As part of his first 100-day plan, Jason Kamras, the Richmond Public Schools’ new superintendent, visited every school and created a Restorative Justice Task Force, which received $150,000 in the upcoming budget.
A movement that arose in the criminal justice system during the 1970s, restorative justice, in which the person harmed and the person who caused harm meet and come up with a plan for restitution, found its way to schools as an alternative to the traditional disciplinary process that often leads to out-of-school suspensions — which can then spiral into chronic absences, poor academic performance and lower graduation rates.
It’s clear that RPS needs an alternative: The Legal Aid Justice Center’s statewide report on suspensions last fall showed Richmond Public Schools with the fourth highest suspension rates in the state. Also during the 2015-16 school year, RPS suspended more than 20 percent of all African-American students and nearly one-third of all students with disabilities.
“This is not just a suspension issue, but a justice issue.” —Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras
In 2016-17, RPS middle and high schools had a total of 6,599 out-of-school suspensions, with about 1,000 of them at Armstrong High School. Even more startling were 2016-17 elementary school statistics: 2,525 out-of-school suspensions.
“They are way too high, and they need to come down, and this is not just a suspension issue, but a justice issue,” Kamras shared in an interview on June 11. “I would like us to be a district where [restorative] practices live in every single way, and it becomes ‘the RPS way’ ” — a new systemwide approach to discipline.
Helping to steer RPS’ restorative justice task force is Ram Bhagat, a “retired” RPS educator who began to explore how restorative practices could be used after he came out of retirement to teach at Ballou High School in Washington, D.C. Bhagat developed a pilot program that he’ll lead this fall at Armstrong High School. (See the story on page 102 of our July issue, heading to newsstands now.)
Kamras knows that $150,000 is not enough to execute a systemwide program in which teachers and administrators are trained, and he acknowledges that this is often where other school systems have stumbled. He sees Bhagat and the new task force members leading the way to help increase awareness, knowledge and then skill development.
“It doesn’t mean that you send someone to a lecture at the convention center by a restorative justice expert,” Kamras says. “It takes time. We need to build skills, practice them and work through it. And that’s going to be a multiyear process.”
