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What is restorative justice?

Restorative justice is a philosophy grounded in the belief that positive, healthy relationships help us thrive. When we do things that impact others and create harm to those relationships, it is our individual and collective responsibility to make things right. Restorative justice is about building, maintaining, and repairing relationships to form healthy, supportive, reflective, and inclusive communities. Restorative justice supports schools to maintain those healthy relationships and encourages equitable access to culturally relevant and meaningful education.

What are restorative practices?

Restorative practices are used at Tier I for prevention and at Tiers II and III for intervention measures to help schools:

• Build relationships with and empower community members to take responsibility for the well-being of others

• Prevent or deal with conflict before it escalates

• Address underlying factors that lead youth to engage in inappropriate behavior

• Increase the pro-social skills of those who have harmed others

• Build resiliency both in students who have committed harm and in those who have been harmed

• Provide students with the opportunity to be accountable to those they have harmed and enable them to repair the harm to the extent possible.

Effective and consistent use of restorative practices can reduce disciplinary referrals, lower dropout/push-out rates, elevate school climate measures, increase attendance, and promote greater academic achievement. 

For these reasons and more, èßäapp¹ÙÍø is committed to expanding restorative practices throughout the district and to helping educators, students, and families learn to implement them with fidelity.