The importance of safe and restorative school environments
What are safe and restorative environments and how do they help?
Safe and restorative practices in public schools focus on encouraging positive relationships and using evidence-based approaches to guide student behavior. Restorative practices are designed to prioritize students’ safety by creating environments where they feel welcome and supported, which leads to fewer disciplinary issues and a more positive overall school climate.
Restorative practices as a way to address disciplinary issues are voluntary for all parties, and the offending student(s) must admit involvement in the incident. They emphasize conflict resolution and repairing harm rather than harmful and punitive discipline that pushes students out of the classroom. Restorative practices are a way to build community within a school by establishing healthy relationships between students, teachers, staff, and school leaders. They can help to:
Promote respect, dignity, and mutual concern
Repair harm within the school community
Create emotionally and physically safe learning environments
Give all students a voice
Empower students and staff to take personal responsibility for the school community
Increasing restorative practices goes alongside reducing the use of harmful or unfair disciplinary methods, which lead to more time out of the classroom and less time learning. These methods are used disproportionately against students of color and students with disabilities, which leads to much worse school climates and negative educational experiences for those groups of students. Restorative practices encourage students to take true accountability for their actions and make better choices in the future while keeping them in the classroom.
Students' well-being, safety, and academic success depend on their learning environments
Our schools are safest and our students are most successful when students and families feel welcomed, valued, and supported. An investment in creating positive school climates is an investment in the safety, well-being, and educational success of our students.
Punitive and exclusionary discipline processes harm all students by reducing classroom time and creating a negative environment, but they are disproportionately utilized against students of color and students with disabilities:
During the 2020 – 2021 school year, students with disabilities were 2.3 to 5 times more likely to receive a suspension in comparison to students without disabilities.
Black students, roughly 22% of the total student population, received over 62% of all school-based disorderly conduct criminal complaints between 2016 and 2019.
Black students, 22% of the state’s K-12 population, represented over half (51%) of students suspended in 2018.
Girls of color are 5.4 times more likely to be suspended than white girls from school.
A 2020 survey indicated that SROs and SSOs (School Safety Officers) are often asked to assist with school disciplinary issues even when the incident doesn’t constitute criminal activity or a direct threat to safety.
Only 5 percent of out-of- school suspensions are given for serious or dangerous disciplinary incidents, such as possession of a weapon or drugs on campus, yet 95 percent are given for disruptive behavior or willful defiance or simply classified as other. That means students are being taken out of classrooms for offenses that don’t risk harm to other students or staff.
However, research has shown that restorative practices increase student achievement, reduce mental health challenges, build community and teach students the strategies to resolve conflict. Every student deserves to thrive, regardless of who they are or what zip code they’re born in. And for every student to thrive we need to invest in community supports and restorative school environments for our young people.
What steps can we take to create safe and restorative school environments?
More than a dozen Virginia school divisions have already employed restorative practices with great results, including Prince William, Alexandria, Chesterfield, Richmond City, Harrisonburg, Fairfax, Spotsylvania, Loudoun, and Roanoke, among others. It’s time for state government to invest in supporting these practices and other community supports across more localities.
When we create safe and restorative school environments, we’re prioritizing our students’ well-being and setting them up for future success. It’s up to Virginia lawmakers to ensure every student has a safe and supportive school environment by:
Increasing funding for restorative practices, including specifically funding “Restorative Schools in Virginia,” a two year pilot program that will establish evidence-based restorative practice(s) schools.
Expand the Safer Communities Program administered by the Department of Criminal Justice Services to provide targeted grants and technical assistance to localities with disproportionately high violent crime rates. Providing additional support to communities to address high violence rates will help students within those communities have safer and more positive school experiences.