The crowd of high school students gathered quickly, streaming out of their classes and into the cafeteria in what looked like a choreographed dance. They encircled a smaller group of students who waved gay and trans pride flags. Cheers rose through the crowd as a student climbed onto a table with a mic.
Voice shaky but growing bolder with every word, the student read a list of demands that called for access to gender-neutral bathrooms, the right to use bathrooms that align with gender identities, honoring pronouns and chosen names, and training all staff in respecting LGBTQ students. The demands concluded with: “These restorative actions are ones that will make our community stronger.”
This was during the 2021-2022 school year at Metropolitan Business Academy in New Haven, our first full year back in the classroom since pandemic lockdowns. Like the rest of us, young people were struggling. Yet in the face of this struggle, students were not giving up — they were rising up. In the span of a month the students had staged three walkouts, the other two in protest of racist curricula and invasive searches by new security guards.
It wasn’t only our school where students were rebelling. As the school year neared its end in May 2022, hundreds of students from a dozen high schools across the city, organized by the Citywide Youth Coalition, walked out of class and marched downtown to rally for police-free schools. Citywide’s demands, which focused on ending the school district’s contract with the police department, also called on New Haven to reallocate millions of dollars from the police budget to public schools, specifically for mental health services, nurses, school counselors, and social workers.
“We protect ourselves better than the police do.”
Toni, one of my students who marched downtown that day, put it simply: “We protect ourselves better than the police do.” Far more than a powerful rhetorical statement, these words came from a student who knew that we could build alternatives to police, suspension, and other punitive discipline models. Toni knew another way was possible because it existed at our school.
Toni was in ninth grade in 2019 when a group of teachers and students came together to form our school’s Youth Justice Panel, a restorative justice model that focuses on repairing harm, restoring relationships, and addressing root causes.
Though Toni had been familiar with restorative justice, they weren’t always convinced. “I’ll admit,” Toni told me, “I fell into the group of a lot of people who didn’t see it, who didn’t understand how you can make it actually work when someone does something wrong.”
But in their four years at our school — from our early experiments with restorative justice to founding a Youth Justice Panel course — Toni lived into the realization that restorative justice is “more than just a concept,” as they put it. “We’re working towards building a better place.”
Working alongside students and teachers toward building this better place within our school has been among the most important work I have done. It has made real for me what before had only been a hope — that schools can be a vital site for growing and teaching abolition.
I first learned about restorative justice out of desperation as a first-year teacher in Philadelphia in 2011. That year, the city declared a hiring freeze, leaving charter schools as the only available employer for teachers. I was hired to teach special education, despite not being certified in this area, and spent one year at a corporate charter school, which was the most punitive environment I have been in before or since. Students were forced to walk silently in the halls “head behind head” as if they were in prison or the military. When they didn’t follow the school’s many rules, they were reprimanded with dollars deducted from fake weekly paychecks. A student who found themselves in debt had to wear a white shirt rather than the black school uniform and eat both breakfast and lunch on the floor.
These were impossible conditions for teaching and learning, dehumanizing for the students forced to endure them and for the educators ordered to enforce them. In search of support and guidance, I turned to Philadelphia’s Teacher Action Group and joined their restorative justice collective, where I found a community of educators who were each navigating their own punitive school environments. We had no blueprint, yet together we found ways — small as they may have been — to interrupt the carceral logic of our schools.
Nearly a decade later in New Haven, I was still drawing on what I had learned in that group in Philly, most of all that when our schools felt broken, the answer was for teachers to turn to each other. I was among the small group of teachers who came together in 2018 as a restorative justice working group. We had been steeped in the philosophies of restorative justice by our principal, Judith Puglisi, who had recently retired. In her absence, it became clear how much of our school’s non-punitive approach had relied on her leadership. Without her it came undone, and in the chaos of its undoing we learned that for this work to endure, it had to come from the ground up — from teachers and students.
Inspired by models we had seen teachers build in other schools, we decided to form a Youth Justice Panel. Nearly 30 students attended our first after-school meeting.
Toni remembers one of our earliest sessions. “There was a spectrum activity that we did at the very beginning, and I remember one of the questions was: ‘Do you believe that everything can be forgiven?’ I was the person on the furthest to the no side, because I was like, ‘there are certain things that have been done to me that I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive.’”
Together with our students, we grappled with questions like these and shared the experiences that shaped our views on how we handle harm. As Toni’s comment reveals, students didn’t all enter this space with an abolitionist mindset. They didn’t necessarily believe in the possibility of a society in which everyone’s needs are met, one where we can address all harm without relying on systems of violence. Many joined still holding tight to the idea that if you did wrong you should be punished.
They were angry with their peers who disrupted class, who smoked weed in the bathrooms, who pushed past them in the hallways. But for years they had watched their classmates get suspended, and they’d seen all the same problems persist and even worsen. The students weren’t sure if restorative justice would work, but they were certain that punitive discipline had failed them.
Schools are some of the first places where young people learn that our society is a punitive one and where this model of discipline becomes normalized. Millions of dollars flow into schools for this express purpose — for spaces and staff devoted to in-school suspension, metal detectors and surveillance systems, security guards and school police, and even teacher training programs and pre-packaged curricula that promote carceral logics. It should come as no surprise that many students and teachers are persuaded that a punitive approach is the only way.
When it came time to introduce the Youth Justice Panel to the entire school staff, this was the reality we were up against. We gathered in the library, teachers around tables in the back and students in front. A student presented a mock case to the library full of teachers who recognized their own classrooms in the example: A teacher confronts a student on their phone, the student refuses to put the phone away, cursing at the teacher and storming out of the room. I didn’t need to decipher the looks on my colleagues’ faces to know what some of them were thinking: Suspend that kid. Teach her a lesson. Don’t send him back to my class.
The students have a different approach — and it’s not light work. After an incident is brought to their attention, Youth Justice Panel members meet with their peers to understand what happened. They interview teachers to hear their perspectives. They discuss the root causes at play and prepare questions and statements to get at the heart of the matter. All of this before a hearing even takes place. For the hearing, students play every role: a facilitator guiding the process, advocates representing the student and community, and a panel that determines a restorative agreement.
That day in the library, the students modeled their process for their teachers. Then they left. There were a few moments of quiet, some shuffling and resettling. A teacher raised her hand. She complimented the students’ preparedness, how well they had performed, but as for the substance, she was concerned. “This,” she gestured to where our students had been sitting a few moments ago, “is not the real world. This isn’t how the real world works.”
Years later, I told Toni about this teacher’s comment and they revealed that a different teacher had told them the same thing. They were quick to respond: “Instead of school mirroring the world, why would we not want to create what we want the world to look like within the school? So that once you leave the school you’re like, ‘this isn’t what the real world is, but this is what the real world could be and should be.’”
Toni knows that schools do not exist merely as training ground for the “real world.” Quite the opposite, schools possess unparalleled potential to interrupt the inevitability of the world young people are taught to expect.
Liberals may have forgotten this, but the right has not. That is why in recent years, right-wing moms and representatives alike have renewed longstanding campaigns to control what happens in schools. They have launched assaults on teaching the truth, on calling our students by their real names, and on how we protect each other from gun violence.
As educators and students fight back against these attacks, we must ask why schools have become staging grounds for these political conflicts. There’s only one reason — despite the claims of naysaying teachers, schools are powerful. How we harness this power is the real question.
We can choose whether to reproduce the reigning punitive ideology, or to resist and replace it. If schools are powerful enough to lay a pipeline to prison, then we can build a school-to-abolition pipeline instead.
Two months after students introduced their teachers to the Youth Justice Panel, they held their first official hearing. After receiving his restorative agreement, the student at the center of the hearing told us he wanted to join the Youth Justice Panel. When the students had left for the day, we teachers stayed late in my classroom where the hearing was held, in awe of the youth and profoundly hopeful for the rest of the 2020 school year.
A few days later, the Covid-19 pandemic sent us all home. When we returned, restorative justice had fallen by the wayside, overwhelmed by the work of keeping ourselves and our students healthy, and trying to teach in impossible conditions. Pandemic promises to reimagine education were quickly replaced with business as usual. Forget the mass death and trauma, schools seemed to say, forget the uprisings of 2020. But students did not forget.
Toni and their peers shared the impact that the uprisings had on their own protests. One of Toni’s classmates recounted: “The world seemed pretty hopeless because of all the deaths, but I think having that sense of hope that things can get better through the act of protest is what kept us going. And I think students are taking that too. They’re done with not being treated like they should.”
While Citywide Youth Coalition’s demands made during their May 12, 2022 walkout have not yet been met, it happened to be that very day that our school’s principal approved a Youth Justice Panel course for the following year, the first in New Haven’s history. No longer would the vital work of restorative justice be relegated to an after-school activity that we no longer had capacity for; it would now be embedded in the fabric of our school.
“We need more politics in our pedagogy and more pedagogy in our politics.”
Shortly after attending the protest, Toni enrolled in the new course, and as a senior they joined 24 of their peers in the inaugural cohort of the Youth Justice Panel class, co-taught by Julia Miller and Steve Staysniak. Reflecting on the impact of the course, now in its third year, Julia told me, “We have all been changed in our conceptions of justice, community, and what school can look like.” Steve and Toni also emphasized the transformative power of this class for the participating students and teachers, along with its potential — one they acknowledged was not yet fully realized — to transform the entire school. That this work is not yet complete is not a failure, but a lesson — one for all of us working toward abolition.
In the summer of 1987, Paolo Freire taught a course at Portland State University. A colleague of mine who was a student in this class is fond of quoting a line that Freire would repeat: “We need more politics in our pedagogy and more pedagogy in our politics.” From the moment I heard these words, they have guided my work in the classroom and in my organizing.
As teachers working within a broken system, we are practiced at creating humanizing spaces under dehumanizing conditions and returning to do that work day after day. For those of us striving for abolition, this level of sustained commitment to build something liberatory in the face of such violence is what is required of us. And we need more of us in order to sustain it. That’s why our work must not only teach others how to be abolitionist practitioners, but also how to become teachers of abolition.
Just after the class held their first official hearing, Toni brought the Youth Justice Panel home to work through an ongoing conflict between them and their sister. They used the script from their classroom, asking one parent to facilitate and the other to determine the restorative agreement.
“I saw the world a lot more black and white before that class,” Toni told me. “There were certain things that someone might do and I would straight be like, ‘they’re a lost cause.’ Being in the Youth Justice Panel has shown me that there truly are no lost causes.”
Nataliya Braginsky is a public high school teacher living and working in Philadelphia. Her writing has appeared in YES! Magazine, In These Times, and the Law and Political Economy Project.
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