‘Restorative’ Approach Merits Kudos

Benton County is home to a jail with a long history of minimal treatment for inmates.

Sheriffs for years have sought to assure the public nobody was going to jail because it’s a pleasant place to be. Inmates are required to wear the cartoonish black-and-white striped inmate uniforms and the cold meals they get have long been a staple of Benton County incarceration.

So whenstarts talking about “restorative justice,” it’s not hard to imagine some people in Benton County rolling their eyes and believing it’s code for mollycoddling wrongdoers.

But restorative justice is exactly whateducators at Bentonville Public Schools are trying, and they should be praised for seeking answers that give young people second chances. Perhaps even more.

The principals at Bentonville High School and Washington and Lincoln junior high schools are experimenting with this approach to discipline that offers shorter suspensions or expulsions, after misbehaving students agree to certain conditions.

“We’re trying to reduce loss of school, loss of instructional time and increase academic support for kids while at the same time not wanting it watered down so much that there’s no consequences,” said Brad Reed, student services director for Bentonville Public Schools. “There are going to be consequences. We also want to have that mercy in our pockets.”

This is a far cry from the days of “zero tolerance,” which created rules that left no room for reasonable case-by-case judgment. Such policies were a one-size-fits-all approach, and such absolutes always have unintended consequences.

Take, for example, the deaf Nebraska child who used a gesture to indicate his name. To school oftcials, it looked like he was mimicking a gun, so, according to the parents, the school told them to retrain their child to sign his name in a way that doesn’t violate the school’s no tolerance police on guns.

Ridiculous.

Some things require zero tolerance, such as a student bringing a gun into a school. But most of what educators deal with requires a balance of discipline and trying to understand what’s going on with the offending student that led to the behavior.

In Bentonville, the restorative justice approach is geared toward doing as much as reasonably possible to keep kids in the positive environment of school. That’s what educators should do.

Our criminal justice system has fi gured out that mixing justice with a healthy effort to get to the root of people’s problems - drug abuse, for example - is a vital part of reducing the state’s demand for prison space. Washington County’s drug court this year got a three-year, $975,000 grant to evaluate programs that make a diff erence in the lives of offenders driven by drug addictions.

Old-timers might suggest locking them up is good enough. Today’s judicial system recognizes that’s not the answer to every violation of the law.

If it’s good enough for those entangled in our justice system, isn’t it even more important to recognize restorative justice as a tool within our education system? When kids are young and in a school environment, that’s precisely the place our communities are most likely to have a positive influence so young students don’t grow up to fi nd out what the county jail, or worse, is like.

We encourage Bentonville schools and others working to find ways to reach “troubled” kids to keep it up. It’s worth the investment.