Restorative Justice in Madison Schools

by Pamela Oliver | Nov 8, 2023 | JSRI Justice System Reform Initiatives, Juvenile Justice, RJAC Racial Justice for All Children, Schools

Restorative Justice in Madison Schools

By Barbie Jackson

The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD), like many other districts, is striving to provide the best possible responses to behavioral challenges in the schools. One method is Restorative Justice, which is emerging as a way to create inclusive environments where all children can thrive and where all are called to respond to harm by restoring wholeness to all involved.

Kat Nichols, MMSD’s restorative justice program manager, expresses it as follows:

Harming others is part of being human, and having the opportunity to say sorry, actively being in the healing process, is how we achieve communities of care, respect, and love where all kids thrive. These are the environments where children and adults can experience the safety and security they are striving for in their schools. Punitive approaches don’t correct the behavior. They just don’t work.

Restorative justice values all our precious children. It responds to harm by avoiding the impulse to punish and suspend, which causes more harm and fails to achieve correct behavior. Rather, restorative justice brings people back into supportive and inclusive relationships and promotes healing.

In MOSES, our Racial Justice for All Children task force (RJAC) is partnering with MMSD to support a robust implementation of restorative justice in the schools. This is one of several RJAC undertakings to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline.

After the May 25, 2020, killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, Madison’s Board of Education voted unanimously to eliminate School Resource Officers (SROs) – police officers under contract from the Madison Police Department – from Madison’s four high schools: East, West, Memorial, and La Follette. The board appointed an Ad Hoc Committee on Safety and Security to study and recommend a new approach in the high schools, which recommended a broad implementation of restorative justice. MOSES fully supported the recommendations and advocated MMSD budget support for four restorative justice coaches in the four high schools. That budget was approved, and the positions were established.

The transition from SROs to restorative justice was to begin in the 2020-’21 school year, but students were not in the buildings most of that year and thus this implementation was disrupted. And the 2021-’22 school year was rough; many students were significantly dysregulated due to the pandemic and isolation from their usual school and social environments. It was only in the last school year that the environment was conducive to rolling this project out and all restorative justice coordinator positions were filled.

In 2023, RJAC members decided to learn more about its current state of implementation and began collaborating with the providers. We met with Ericka Brown, a former restorative justice coordinator at East, to learn about her perspective and experience. We met with Rev. David Hart, special assistant to the superintendent, and Kat Nichols, who has been working with the district over the past academic year and is a dedicated and passionate supporter of restorative justice in the schools. After these two meetings, we formed a small team to continue our engagement, learning, and advocacy: Shel Gross, Peggy Larson, Nakia Wiley, and Barbie Jackson.

This team met again with Kat to discuss the current status in the high schools, as well as implementation of restorative justice in the elementary and middle schools. Kat supported connections between some of our team members and the restorative justice coaches at East and Memorial high schools and will provide further connections to senior administrators responsible for it. In October, Robin Lowney Lankton, a member of Families for Justice and Madison Friends Meeting, arranged for Kat and her colleague Lonna Stoltzfus to visit a Friends meeting to talk about restorative justice and to facilitate a restorative justice circle experience for participants. Shel and Barbie were among the attendees and recommend this powerful experience as something MOSES could consider for a future general meeting.

MMSD faces some challenges in continuing its rollout of restorative justice. Although there is a full-time restorative justice coordinator position at each high school, the person at West is on leave, so that position is not currently operational. Additional challenges include lack of staff time for training, insufficient funds to expand support, and multiple demands on scant financial and staff resources. Implementation of restorative justice is really a multiyear process, as it involves changing the culture of schools. It also involves individual teachers learning how to effectively use restorative conversations with their students and create community-building circles in their classrooms. Restorative justice will be more effective in a school that is also implementing trauma-informed care and social-emotional learning practices.This requires an extended focus on these issues – something MMSD has not always been able to do well, given the multiple, often conflicting demands that schools face.

Our restorative justice team intends to continue its discussions with school administrators, Board of Education members, and community partners with a historical perspective on the challenges of fully implementing restorative justice in the schools. Part of this includes making sure the community in general and parents in particular are aware of what MMSD is attempting to do and rallying support for it. We are hopeful that our engagement will help identify specific points where we can advocate steady support and growth of this important way of providing a welcoming, inclusive environment for all students and a disruption of exclusionary practices, such as suspensions and expulsions, which seriously contribute to the school-to-prison pipeline.