How to heal a community

ILLUSTRATION Jodie C.

Shedding light on the behind-the-scenes work done by Honor Council to promote restorative justice

As a member of the Nueva Honor Council, I am very committed to the efficacy, use, and future of restorative justice in our community. Restorative justice prioritizes healing over punishment, and conversation over conflict—values I wholeheartedly believe in.

The Honor Council offers student perspectives on complex issues, which are a natural and expected part of the high school experience. It’s impossible to navigate teenagehood, or any institution in general, without some kinds of disagreements and harms. Hateful language, insensitive jokes, and poor digital citizenship just scratch the surface of topics that may call for a restorative circle.

I’ve served on the council for two full years now, in our transition back to a post-pandemic high school experience. The efficacy and use of the Honor Council took a hit during an online era where it was nearly impossible to facilitate restorative justice, especially because of the anonymity that digital spaces can have. With changes in administration and faculty in the past couple years, as well as senior members leaving, it’s been a long process to return to the implementation and prioritization of what the council has to offer to the administration and student body.

Since returning to in-person school, we’ve pivoted from focusing on learning about the application of restorative justice in high schools to learning how we can advise administration on decision-making, as most incidents have been handled by the administration and any involved parties.

As someone who has attended multiple all-school restorative justice circles during my time at Nueva, more as a listener than as a participant, I applaud the administration’s use of well-thoughtout consequences for parties who have harmed the community in some significant way.

The use of research, personal reflection, and small and big group conversations have proven to me a commitment to both helping harmed community members process and express

There is no formula for restorative justice

their feelings and giving offending parties the opportunity not just for forgiveness, but for progress.

One major part of the process of restorative justice circles working in times of crisis is having communitybuilding circles and creating trust before these concerns come up. In order for us to be able to speak peacefully and empathetically in restorative circles, we need preemptive conversations to prepare the community for this kind of strategy, rather than just employing it in a moment of crisis. In order for the process to work, we need adults and students to invest in it. If we only implement restorative practices after conflicts, the process feels disjointed. When adults decide all of the consequences as well as public and private reactions to harmful events, students can feel fully left in the dark, unaware if action is even being taken, and what the relevance will be to the situation.

Student input is a unique and necessary part of the disciplinary process. We are in touch with social and academic situations in a nuanced way that faculty may not be.

The ultimate goal is to prevent what may be our instinct: social ostracization and punitive consequences for infractions. Those two things I believe are the perfect storm to make community members who may have made mistakes feel as if there is no hope for overcoming and moving forward from the incident they were involved in.

While some students may be cynical or dismissive about restorative justice, I believe that it is the solution needed for potential future conflicts or harms, but the student input that Honor Council offers has to be more actively utilized. In order for the disciplinary process to feel more comprehensive and relevant to the people most frequently affected by such conflicts–students–student input is vital.

Ever since the upper school community went through the restorative process as a response to the antisemitism incident last spring, I found myself intrigued but unconvinced by Nueva’s restorative justice approach.

When I discussed the situation in an intimate setting with Jewish students who were able to speak about their experiences and build on their experiences, it was incredibly healing and fostered understanding and solidarity among the community. However, none of this conversation took place in an all-school setting. To then have multiple assemblies rehashing the details of the specific incident, rather than addressing the broader problem of antisemitism and how we could be allies to marginalized communities, felt performative to me.

I felt similarly after the incident with the homophobic slur written in the gender-neutral bathroom (graffiti left by a non-Nueva community member): Were the assemblies necessary, or did they just provoke fleeting sympathy from allies wanting to show they care? Having restorative meetings with queer community members had created solidarity, but much of the school, including myself, hadn’t known that this incident had even occurred until we were given a rundown of the history of homophobic slurs and allyship.

While I appreciate Nueva’s efforts to show the Jewish and queer communities that they care, both of these issues were painted as juvenile mistakes—with statements that the antisemitic Kahoot name was simply a joke made by a Jewish student and that the homophobic slur was “not written by an upper school student,” in an affirmation that Nueva remains a safe haven for its marginalized communities.

Nueva’s action in creating focus groups and specificity of its work since these past two incidents has been an improvement that is visible and felt. With more recent events regarding disrespectful messages in a private freshman group text, the restorative justice process has stayed more community-focused, with a similar approach as the anti-semitism incident: a smaller, grade-wide circle, which will hopefully lead to more transparency on the issue.

Although I think that the ninth-grade circle was an incredibly important step in cultivating restorative justice, I wish that there had been at least half as many assemblies addressing it as there were regarding the antisemitism incident. The difference between these issues is that while it makes sense for Jewish and queer communities to heal on their own first, this more recent incident was not targeted towards the ninth grade population. If anything, the “innercommunity” circle needed to be a wholeschool involvement.

In addition, a series of whole-school assemblies felt to me like they were only serving as a warning, rather than a punishment. Restorative justice is about rebuilding as a community, but there also needs to be more transparency on how community members who have hurt other populations are learning from their mistakes.

I hope that in the future there is more transparency between students, Honor Council, and administration on how larger-scale issues are handled. I do appreciate all-school restorative justice at its core. However, handling these issues more directly and communicating specific efforts to ensure security will help students heal, learn and set an example for what students can improve, and prevent mistakes rather than putting a bandage over them.

When they were young... Teachers share memorable moments from their senior years of high school

As the school year comes to a close and the class of 2023 prepares to graduate, teachers share memories from their own senior years.

"In my senior year, I was one of the lead editors of the school paper…I infiltrated a John Birch Society meeting, which is a right-wing group, and pretended that I was interested in joining [as] a youth member so I could understand what they were really talking about in there. [My article] drew some pretty intense responses."

All drip, no drown

"We had 12-hour long overnight Risk parties in my friend Paul's basement until 7 a.m.. Eventually we all started writing our own software to model the likelihood of winning an attack, [but] that took all the fun out of it, so we stopped doing it. At one of those parties I was bored and said I would leave and be right back, and ended up walking two hours to the 24-hour grocery store and buying a bunch of smoked salmon. It didn't really occur to me that this was a minor inconvenience because it was my turn. I think [my friend] Rob is still upset about that."

“I went to a boarding school where we stayed there Monday through Friday, and we did the chores. I was on the outside crew, so amongst many shenanigans, me and my friend raced the tractor versus our work car, [which] was an old Honda, around our two soccer fields. I had a solid lead with the tractor, but the car caught up and beat me. And I almost flipped the tractor over when we were turning because I forgot that the mower was attached.”

Take a look at some of the unique, DIY, or thrifted outfits at boat prom!

"To really impress upon us the importance of why you shouldn't drink [on prom night], because you might be driving, [my high school] had this team that came in [and did] a drunk driving reenactment. They had set up two cars on the football field that had been crashed into each other, and I was one of the people that was picked [to] participate…They asked me to be on the hood of the car like I had been ejected and put stage makeup on me to look like blood, and I had to lay with my cheek on the hood of the car [in] 85-degree weather. My character had been killed, and they had real paramedics come in and put me inside a body bag. Then they put me and my friend in a helicopter [and] it went up and came down. I felt like I was a celebrity."

“I really liked the pattern and thought it was a super fun suit since it had lots of bright pops of color... and suits are comfortable. I was going for comfort.”

“I’ve wanted to thrift my prom dress for a couple years now but I really wasn’t expecting to get one the day I bought it. I just saw it hanging there and saw the flower detailing and lace up back and knew I had to try it on. I was amazed at what good condition it was in and how well it fit, and everyone in the store kept complimenting my find. I knew I had to buy it. We even made the corsage and boutonnière ourselves!”

“It was my first time making a dress since 6th grade. I had watched one YouTube video and then I just went for it and even created my own pattern. I am most proud of the fact I put it all together in a month not knowing what I was doing and it turned out exactly how I imagined! Ever since I was little I’ve wanted to make my senior prom dress…I even talked it over with my best friend at the time in fourth grade.”