Program to cut suspensions in Oakland at risk
In a candlelit classroom at the back corner of Edna Brewer Middle School’s gymnasium, Ta-Biti Gibson settled his sixth-grade class and picked up a “talking piece”: a clear, plastic cylinder with a turquoise star at one end.
Gibson has been building a community of student leaders in Oakland to create spaces that help classmates hash out conflicts in a healthy, respectful way, and the talking piece — an object whose holder is allowed to speak, while everyone else listens — is just one of many tools.
Across classrooms in Oakland, such restorative justice circles are helping students learn to build relationships through conversations about values, self-awareness and accountability.
In the past seven years, the program has been praised by teachers and administrators for helping to reduce suspension rates across the
district by replacing discipline that removes students from classrooms with an approach that emphasizes responsibility and emotional well-being.
But that progress is at risk due to looming budget cuts in the district, which faced a $30 million shortfall this coming school year and could face a $60 million shortfall in the fall of 2020. This month, 15 of 31 employees on the restorative justice staff were laid off, reassigned or had their hours reduced.
In the fall of 2012, when Oakland Unified rolled out the technique, 3,702 students had been suspended the previous school year — or 7.6%, according to the California Department of Education. Of those suspended, 40% were forced out of school more than once.
By 2017-18, the rate dropped to 4.4%, or 2,323 students.
Oakland’s City Council cited the program’s success when it recently passed a resolution to commit $690,000 to restorative justice as part of a $1.2 million grant to the school district. The funds will also go toward school libraries and case managers for foster youth. But until the district’s cuts are finalized in early June, it’s anyone’s guess how the program will look next fall.
“It’s not that they think restorative justice is not working, because it’s one of the things that actually is working,” said David Yusem, the district’s coordinator for the program. The city grant, he said, “won’t fully compensate for what the district is cutting, but it will definitely help.”
The school board voted in March to slash $21.75 million from its budget, including $3.75 million in services to school sites, which funded restorative justice facilitators at 26 schools and four program managers.
“In the most robust way possible, we want to have it in our schools,” said John Sasaki, an Oakland Unified spokesman. “In the end, our staff recommended these cuts because we had to find the money somewhere.”
City Council President Rebecca Kaplan said she wrote the resolution that secured city funding for one year in order to keep the program going while officials work to find long-term solutions, such as state funding.
“People sometimes say, ‘Why should the City Council care? This is a school district problem, not a City Council problem,’ ” Kaplan said. “If there’s more violence, unemployment, side effects of when disputes are resolved in unhealthy ways, those problems will end up being all of our problems.”
Although restorative justice has succeeded in helping to reduce overall suspensions, there is much work to do. Stark racial disparities persist.
During the 2017-18 school year, 1,226 black pupils were suspended, making up 53% of the students suspended in a district where black children are 25% of the population. A similar disparity prompted the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Civil Rights to investigate the district in 2012.
That year, black students made up 32% of students in Oakland but represented 58% of the students suspended. Black students were removed from school six times more frequently than white students in the district.
Research has shown that students who are suspended or expelled, or investigated by police for behavior at school, are more likely to end up in the criminal justice system over the long term, a path referred to as the school-toprison pipeline, according to a report from the American Bar Association.
District officials agreed in 2012 to implement a restorative justice program to reduce these disparities and move away from zero-tolerance policies. The idea was to help teachers and school staff analyze students’ behavior holistically, instead of responding to a single offense.
Students face conflicts and responsibilities outside school that can impact their behavior on campus in ways that zerotolerance policies don’t account for, Yusem said.
“Oftentimes, we discipline for behavior and we’re not thinking about what’s at the root of that behavior,” he said. “Discipline should be a learning process. It should not be a way to isolate somebody.”
At Edna Brewer, a school of about 800 students in Oakland’s Glenview neighborhood, Gibson trains dozens of students each year in restorative justice practices. The students then lead harm-reduction circles when offenses happen outside his classroom.
In the 2011-12 school year, Edna Brewer’s suspension rate was 16.3% — more than double the district’s overall rate. Six years since the restorative justice program went into effect, the suspension rate fell to 3.7%.
When students get suspended, Gibson said, they return after three or five days but “nothing has really changed. And that’s what we had been doing for so many years.”
Instead, at a school that practices the restorative philosophy, students form a circle that can include teachers, staff or parents and allows everyone to reflect on what happened. The process allows both the offender and the people who were harmed to come to an agreement on a solution designed to allow healing, Yusem said.
In the 2018-19 school year, Gibson taught 67 peer leaders — up from 30 last year.
“I’ve heard more than a few students tell me they’ve picked up a talking piece at home when their family was fighting over something,” Yusem said.
While the money promised by the city of Oakland won’t cover the district’s shortfall for restorative justice, it could bring back some of the employees who were laid off, Yusem said. The goal is to find full, ongoing funding for the program.
“We just may have to contract a little bit before we expand again, but we will,” Yusem said. “I’m confident that we’re going to survive this.”
In an exercise this spring, Gibson had to explain to a group of disappointed sixth graders that the budget meant they wouldn’t be attending a restorative justice conference. It didn’t take long for the students to turn that disappointment into an opportunity to discuss solutions.
“We could protest,” one said, “or make a picket line.”
Another added, “We can make a circle with whoever made the decision.”