PK circles: catching on fire, funding is fueling it's growth

Peacekeeper circles are catching on fire. The excitement of schools, principals and teachers is rippling out to a bigger demographic. The current process of writing a grant is creating another ripple wave. We are on fire to raise awareness and funds because we have a goal for this fall to be training 10 classroom teachers at two schools (20 in total) in Fort Collins, Co. and possibly also training a few classes near Colorado Springs. This grant writing process is causing us to search for other funding sources to ensure that funds are in place to have a trainer available to train 20 teachers and over 400 children.

Once that is accomplished the trainer will begin to teach other trainers so that when these circles take off like the wild fires here in Fort Collins, PeaceKeeper circles can spread like these crazy fires without all the fear, anxiety and loss. Peacekeeper circles like disasters help build community.  Natural disaster cause people to show up and support their neighbors and anyone with whom they have this set-back in common. Peace circles aim to offer language for people to help them understand different perspectives and feel for themselves what needs to be done to improve a situation.

Funding is imperative to grow. If you have any funding ideas to share or want to help fund this project stay tuned for the new opportunities that we are exploring. Sustainable support will not only help launch this project but will ignite peacekeeper awareness helping to build a more compassion and caring youth population. We don't want to wait for natural disasters to occur to experience respectful and genuine communication of needs and feelings. If we plant these seeds now for our youth, we will be planting seeds for a more peaceful and cooperative society, one filled with love and respect and less based on fear, greed and denial.

article: about RJ in schools

Can Restorative Justice Stop the Schoolhouse-to-Jailhouse Pipeline?

By Jeremy Adam Smith

Instead of being kicked out for fighting, stealing, talking back, or other disruptive behavior, public school students in San Francisco are being asked to listen to each other, write letters of apology, work out solutions with the help of parents and educators, or engage in community service. All these practices fall under the umbrella of “restorative justice”—asking wrongdoers to make amends before resorting to punishment.

The program launched in 2009 when the San Francisco Board of Education passed a resolution for schools to find alternatives to suspension and expulsion. In the previous seven years, suspensions in San Francisco spiked by 152 percent, to a total of 4,341—mostly among African Americans, who despite being one-tenth of the district made up half of suspensions and more than half of expulsions.

This disparity fed larger social inequalities: Two decades of national studies have found that expelled or suspended students are vastly more likely to drop out of school or end up in jail than those who face other kinds of consequences for their actions.

“My first act as a school board member was to push a student out of his school,” recalled Jane Kim, a former community organizer who as a member of the Board of Education needed to approve all expulsions.

“That’s not what I expected to do,” she said, especially when it seemed to exacerbate the social inequalities she had pledged to fight in her position.

Board colleague Sandra Lee Fewer said, “Sixty percent of inmates in the San Francisco county jail have been students in the San Francisco public school system, and the majority of them are people of color. We just knew we had to somehow stop this schoolhouse-to-jailhouse pipeline.”

Fewer and Kim, along with colleague Kim–Shree Maufas, led the three-year process for the board to officially adopt restorative justice. Though the task force charged with implementing the policy received only modest funding, expulsions have fallen 28 percent since its inception. Less serious cases have shown even more success. Non-mandatory referrals for expulsion (those not involving drugs, violence or sexual assault) have plunged 60 percent, and suspensions are down by 35 percent.

Board members and many educators say restorative practices have kept students in school and out of the criminal justice system. “We’re holding kids more accountable than we did before,” said Kim, who now serves on the city’s Board of Supervisors. “In restorative justice, you have to actually have the offender and the victim sit down and discuss what happened and how the offender can make it better.”

But the data—along with interviews with parents, students, and educators—reveal that progress so far is halting and uneven. Critics say that’s because the transition from punitive to restorative justice is haphazardly evaluated and underfunded. In fact, Peer Courts, a model program extensively promoted in the Board’s 2009 resolution, was forced to close this year due to budget cuts. Meanwhile, suspensions and expulsions are actually rising in some schools that have yet to embrace restorative practices, often in low-income, high-crime neighborhoods. At one, Thurgood Marshall High School, suspensions have almost tripled since 2007.

The resulting picture is a school-by-school patchwork, at best an unfinished project to reform the traditional juvenile discipline paradigm. It’s a work-in-progress that contains lessons for educators and parents in other districts who are looking for effective disciplinary policies in a time of severe budget cuts.

One school’s quick turnaround