Restorative Justice Part 1

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We talk on my radio show often about Restorative Justice. This is the progressive “discipline” philosophy in public schools that says, “Suspension rates are too high and minority kids are disciplined disproportionately from white kids. So instead of disciplining kids, it’s game on! And instead of suspending kids, we’re going to let them do whatever they want.”

If you’re a teacher, please share your story in the comments with this Restorative Justice philosophy and how it’s made your job miserable.

We had one teacher call into the radio show and say she has such trouble with one elementary school kid, the principal told her that if he acted up she had to remove ALL THE OTHER KIDS from the classroom.

Check out this article about teachers in St. Paul. One of the teachers says “we have a segment of kids who consider themselves untouchable.” Another teacher, “students who tired of lectures simply stand up and leave…They can just bust into rooms where they don’t belong, just picking fights not even in hallways, in other classrooms, teachers have to lock the door to keep other kids out.”

A fourth-grade teacher, “I’ve been punched, kicked and spit on” and called “every cuss word you could possibly think of,”

One teacher, “Many of us . . . often go home in tears, Please, don’t give us more staff development on racism or . . . how to de-escalate a student altercation. . . . We teachers feel as if we are drowning.”

So the idea is, we keep disciplining kids and they get on the wrong track and go to prison. And we have the “school-to-prison pipeline”, so if we don’t discipline kids at all, then they won’t go to prison.

One teacher says “this is backwards! By not disciplining, we’re telling these kids you don’t have to be on time for anything, we’re just going to talk to you about what you’ve done. You can literally assault somebody, an adult and we’re going to let you come back to the classroom.”

That type of behavior – if you allow that – is just going to get worse. And they’ll eventually go to prison.

The Fresno School District, at least 70 of 85 teachers have signed the petition asking for a stricter and more consistent student discipline policy.

“Students are returned to class without consequence after assaulting teachers, both verbally and physically,” the petition states. “When students face no accountability measures, it undermines the authority of all teachers, and creates a negative campus culture.”

One teacher of eleven years says “a student can say ‘F—-you’ and we’re told that it’s just his personality. The students do the same things over and over again, and we respond in the same way over and over again.”

A school in Ohio, “Teachers in this Ohio town have been physically assaulted 36 times this school year” It’s game on. The kids know it.

Now, what does this have to do with the school shooting in Florida?

This is the Executive Director of Student Support Initiatives for Broward County Public Schools, in August 2017, “we’re not compromising school safety. We’re really saving the lives of kids.”

She’s referring to what’s called to what was called the “Broward County Solution.” It’s Restorative Justice. Broward County used to lead the state of Florida in sending kids to juvenile detention. The progressive solution was Restorative Justice: decrease the number of arrests by not making arrests.
They took twelve different misdemeanor offenses and instead treated them as school-related issues, not criminal ones. In 2011, there were over 1,000 arrests (which is an insanely high number). Four years later, less than 400.
Now, this doesn’t mean the criminal behavior stopped. It’s just fewer kids were getting arrested for the bad behavior.There very well could be, probably was, MORE bad behavior. Just no one is getting in trouble for it.
This school shooter was one of these kids who was always in trouble, but nothing was done to stop him.
Not only that, but in 2012, Barack Obama sent a memo to public schools all across the country telling them to avoid, “methods that result in disparate use of disciplinary tools.” Disparate use means more minority kids are getting disciplined than white kids, so stop disciplining minority kids.

Nikolas de Jesus Cruz is a statistical Hispanic.

When the effort from the school is to lower the suspension rates for minorities and to get them more in line with White and Asian students, officials at the school have every reason to NOT report Nicolas Cruz’s troubling and likely criminal behavior to police.

Miami Herald wrote a great article about his behavior problems and the headline read
“Parkland shooter always in trouble, never expelled. Could school system have done more?” The answer is yes.

The opening paragraph talks about how Cruz was a school administrator’s nightmare: kicking doors, cursing at teachers, fighting with classmates. He brought a backpack with bullets to school. One teacher said he wasn’t even allowed in the school with a backpack because they were afraid of what might be in it!

Everyone knew about Cruz, it was not a mystery.

One teacher sometimes had to call security to let Cruz into the classroom and to keep an eye on him during class. A security guard!

Cruz was in the Exceptional Student Program at Broward Schools. Don’t go thinking that exceptional means exceptionally GOOD. In progressive world everything is backward. It’s the opposite. If you’re in the “exceptional program” it means you’re exceptionally bad. An administrator who was with the Exceptional Student Program for 42 years says she’s never seen the document about Cruz’s behavior with such obvious signs that the student would become violent.
The school knew this would happen! Why didn’t they do anything?

Restorative Justice.

To be clear: I don’t expect schools to do all the disciplining. Kids used to be disciplined at home and the school was a supplement. And the discipline and punishment be worse when you get back home. But when the disciplining stopped at home, the school was left to fend for themselves, and after all of these decades, they’ve finally decided to give up. What’s so frustrating and deceitful however, is they’ve given up in the name of helping kids.

So now we live in this world where kids don’t get disciplined for anything. They run the show. They’re in control of the parents. And they think they can be in charge of the teachers too. The progressive mentality is to institutionalize this. And we tell these troubled kids: “Ya. You are in charge.”
This philosophy won’t help those on the fringes. It will allow them to spiral further out of control and into deeper isolation. And the kids who just want to learn while in school are victimized even more.
Restorative Justice has to stop. Make sure your kid’s school doesn’t follow this philosophy.