Restorative Justice Instead Of Suspension

I actually had the conversation last year with a principal when my sixteen year old had some problems at school and they wanted to suspend her. "You are punishing her for being out of school by letting her stay out of school?" "Yep" he said.
The fight began with name-calling in a classroom and had escalated by the time school let out into a brawl outside cheered on by dozens of excited students.

A couple days later, the two boys involved - plus their moms - were sitting around a table at North High School talking about what led to fists flying.

"I told him I was going to d--- slap him," one boy said, using slang for male anatomy. "I was playing."

"He did it maybe about three times and then I just kind of got irritated," said the other.

Some schools might suspend the fighters from classes for a few days and stop at that. In fact, that's the norm in Denver Public Schools, which relies on out-of- school suspensions as a disciplinary tactic more than any other large district in Colorado.

But North is trying something different, an approach called restorative justice that Denver school board members in November will consider for use across the district.

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