We have seen the viral TikTok videos of students engaged in violent fights among each other or a student knocking a teacher out. Discipline in public schools across our country has become almost nonexistent. Teachers are leaving the profession citing student violence as the reason for taking an early retirement. Parents have taken to school board meetings in hopes that their child’s bully faces consequences for violently attacking their child. School districts, superintendents, and administrators blame it on COVID and school lockdowns, but that is not the whole picture.

In 2014, the Obama administration’s Department of Education sent a letter to school districts in our country with the threat of investigating any school districts that suspended minority students more than white students. School districts reacted by drastically reducing suspensions among students and immediately installing restorative justice as a form of discipline. The goal of restorative justice is to mend the relationship between victim and offender by sitting in a circle to discuss the hurt caused by the offender and the hurt experienced by the victim. The practice may sound nice and at times necessary, but it has not been of benefit to school districts that have adopted restorative justice.

Teachers do not receive the training necessary to enact restorative justice. Our teachers barely have time to teach their subject; adding a restorative justice session into class time is not feasible. Instead, what happens is the disruptive child gets sent to talk to the principal or is assigned in-school suspension. Many teachers state that disruptive children do not take this seriously and often get sent back to the classroom with a lollipop and a grin on their face.

Restorative justice does not work when a child throws chairs in class and the class must utilize a “safe” word to let the other students know it is time to clear the classroom to give the disruptive child space. Restorative justice does not work when a teacher gets stabbed by a student and the teacher is pressured to not report the incident to police. Restorative justice does not work when a student sexually assaults another student in the bathroom.

In Washington state, the Bellingham Public School District is under a federal lawsuit due to the administrators’ failure to report a sexual assault between two students at the local high school. KOMO News reports:

“At [Assistant Principal Maude Chimere] Hackney’s direction, [victim] was required to be alone in a room with the perpetrator of the sexual assaults, then told to ‘shake hands and you’ll be fine,’” the lawsuit states. “Forcing the plaintiff to participate in a ritual with the perpetrator of sexual violence against her that the school the school called a ‘restorative circle’ was outside the bounds of decency and intolerable.”

Whether restorative justice has good intentions or not, our children should not be subjects of an experiment to make school districts feel better. Every child must have the opportunity to learn in a safe and distraction-free environment. Restorative justice does not provide a safe and distraction-free environment.