Your lesson, should you choose to accept it, is to build, repair, and restore school relationships through restorative justice.  The special agent assigned to help you with this task is Laura Fittz, English teacher, Peace Team facilitator and PhD student from Nashville, Tennessee.

Based on the broken windows theory, which has recently been called into doubt, zero-tolerance policies in schools became popular in the 1990s.  While there’s no evidence that zero-tolerance policies actually improve school safety, there is evidence that strongly links suspension and other school discipline to failure to graduate. In American, as many as 95% of out-of-school suspensions are for nonviolent behaviors that are very subjective, such as students being disruptive, acting disrespectfully, or dress code violations. When you look at the data that also shows that Black students, who make up 18% of the school population, account for 46% of students receiving multiple suspensions, one can’t help but conclude that racial bias plays a large role in how discipline is meted out in schools and directly contributes to the school-to-prison pipeline.  Rather than continue to wonder why pushing students out of classes doesn’t seem to affect any change in behavior, educators like Laura Fittz are challenging the punitive model and replacing it with a restorative justice model that views students as integral parts of classroom communities rather than problems needing to be removed.  Despite the fact that Nashville was under a tornado warning, Laura was willing to talk to me in late August.

In this episode we discuss:

1️⃣ Moving away from punitive practices and towards healing relationships between students, students and staff, and staff with each other

2️⃣ Letting students take the lead and getting families involved in the restorative process

3️⃣ Operating restoratively within an unrestorative system and starting the personal journey towards restorative practices

Laura recommends the following books:

•  The New Jim Crow 

• Changing Lenses: Restorative Justice for Our Times

• We Want to Do More Than Survive 

• Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools

• "These Kids Are Out of Control": Reimagining Classroom Management for Equity 

Contact information:

• Personal Email: laura.l.fittz@vanderbilt.edu  

• Coalition Email: restorativestudentleaders@gmail.com

 You can follow the Peace Team and CORE team on Instagram @glencliffpeaceteam and @hillsborocore