Restorative Justice: Nevada schools need it now more than ever
Executive Summary
Public K-12 school students are not being supported when they misbehave and restorative justice must stay in place in Nevada public schools to support, rather than punish. When students violate school policies or behave violently or inappropriately towards others, they are often sent to the principal’s office and in extreme cases, suspended or expelled from school. These punishment tactics are not beneficial to students because this does not help them learn from their mistakes or understand what they did wrong in the first place.
By retaining Assembly Bill 168 (AB168) and not repealing it, schools can better their restorative justice program and provide support through counseling, therapy, or connecting them with community resources. It is integral to keep this bill in place because this will prevent students from being funneled into the school-to-prison pipeline where most of them are pushed into because of these punishment tactics they face.
If students do not understand what they are being reprimanded for, they do not gain an understanding of how they can better themselves in the future. The current accountability system inhibits students from gaining beneficial personal development. Adding a hypercriminalized school environment where students are at a high risk of being referred to the juvenile criminal justice system only makes matters worse. These modes of holding students accountable negatively impact students across the state — especially students of color. This disproportionality is what AB168 aimed to lessen in the first place. However, because of its timeline, the bill did not get a chance to be implemented properly due to COVID-19 and online learning. Before repealing the bill, it must be allowed to succeed and be properly implemented in schools first.
What is restorative justice?
Generally, restorative justice is a method of accountability that centers around finding root causes of misbehavior, instead of punitive measures that leave students with almost no understanding of why their behavior is seen as wrong or what causes it in the first place.
We know that restorative justice works because it has worked in Oakland, CA in the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD). Fremont High School in Oakland was historically known to have the city’s highest discipline rates and lowest student attendance. However, the school holds an entirely different reputation now. Since adopting RJ to improve the campus climate, they have seen their enrollment jump 20% higher in 2022 than in previous years (Jones 2022). The high school has an in-house restorative justice facilitator who has focused on building community, relationships, and trust between the students and school leadership. This gained momentum in 2017 when the school district invested $2.5 million to expand RJ in its various schools. This is what led to hiring RJ facilitators at schools with high discipline rates to facilitate discussions with students and provide support for teachers in every classroom as well. In their school district, there is a director and administrative team specifically for supporting schools using this program. They have all kinds of resources available for educators to learn more about and adapt restorative justice in their classrooms and administrations. Aside from a district-wide staff available to help individual schools with strengthening their RJ programs, they even have guidelines that can be generally adapted to any school in this school district readily available on the school district’s website (OUSD). Oakland has been practicing RJ in their schools since 2006 and has only built on it since then because it proved to be a major success for teachers and students alike. These resources and staff are exactly what is missing from the Nevada programs’ adaptation of this form of accountability. There has been no creation of a fixed set of resources that schools can follow to use this program because the Nevada Department of Education has not allocated the necessities to do so. There are no structures, additional support staff, or anyone overseeing the restorative justice program to ensure its success. This is the reason it has not succeeded because it has not been given the opportunity to.
What is AB168?
It should not be any high school student’s normal morning to enter through their school gates and walk through metal detectors. School should be a place where children can learn freely, both inside and outside the classroom, without the worry about what dangers they could encounter with those meant to mentor them, not punish them. The school-to-prison pipeline hints at the hypercriminalization in schools, suspension, and expulsion can push students “out of school and into the juvenile justice system” (Krezmien, Leone, & Wilson, 2014 in Mizel et. al 2016). In Nevada, legislators have made attempts to fight against hypercriminilization in public schools that perpetuate the school-to-prison pipeline. In 2019, the Nevada Legislature passed Assembly Bill 168 (AB168) which implemented restorative justice (RJ) in all public schools in Nevada. AB168 was passed to allow students to grow from learning and limit the public school suspension and expulsion capabilities of teachers and administrators. In the Bill’s text, AB168 is described as:
AN ACT relating to education; requiring a school to provide a plan
of action based on restorative justice before expelling a pupil;
prohibiting certain pupils from being suspended or expelled
in certain circumstances; and providing other matters
properly relating thereto.
Since this bill was passed in 2019 its implementation was to be rolled out in the fall of 2020. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and online classes, this was put on the back burner and was never actually planned out or given proper time to train teachers and administration. These difficulties led to the AB168 triumphs essentially being forgotten. Thus when classes returned to in-person classes many teachers felt limited by their disciplinary abilities because they could not suspend and expel students (Hernandez et. al 2023). Many schools attributed this to the lack of ability to discipline students in those traditional ways. They allege that there was a rise in violent occurrences because of students on campus and the lack of accountability that they saw fit for the situations (Hernandez et. al 2023).
AB168 is under threat of repeal
In 2023, Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo responded by proposing a new bill that would repeal restorative justice and return to forms of accountability that did not truly hold students accountable at all. This attack on restorative justice will continue perpetuating the school-to-prison pipeline highly affecting students in the Clark County School District. The initial rollout and implementation of restorative justice did not work in school years 2020–2021 and 2021–2022. When rolled out, it essentially did not work for schools because they were unable to “punish” students for bad behavior. Over time, this resulted in larger issues escalating in schools with the teachers and administrators feeling like there was nothing they could do because of the new forms of action that the bill required schools to abide by. The lack of positive results has led to school officials fighting for the end of this program and returning to old disciplinary actions (Hernandez et. al 2023). This is a result of the overall lack of preparation for this program and the switch of ways of holding students accountable. Online classes did not allow for the proper training and guidance for teachers and administrators to learn how to deal with misbehaving students under the new program of restorative justice. Since students were not attending in-person classes in the school year 2020–2021, there were little to no instances where serious disciplinary action or processes had to be taken by teachers directly. Moving into the school year 2021–2022, the return of fully in-person classes, with still no training on how to use the restorative justice approach, many schools felt abandoned in this sense and this is why there have not been many successful attempts at using this program to replace suspensions or expulsions (Wootton-Greener 2023). A large wave of criticism from educators and administrators alike against AB168 began because of this — which kickstarted Lombardo’s advocacy to repeal the bill.
Many educators believe current school disciplinary measures are necessary to maintain order inside the classroom (Hernandez et. al 2023). They assert that disciplinary actions like in-house suspensions where students miss their classes while still on school grounds, suspensions, and expulsions are necessary parts of disciplinary processes at school. Without the ability to remove students from the classroom, teachers complain that they cannot run their classrooms smoothly without disruptions. Teachers have said that actively disciplining misbehaving students takes away from other students’ classroom experiences and it is better to have those students removed than allow them to remain in the classroom (Wootton-Greener 2023). However, this leaves little to no space for the student to stay and get the opportunity to stay updated with what is being taught in the class. Taking away a student’s opportunity to learn and regulate their emotions to do so is counterintuitive to ensuring their misbehavior is actually addressed. Instead, focusing on finding the root of that behavior will actually benefit teachers and students alike over time because students prone to misbehaving will be better equipped to understand what this means for them. This, again, is the main objective of restorative justice for students who are misbehaving. The threat of repealing AB168 risks the dangers of students experiencing the consequences of a carceral-like system in the classroom.
Hypercriminalization in public schools puts students in environments that mimic carceral-like structures and procedures like hall sweeps, constant surveillance, and even metal detectors. These forces create a hostile environment where students may not feel safe or able to learn freely (Mizel et. al 2016). Thus, this environment and other pressures from their personal and social lives may cause students to project negative emotions into misbehavior. Restorative justice is important because it can help students regulate their feelings, understand what is going on with themselves, and find the connection between their emotions and actions (Menkel 2007). It would also shed light on what kinds of gaps are continuously perpetrated by ignorant perspectives as exhibited by these preliminary assumptions. Assuming there are no influences of being treated like a prisoner at school to how a child might behave or act outside of school ignores how impactful the treatment of individuals can be on how they navigate the world around them. In schools, when students are constantly being surveilled, written up, and at extreme times prevented from attending classes, they are constantly being socialized to get accustomed to these forms of treatment (Mizel et. al 2016).
Why do we need restorative justice?
Nevada is ranked sixth in the nation for the number of students who get arrested at school (Lyle 2023). This is because of the large police presence and emphasis on punitive-based punishments for students who misbehave. The Clark County School District Police Department (CCSDPD) has an annual budget of $21.7 million dollars and uses more school funding than schools have to hire support staff for students (Solis 2020). Children as young as seven years old are leaving school handcuffed simply because they can not be supported by their teachers when they are misbehaving (Solis 2020). School Resource Officers (SROs), who are police-like figures in schools, under the CCSDPD are more likely to be present in schools that have a minority-majority population. Students of color are referred to law enforcement at disproportionately high rates in Nevada tangibly showing the ways that students are funneled into this pipeline. This means that schools with more students of color are likely to have these systems of hypercriminalization in place. This call to action is important to realize how much is at stake for students who are being disproportionately affected by this. The issue is not that students of color misbehave more than their white counterparts. Rather, they are being punished more harshly for the same behaviors or misconduct. Integral to understanding why Nevada students need restorative justice is that it disproportionately affects marginalized students. The school-to-prison pipeline disproportionality penalizes “students of color as well as those who are male, of lower socioeconomic status (SES), and who have disabilities” (Krezmien, Leone, & Wilson, 2014 in Mizel et. al 2016). This representation of social inequity in public school disciplinary measures emphasizes the need for an equitable approach like restorative justice. Suspending a student has not been proven to lessen the rule-breaking behaviors of the student, instead, it increases the risk of that student dropping out of school voluntarily (Morrison and Skiba 2001 in Mizel et. al 2016). Thus, AB168’s goal is to find methods of school discipline that support students, not punish them. The bill aimed to end the school-to-prison pipeline affecting students all over the state, but especially in the Clark County School District where there is a troubling disparity negatively affecting students of color. Statistics from the academic year 2019–2020 show that in this school district in Las Vegas, Nevada, Black students made up 15% of the cumulative student population, but accounted for 40% of suspensions and 79% of expulsions (Grio 2022). This shows that there is a large disparity because students of color are disproportionately affected by this issue. This hypercriminalization is also emphasized by the fact that schools in the school district have more police officer-to-student ratios than counselors or other support services students can access (Lyle 2023). Students with disabilities are also forced into the criminal justice system for minor cases of misbehavior (Mizel et. al 2016). These attacks against marginalized students are made possible by the systems of hypercriminalization present at these public schools. Pepper spray and physical aggression towards students have no place in any classroom but we still have seen examples of excessive force like this from the Clark County School District police. In fact, on February 9th, 2023 multiple black students at a high school were arrested and one student who was recording the incident was thrown to the ground by an officer who then almost took that student’s life with their knee. In following investigations they found that there was no active threat by the students at the time (Jones 2020). This shows the pervasiveness of hypercriminalization and to what extent the negative effects can be on student well-being and safety as it perpetuates the school-to-prison pipeline. The pipeline exists because of the structural ways that schools push students into imprisonment through neglectful forms of punishment that do not benefit the students engaging in misbehavior. This is an issue because it is an indirect way that students are funneled into the criminal justice system. For students who are undocumented or on temporary status, this could even mean running the risk of deportation because of the history of juvenile imprisonment. This is why, now more than ever, hypercriminalization and harsh modes of discipline need to be replaced with RJ practices.
What should be done?
Governor Lombardo’s attempts to repeal restorative justice are not justified because it has not worked for the sole reason that it has not been given adequate resources to attempt its use properly (Gonzalez 2020). The solution is clear. Instead of repealing AB168, it should be expanded upon by adding the necessary infrastructure and support staff to push this program to fruition. The main goals are to build a curriculum that has already been implemented in other districts like the Oakland Unified School District to train teachers and school administrators on adopting the RJ program. By providing this training, teachers will see how this program does not take power away from them. Rather, it centers the accountability around the student’s behavior and not the students themselves which will, in turn, create safer classrooms with students respecting themselves and others more (Menkel 2007). Educators across the state are worried that RJ will ruin classroom etiquette because of the loss of discipline. However, this has been debunked by school districts that have adopted this program. RJ programs have increased morale in schools measured by attendance numbers and amount of punitive measures therefore making classrooms safe, fun, and greater learning environments (Menkel 2007). These effects can soon be felt by students in Nevada. By retaining AB168 and building onto the program, creating an action plan on how to shift means of holding students accountable, and therefore decreasing hypercriminalization in our Nevada public schools, students will feel safe, heard, and respected which will, in turn, push them to respect others.
Action Plan (Now What?)
““Correlation is not causation,” said Annette Dawson Owens with Children’s Advocacy Alliance. “Restorative practices are being blamed for the recent incidents and difficulties in our schools. The reality is, restorative justice has never been fully implemented.”” (Lyle 2023). With the clear answer to retain AB168, the Nevada Department of Education must take the necessary steps to implement a robust, detailed, and resourced restorative justice program for all schools. Governor Lombardo has yet to repeal the bill, but in next year’s Nevada Legislative Session, he just might. On page 5 of the Bill’s text, it outlines what is required for every school to enact as part of this new programming. It details what the Nevada Department of Education must include the following in the RJ programming: (a) Positive behavioral interventions and support; (b) a plan for behavioral intervention; © a referral to a team of student support; (d) a referral an individualized education program team; (e) a referral to appropriate community-based services; (f) a conference with the principal of the school or their designee and any other appropriate personnel. This outline provides foundational guidelines that will allow schools to fully practice RJ, instead of simply removing teachers’ ability to remove students from the classroom. Establishing the necessary infrastructures and resources will allow schools to try RJ properly. Instead of just repealing the bill, students in Nevada deserve the chance to try a robust RJ program.
Sources
Hernandez, Rocio, Mueller, Tabitha, Golonka, Sean. (2023, March 23). Lombardo presents flagship school discipline bill with districts, teacher union in support. The Nevada Independent. https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/lombardo-to-testify-before-lawmakers-on-bill-repealing-restorative-justice-law
Lyle, Michael. “Lombardo’s Proposal Targeting Restorative Justice Policies Scrutinized by Lawmakers.” Nevada Current, 25 Mar. 2023, nevadacurrent.com/2023/03/24/lombardos-proposal-targeting-restorative-justice-policies-scrutinized-by-lawmakers/.
Lyle, Michael. “Not an Isolated Incident: Video of Violent Arrest Heightens Calls for More Scrutiny of CCSD Police.” Nevada Current, 17 Feb. 2023, nevadacurrent.com/2023/02/17/not-an-isolated-incident-video-of-violent-arrest-heightens-calls-for-more-scrutiny-of-ccsd-police/.
Jones, C. (2022, July 5). At this oakland high school, restorative justice goes far beyond discipline. EdSource. https://edsource.org/2022/at-this-oakland-high-school-restorative-justice-goes-far-beyond-discipline/673453
Menkel-Meadow, Carrie. “Restorative justice: What is it and does it work?.” Annu. Rev. Law Soc. Sci. 3 (2007): 161–187.
Mizel, M. L., Miles, J. N., Pedersen, E. R., Tucker, J. S., Ewing, B. A., & D’Amico, E. J. (2016). To educate or to incarcerate: Factors in disproportionality in school discipline. Children and youth services review, 70, 102–111.
Restorative justice. Oakland Unified School District. (n.d.). https://www.ousd.org/restorative-justice
Solis, J. (2021, May 27). CCSD police feeding school to prison pipeline, critics warn. Nevada Current. https://nevadacurrent.com/2020/07/08/ccsd-police-feeding-school-to-prison-pipeline-critics-warn/
Staff, T. (2022, April 10). Black students face expulsion, suspension far more than whites in Las Vegas-area schools: Report. https://thegrio.com/2022/04/09/clark-county-schools-suspension-rates/#:~:text=Numbers%20for%20the%202019%2D2020,of%20expulsions%2C%20the%20outlet%20reported.
