A core tool of restorative justice is the restorative circle, a nonjudgmental space for everyone who was affected by the incident to express themselves and come to a resolution. In the school context, that can include parents and teachers.

At the end of a circle, participants come up with an agreement to repair the harm. They might decide someone needs to post an apology on Facebook, or a resolution could be as simple as a promise to say hello to each other in the hallway.

“Middle school … is a very dramatic place,” Conforto said. “There’s always drama. It just became very clear that we couldn’t suspend our way to a calm campus.” She said some teachers needed convincing that this approach is not just an easy out for kids.

“Staying home for three days is an easy solution. That’s a vacation,” she told them. “What is a harder solution is to sit there amongst your peers and their parents and your parents, and be made to take responsibility for what you did wrong. Being made to make amends, and have to make a contract, and have to apologize and shake hands in front of everybody? That is much more difficult than to stay home for three days.”

Before he became a facilitator, Kulakowski also had his doubts. “I was very skeptical at first,” he said. He thought kids would simply go through the motions of talking about a fight and then go back out and start fighting again. But then kids started asking him for circles before fights broke out. “I realized that once we did it right, it really worked,” he said.

Since Marrero decided to commit to restorative approaches in August 2016, suspensions have dropped by 56 percent. Conforto reports that they’re seeing fewer fights overall. Other schools that have embraced the “whole school” training have also seen declines in out-of-school suspensions, data from the Jefferson Parish school district show.

But creating and sustaining a restorative culture takes a great deal of work and commitment, Trout said.

“The goal of restorative practices is not to reduce suspension rates,” she said. “The goal of restorative practices is to create cultures and climates in which people feel connected to each other.”

To that end, Kulakowski doesn’t just hold restorative circles after an incident has happened. Teachers and students will come to him if they sense a problem brewing so he can de-escalate the situation with a preventative circle before conflict occurs. He visits classrooms to talk about bullying and explain the circles. He even facilitates circles between teachers. In the first year of the new approach, Conforto also required teachers to hold at least one community-building circle a month.