Restorative justice in schools: reviewing best practices and implementation strategies

In recent years, school districts have taken an interest in restorative justice as they consider alternative ways of securing school safety. This has become a priority for schools, communities, and governments in light of several incidents of extreme violence in Canada and the United States. These incidents have received a lot of attention and forced schools to examine alternative ways of preventing and responding to bullying, violence, and disruptive behaviour (Morrison, 2007). This paper is a review of the related literature regarding restorative justice and its implementation in schools. There is little available research in this area from a number of countries including Canada. There is a trend to move toward restorative justice in the school system and conducting this review will be an asset to schools considering change as well as stakeholders in order to have the opportunity to review what has worked or not in other school districts so they can make informed decisions. The importance of having the school board, administrators, and principals support to lead the change along with the development of a whole school approach to solving problems has been echoed throughout the literature. Implementing restorative justice in schools can be challenging as it requires the whole school to shift their thinking toward the development of a community and changing the culture within the school. To be most effective, restorative justice practices should be implemented in elementary schools so that restorative values and practices can be taught to younger children. There must be some process implemented to assist school staff to be directly involved in restorative practices while still fulfilling their primary responsibilities, the education and training of all school staff in restorative practices must be focused and continual, and funding and other resource support for the process, for a follow-up period, and for empirically-based evaluations must be secured prior to implementing restorative practices in schools. Related to this, and critically, the objectives and measures used to identify success and failure must be clearly established in ways that both achieve the specific needs of the school community, but also serve to allow the school to be evaluated and compared to other schools that have and have not employed restorative practices.