, especially as a Black woman and also as a mother now, like I don't mind the uniform, but I also see what you're doing, right?
Taj: I see what you're doing. I see how it's related to all these other things about schooling. Can't go to the bathroom at a certain time. You can't ask questions during a certain time. They'll literally shut the door on kids faces like the bell just rang. Well, you're late to my class. Well, now I can't learn, bro. So who is this really working for? Right. And just like all those kinds of really upsetting things that I think a lot of kids--first they have to get the opportunity to even realize, oh, that is actually like I it's normal to me because it's the rules. But also this is not doing anything to help me get educated and build relationships. Or like, figure out who I am as a human being and what I can contribute to the school and my community at large.
Kathleen P (Host): Well, that's the question that I actually wanted to ask you all. Like, what is the point of the rules at your school?
Emma: I feel like, honestly, there's like no point. No, no, because like, it's just kind of like stripping our identity from us. We can't express ourselves. We have to be like a perfect human being or this person that we're really not. But they're just killing our freedom and everything else is stripped away.
Kathleen P (Host): The more stories the young people shared about the harms they had experienced or witnessed, the more they talked about what youth were actually getting punished for in schools, the more I was shocked and amazed that they showed up for school at all, much less that they spent their lunch periods and their Saturdays sitting in circle, building a community and a set of muscles to both prevent and respond to conflict and harm in their schools. Now, I want to come back to what I talked about at the top of the episode, the idea that it is the environment in schools, and not just the choices of the people in it that are creating these challenges to safe schools. So I want us to switch for a second to listening to attorney Ashley C Sawyer.
Ashley C Sawyer: I've been practicing for about ten years, focused primarily on issues related to education justice, and youth criminalization. I am an adjunct law professor at Brooklyn Law School, and I teach a course called Race and Educational Inequity.
Ashley C Sawyer: Where do we begin? I say this sort of humorously, but it actually does break my heart when I really think about it. American public schools from the very beginning, have existed in many iterations as tools to control and suppress rebellion and to, like, train a class of people who would be good workers. And I think that that's an important part to begin the conversation with, because public education, I think, is an important public good and can be used to do powerful things. And in the right hands, public education in the United States can be something that young people design--their families and their communities--design for their own liberation, their own preparation to be members of a community and to thrive and achieve whatever it is that they want to achieve and to build the knowledge and skills to get to that space. But instead, American public education has relied very heavily on the concepts of control, teaching obedience, teaching children and young people to follow directions and follow orders.
Kathleen P (Host): When the focus of schools isn't teaching independent thinking and interdependence and community building. When it's about teaching compliance, then the biggest tool in your toolbox is going to be punishment.
Ashley C Sawyer: There's a lot of punishment happening in American public schools. It looks like school suspensions. It looks like school expulsions. It looks like school-based arrest that's, you know, incredibly common, where, you know, school cops or school security are handcuffing students, arresting them even as young as five years old. It can also look like young people being put into what I would argue and what many would argue are mental health confinement. And then another punishment practice that I learned about through working at Advancement Project is the practice of school based corporal punishment. There are more than a dozen states, actually about 18 states in the US, that still legally allow school staff to hit and paddle students.
Kathleen P (Host): Luckily, New York State is not one of the states that allows corporal punishment. But before we congratulate ourselves too much, we have to get real about what it means to rely on punishment, including expulsion, first and foremost, to deal with any issues of young people's behavior.
Ashley C Sawyer: And punishment is also just looking like just failing to meet young people's needs. When young people say, like, hey, I'm dealing with whatever stress they're holding, whatever complicated family dynamics they might have, or adult caregiving responsibilities they might have, particularly when we're talking about Black and Latine girls and schools. I think it's a form of punishment, when those young people come to school and they're like, I am so freaking tired. I just want to put my head on this desk. And then the person is like, "no, you need to be paying attention if you're not paying attention, get out of my classroom." That's punishment.
Kathleen P (Host): These forms of punishment, of pushing young people out of the classroom, out of the school building, when they're struggling, is the basis of what people are talking about and have talked about at this point for decades. The school-to-prison pipeline, that's the systems of punishment that start to shove youth, specifically Black and Brown youth, onto a path that is going to lead to prison or jail. Instead of offering healing resources, a focus on helping them join the workforce in meaningful ways, stay in school or get to college.
Kathleen P (Host): Circle Keepers is great, and they are one model and one approach. There are lots of different ways that students are trying to change the norm when it comes to punishment in schools. I also had a chance to sit down with Isabella and Ava, high school students at Bard Early College High School. They're trying to start a Restorative Justice group within their school. And I started off by asking them why. It turned out the story of that started going all the way back to their experience in elementary school. I'll start us off with listening to Isabella.
Isabella: So I guess for me, when it came to like punishment specifically, it was like a really complex subject, especially when it came to like me in elementary school, because in elementary school, it was probably the place where I actually received the most punishment in my entire life. I know it's crazy. Let's just say, like a lot of racial stuff happened, and a lot of the times when I tried to, like, confront teachers about it, they didn't really do anything. Because I even remember I almost got suspended for biting a kid on the thumb and. Okay. And the context behind that is like, this girl and I, we were doing, like, a pain competition to see who can hold the most pain tolerance. For some reason--it was stupid and the girl slapped me in the face and after she slapped me in the face, I didn't cry and I was like, okay. And then I bit her on the thumb afterwards. And then she started crying and I felt really bad. And I was apologizing because I didn't like, I didn't like. We were sure, testing our like pain tolerance, but I didn't mean to like make her cry. So from that point they tried to like get me suspended. And my mom was just telling them how it's insane that, for starters, I was the only one getting in trouble because I think at the time, the girl that I ended up biting on the thumb wasn't Black. I think she was white. And I think from that point it just kind of like gave me a little bit of like a troubled past, especially when it came to like punishment. And I also became, like, so afraid of getting in trouble. And sometimes like, like it's definitely toned down, but I get really anxious whenever, like, I get in trouble because I'm afraid of, like, something like that's gonna happen again and I don't want it to happen again.
Kathleen P (Host): Isabella's classmate Ava, who lives in Harlem and was also going to Bard Early College High School in Queens, had a different path that brought her to her interest in bringing restorative practices to her school.
Ava: Seeing like people being punished more was more prominent in elementary school specifically. It wasn't me that was being punished, but one of my classmates were being punished. But I could tell that he needed assistance in terms of like, mental help. But he would act out in class sometimes and my teachers would punish him, like, really harshly because he was acting out in class. But it was, I believe, a mental issue going on. And my mom was trying to communicate to the teachers and the principal that he shouldn't have to be suspended, because he was causing a disturbance in class. So I think that in the school system, I think there needs to be a better understanding of mental health in children and when to recognize it and not punish kids when it's not really their fault.
Isabella: I feel like there was like an incident that happened at our school a while ago, which was it was basically a racial attack from like one student to a Black student. And I feel like the way how our school kind of handled the situation was not appropriate at all. And I think from that point, we just kind of like was like, okay, there has to be like a better way of dealing with conflicts like this. And I think we both kind of like had the idea about doing something like Restorative Justice wise with like the school. And I think from that point we've been kind of working on it together.
Kathleen P (Host): Isabella and Ava started a Restorative Justice club at their high school, and I asked them, so then what happened?
Ava: In terms of Restorative Justice? As a club, we've had a lot of pushback with how we would run our club.
Kathleen P (Host): Has there been pushback from other students?
Isabella: So far, no, actually.
Kathleen P (Host): Right. Students aren't like, "No, there's too much Restorative Justice already!"
Ava: Also like to add on, I think that the no that we're being told is kind of like it's not what the Restorative Justice Committee would look like now is more adults are more telling us what we should be doing and pushing that out to students. Whereas before I felt like we had more control over what we would be saying and what we would be doing, because we would know how to communicate with students because they're our peers. So now it kind of feels like we're a bit muted in terms of our decisions and our opinions and what we can and can't say because we're being monitored by adults. When we weren't initially planning on having that system before.
Kathleen P (Host): The Bard Early College High school students, they're similar to what I was seeing with the Circle Keeper youth that I met. And they're at a bunch of different schools. These are young people who have ideas. They have energy. They are ready to take on these issues of safety and harm. They're pretty sharp in their assessment of these problems, what they're seeing, and what needs to change. I'm going to go back to Amber with the Circle Keepers for a second.
Amber: Let's say if a kid is sleeping in class. You know, it's like you wake them up the first time, and it's like, "why are you sleeping in class? Okay, you don't want to be in my class. Get out." I feel like that's a really common thing. And instead of, like, teachers understanding, like, damn, maybe something's going wrong at home. Maybe this kid's not getting enough sleep. "You're disrespecting my class. Get out of my class." And I feel like that doesn't work, because then it's just gonna not wake the kid up. It's going to make the kid go to sleep somewhere else, or go in the hallway or do something.
Kathleen P (Host): When we were in circle with the Circle Keepers in Manhattan, we heard a story from a few of the students who went to the same school about when Sharpies were banned from their school.
Shayelle: There's a lot of graffiti on the walls in the bathroom stalls. There were several incidents of people carving threats onto walls and racist symbols, and also swastikas. And instead of getting to the root of the problem, dealing with it, even talking about it, they just banned Sharpies.
Shay: That's crazy. To us.
Circle: But how do you do your homework? Pencils.
Kathleen P (Host): So how do you wish they had this one instead?
Emma: I wish they talked about it. And like some sort of assembly and like educated about the actual harm that could have been happened, that could have been done to their community, seen it and identified with those. But it's still happening. We all just use pencils.
Jahari: Right?
Emma: The stalls, with like pencils. They just stab at it.
Taj: Yeah. About to lose their pencils next.
Emma: They're not talking about it. The only thing they talked about was respecting property. Yes. But. But they just they didn't even replace the stalls. They didn't cover it up. They didn't.
Taj: Oh my god.
Emma: It's still there. It's still there.
Jahari: So that whole idea of, like, respecting property, that's what police is all meant to do, to function as to, you know, protect property, protect class wealth. Protect that and not the people. It's meant to target the people to target and marginalize individuals like the fact that they're not responding to like, these forms of like white supremacy or anti-Blackness, etc., Like it just shows how the school is interconnected with policing, is interconnected with surveillance, you know? So, wow, that's.
Kathleen P (Host): What do you wish they did?
Jahari: Instead, destroy these policing systems down to the ground and like actually create like for restorative, transformative systems that get down to the root causes. Where we can address the intergenerational harms and oppressions that exist that we internalize to this very day. And like how that affects our relationships as students, as teachers, as staff, and like even our communities around us. So, yeah.
Kathleen P (Host): The stories that we heard from students about their experience in school follow a pattern that have come up in a number of the conversations I've had with people for this podcast in different settings. The problem winds up in kind of two large buckets. One of them is people are getting punished for nothing. The punishment doesn't even serve a purpose. So in schools, for example, that would be the dress coding. It's just to show that you can punish people. And then there's the bucket the problem of there's actual harm happening. And that people's frustration-- and why they're making things that work better, why they're building their own solutions, why these young people are sitting in circle--is that the punishments that are being offered when harm happens are truly inadequate. And these young people can see it. This is what many of the guests in these episodes who are doing things have in common. And in all of these settings, we have to talk about then, well, why the punishment? What are we trying to accomplish? And in this episode, for that, we're going to turn back to Ashley Sawyer, the attorney we spoke with, to talk about what the big picture is.
Ashley C Sawyer: Yes, there are times where young people do hurtful and bad things, full stop. Their brains are still developing. They are still figuring out who they are as people and figuring out what does it mean to interact with other people. Particularly on the heels of this massive, earth-shattering event called a global pandemic. A lot of the conflicts that I have heard about, or a lot of the times, actually were school-based arrests have happened across the country when it comes to Black girls. A lot of the intervention happens when the girls are fighting. There's a fistfight or a fight of some sort, and a so-called school resource officer or school cop calls themselves "intervening," and they end up escalating the situation. And one of the big demands of abolitionists and education justice organizers has been for schools, including New York City schools, to invest money and resources into the types of programming and staff that can help young people mitigate that. So Restorative Justice, Restorative Justice practitioners who don't just come once a week here and there, but who are deeply embedded in the school environment, building long-term relationships with the students, and who are able to anticipate, okay, these groups of students are having tension with each other. They have beef. Let's get them in a circle. Let's work some stuff out before it gets to the point where they're fighting.
Kathleen P (Host): I'm going to confess to being genuinely embarrassed at how much more emotionally mature these teenagers in the Circle Keepers were compared to me at, say, the age of 35. They are very thoughtful in their approach and thinking and articulating why punishment isn't working, and why they would rather be putting their time and energy into something else that's better.
Maria: The restorative part of Restorative Justice is so important because it takes the time to understand the why and the how. Because you can't really tell somebody to change or fix what they do by punishing them. Because it only teaches them, oh, this is wrong, because I'm gonna get punished, and not actually understanding I'm doing this because of one, two, and three. And this is how my actions are affecting one, two, and three. So Restorative Justice brings that deeper understanding of actions.
Kathleen P (Host): So, given that there are young people who are interested in this and want to build those skills, the question is, well, how are we going to support that? And that's where we're going to turn back to Ashley.
Ashley C Sawyer: But at the very basic level, there need to be people who care about young people who are trained to support young people who are not cops involved in schools. But there's a number of studies that say Restorative Justice, when done with fidelity, can reduce conflict in schools.
Kathleen P (Host): We're not going to read all the research to you on this episode, but we will link to it on our website. The research that Ashley's talking about, some of it I had heard of and was familiar with the research about Restorative Justice, community practices working better than expulsions in terms of creating safe environment in schools. But she mentioned another thing that leads to better outcomes that I have personally experienced. But I didn't realize there was research about, which is that it makes a difference what we're learning in schools and the extent to which the curriculum includes everyone. Includes our communities, our ancestors in the story of what makes our society work, what makes our society tick, versus only getting part of the story. And now this has become a really loaded topic, but I'll let Ashley talk more about it.
Ashley C Sawyer: Restorative justice does work. Another thing that there is in, you know, research indicating that works, whether in New York City or across the country, is culturally relevant curriculum. Research shows that when young people have access to curriculum that reflects their racial, ethnic background and heritage, they feel more engaged in school. They're more excited about school, and they have a better relationship with the staff and teachers that they work with. And surprise, surprise, when young people feel more connected to their school, they tend to get into fewer fights.
Kathleen P (Host): Right, and let's come back to the idea that there are things that seem like they are instant, comprehensive solutions. Expulsion, suspensions, they seem like they are so definitive. They are so fast. You can just do them, and do they just fix the problem? They're not the quick fix that they make it out to be.
Ashley C Sawyer: It's actually a series of investments and commitments day in and day out to really meaningfully invest, meaning spend money on tools and resources that work. Listening to people who have real relationships with young people, listening to young people themselves, helping them build skills in conflict resolution and navigating trauma, and getting healing support. That is what actually works. That is going to take time.
Kathleen P (Host): And this is where we're going to come back to listen to one of the young people, Amber, one of the Circle Keeper students, talking about her own experience with the school. Because this stuff is real and it's happening already.
Amber: I'm here to just really, like call out the punitive system in schools, especially coming from both the best worlds. I went to a charter school fully punitive, and then my high school was just fully restorative. So understanding, like, you know, like I said, both of best worlds, knowing what really helps and harms kids in the DOE system. I think I maybe did this two years ago, but it was two best friends beefing over a racist issue. You know, one of them had said the N word when she had no right or place to say it, and the other friend felt very hurt. She was like very disappointed in her friend. And it did take a couple sessions, you know, because not everything can be fixed in one meeting. But seeing that their friendship definitely got closer, they definitely built like a lot. And we saw how like, I honestly enjoyed doing that mediation because I got to see the real process of how Restorative Justice works. And not like even with school issues, but own personal issues. And like, even on a big thing like race, I felt like Restorative Justice made them like, you know, all these mediations made them so much closer now.
Kathleen P (Host): Not all the episodes involve folks who identify as learning Restorative Justice or practicing Restorative Justice as much as these young people do in this episode. And if we're going to talk about Restorative Justice, I'm going to invoke Mika Dashman from Restorative Justice Initiative, who I've heard say any number of times. "Restorative justice is not about restoring justice as much as restoring relationships." And Martín brought this up as well in one of the circles that I was in with him.
Martín U: People have a misconception that Restorative Justice in schools is only about conflict resolution. If you only look at it as like conflict resolution, you always will be like a firefighter. There's a fire, you put it out, and you get exhausted. And then sometimes, maybe you even get burnt and hurt in the meantime. But there will always be another fire. Actually, Restorative Justice is about developing relationships in school that are not going to break at the first sign of a conflict. And it's about getting tools to give each other tools to work on those relationships. Whether it is through conflict resolution, but also through student leadership. Right? You know, I'm going to go in, I'm going to join my senior club, and I'm going to bring restorative practices to senior club. And I'm going to join like this citywide event, and I'm going to bring RJ to that. And I'm going to tell my friends, "yo, you know, I think you're going to like this club." So boom, coming in, which is kind of what's happening here, right?
Kathleen P (Host): You know, the thing to remember is that with luck, all of the students in a school grow up to be adults. And the communities, the environments that we create in schools become the blueprint for how people expect to interact with community, with the workforce, with their families as we move through life. And the extent to which we learn you're either in or you're out, you're either being punished or you're you're being compliant. Those lessons make a difference for the whole rest of our lives. I hope you check out the links we have on the website. Learn more about these young people and what they're doing. There are young people doing great things in school, leading in schools on a change for this. There are allies, adult allies that are working with them along with it. And I'm going to give the last word in this episode to one of the students from the circle. This is Emma.
Emma: Kids, they have so much power, but they don't realize that because the parents and other adults say, "no, you don't have that power because you're a child, you don't know any better. I know I'm older. I'm more wise and more experienced. You don't know anything. You should follow my lead." Now, if you're still aware. Like the kids have so much power and so much opportunity and potential. But like, yeah, it gets like it gets taken away by people who think they're better when they're not. Everyone has power.
Kathleen P (Host): This podcast was produced in Brooklyn, New York. The unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape and the Canarsie people. We thank all the ancestors for caring for this land over the generations, and we are committed to the work of creating a shared future that includes the Native communities that are still here, and all the people who call this land home.
Thank you to Martín Urbach and The Circle Keepers who restore my faith in the future. You can learn more about them at thecirclekeepers.com. Again, thecirclekeepers.com. Thank you to Isabella and Ava for taking time to meet with us and share the story of your journey to launch a Restorative Justice project. Thank you to Ashley Sawyer for giving us a way to think about the bigger picture of why we need to update how we think about changing schools, and also for introducing us to guests for a different episode that we're very excited about.
Thanks to our podcast team for this episode, Doctor Candacé King, Reverend Doctor Sharon White-Harrigan, Raphael Eissa, and Tess Weiner. Thank you to our Resonate production team for this episode, including our creative partner, Anna Worrell. I'm your host, Kathleen Pequeño. This podcast is a project of the Justice Beyond Punishment Collaborative at the Center for Justice at Columbia University, with support from Trinity Wall Street. You can learn more about the collaborative and our other creative projects at BeyondPunishment.Org. Thank you for listening.
