Sheldon [00:00:00]:
Welcome advocates to another episode of the Lead in Equity podcast, a podcast that focuses on supporting educators with the tools and resources necessary to ensure equity at their schools. Today's special guest is Nicholas Bradford. So without further ado, Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today.

Nicholas Bradford [00:00:17]:
Yeah, thanks for having me here. Appreciate it.

Sheldon [00:00:19]:
Pleasure is mine. We're talking about one of my favorite topics, restorative justice. So before we get into that, I'd love for you to share a little bit about yourself and what you currently do.

Nicholas Bradford [00:00:27]:
Yeah. Nicholas Bradford, I'm the founder of the national center for Restorative Justice. We provide trainings for schools, administrators, districts across the country. We have kind of three hubs, Seattle, Portland and Kansas City. So we host trainings there. We do have a new training that's offered in Chicago in August. And yeah, that's kind of what we do. We really try to manage, help navigate conflict with schools amongst young people, young people and adults, and adult and both staff, staff conflict.

Nicholas Bradford [00:00:57]:
We don't really distinguish that much between strategies and tools that we're working with young people with the same kind of strategies and tools that we're working with adults on, talking about accountability, understanding the impact of our actions, and then some repair work that has to happen. So, yeah, we're doing all kinds of different things. Obviously, we got trainings, we've got conferences, and we do a lot of traveling to schools as well. So we ended up like inside schools doing consulting work, coaching alongside running circles alongside teachers and coaching conferences. We do a little bit, a tiny bit of facilitation itself. So sometimes schools will call us in and like, if we've got a problem with these two students or this circumstance happened at our school. So we can kind of like help and support those spaces as well.

Sheldon [00:01:37]:
Absolutely. And you have a conference happening in a couple weeks?

Nicholas Bradford [00:01:40]:
Yeah, we got a big conference. Our first, this is our sort of schools conference here in Portland, June 26th and 27th. We're real and this is like it's a big deal for us. It feels like a big deal. We're. It's not going to be a huge conference. We got 150 people. That's going to be our max, max capacity.

Nicholas Bradford [00:01:55]:
But we got Joe Brummer from Connecticut and Margaret Thornsberg from Thorsburg from Australia coming in to, to the state. I'm really excited. This is. So they wrote two books recently about trauma, informed schools and restorative justice. Mark goes way, way back in restorative justice, like three decades, kind of really like foundational in Australia. And she And Joe kind of paired up to do this like big research. Two books now turn into one, turned into two of these books on trauma Informed practices and Restorative Essence. How do we, how do we kind of do both of these things at the same time, be aware of trauma and also engage in healthy, sustainable conflict? This is a different conference.

Nicholas Bradford [00:02:33]:
A lot of times people bring in these really great speakers and you hear them for a keynote and you're like, great, I got an hour of Joe's time or Mark's time, and that's really not what we're doing. We've got like a full day training for each. We divide the group, the large group into two groups. So people have a full day with both of them and basically a full day with us. We're split it half and half, kind of two days and two days, but. Or half day and half day. So it'll be a little bit different. But people are going to get a lot out of the time that they spend here.

Nicholas Bradford [00:03:00]:
It's going to be very different than a traditional conference where you go and you get an hour or 50 minutes at lunch with a group. So I'm excited about that. Yeah. Portland.

Sheldon [00:03:10]:
Yeah. Yeah. So it's like an all day workshop type of format.

Nicholas Bradford [00:03:14]:
It'll be like sort of half a workshop with them, half a workshop with a Choose your own adventure with my staff and then the next day will be half a workshop with them, half a day workshop with them, and then choose your own adventure with my staff. And we've got some, we're trying to walk the walk of restorative justice. So we're really doing some relationship building. So each one of my staff members, I might have to jump in there as well. We'll run small group circles of up to 15, maybe 16 people. And. And so we've got teachers, we've got administrators, we've got community folks. Part of what I miss and what I love about some conferences that I go to is meeting people.

Nicholas Bradford [00:03:47]:
Like we want to go to places and meet people and we're going to get some structured opportunities to do that and then also reflect on the learning. So if you went to a part of Joe's talk in the morning and I went to the Joe, like the talk in the afternoon and we did different things in the morning, afternoon, like in the afternoon when we're finishing our day, we just spend a little time like, hey, what'd you get out of that? What'd I get out of that? What was it? Aha. What was the question? Maybe you answered my question. And then there's another teacher or administrator that can speak to a different perspective if I'm a, I'm a classroom teacher or I'm a CUNY member. So we really think that that structure as well is really kind of leaning into our work in restorative justice. Like, it's really trying to walk the walk of a conference. How does it reflect our values of community? So those are big pieces.

Sheldon [00:04:33]:
Nice. And, and you know, I was waiting on you to say it, but you're also an author.

Nicholas Bradford [00:04:37]:
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sheldon [00:04:38]:
True.

Nicholas Bradford [00:04:41]:
I founded the national center for restorative justice in 2016 and we published and finished our book in 2021, kind of around the same time that my son was born. And so our next book will be a book on parenting and restorative justice. But really it's the real world guide to restorative justice in schools. It really captures a lot of our ideas and principles. Principles. But we still hold trainings, obviously, just because there's so much to be gained from the in person experience. But some people, they'll do a little pre work and then come to our trainings. I kind of will support a book club or something like that for a school.

Sheldon [00:05:11]:
And yeah, you're being, you're being too humble, man. I was like, man, come on here.

Nicholas Bradford [00:05:16]:
That's what I'm here for.

Sheldon [00:05:17]:
So. All right, all right, let's get into it. And, and I don't want to spend a lot of time on what is restorative, just justice and how do we. I really want to focus in on scenarios because a lot of times I get, I. Folks reach out to me and ask me, well, how should I have handled a situation or how do I respond. Sometimes when we do trainings, PDs, for example, kind of like what you were touching on, it's like, yeah, you get an hour, you get an hour and a half. But it might be a generic, you know, it's a topic, but it may not be specific or relevant to an individual. So yeah, maybe I'm doing a, a training on, I don't know, classroom management.

Sheldon [00:05:53]:
But like I have specifics regarding my classroom student demographics or it changes every semester, every year. How do I handle various situations? So people always ask me for talking points. People always ask me for like, what should I do, what should I say? So I want to start with you just defining restorative justice. And then we're going to just jump into some scenarios as far as like real life, real world type of things that could happen in Our schools, in our classroom, hallways, bathrooms, wherever. And how should they be handled? So go ahead and start us off with what is restorative justice?

Nicholas Bradford [00:06:27]:
Yeah. And to preface, the way we talk about it and the way I think about it is not the right way. And so it'll come across as that. But that's certainly not my intention. This is the way that we think about this and a strong framework to hold a school's culture. So. But the definition that we like to use, really easy and digestible, is a relational approach to conflict. And this kind of captures two different things, right? This relational approach to conflict.

Nicholas Bradford [00:06:50]:
One is that we've got to be relational. We know that relationships are keys to the kingdom when it comes to schools and young people being successful inside schools and many other places as well. But certainly we're talking about schools and then being able to engage in the conflict. And so there's lots of stuff to consider. But I really want us to think about if we are too focused on relationship, that's we're not doing our sort of justice if we're only building relationship, if we're only thinking about relationships like circles or compassion and things like that. And I definitely bias that direction. I'm going to be more compassionate to young people than a lot of other adults. That's just my nature.

Nicholas Bradford [00:07:26]:
But if I'm not also sort of engaging in the conflict and saying, yeah, I want you here, this is really important. You're a great kid. I love being around you. And the thing that you did was wild. That was not okay. That was scary for other kids and maybe yourself. So what are we going to do about that? We got to do both those things the same. This is why restorative justice is hard, is because it's not one or the other.

Nicholas Bradford [00:07:47]:
It's not punitive. There are consequences, obviously, but it's not punitive. But it's also not enabling. If we are enabling, that's easy. That really gets to an easy place of like, oh, I'm sorry. So it's your story, your experience, your learning disabilities. Like, all those things get in the way of being successful here. And, like, I pour my heart out.

Nicholas Bradford [00:08:06]:
And that enables young people to keep doing the things that they're doing, to not learn from their mistakes. We really hamstring their opportunities to learn when we are poor, permissive, or enabling. Right. And the same. The opposite, but similar problem around just consequencing. Right. Just having really strong, clear expectations. If you do this, this happens.

Nicholas Bradford [00:08:26]:
So balancing those two things, that's hard. And I want to be clear with folks like we're never going to say that restorative justice is easy or that we got easy answers because each kid and each circumstance is going to be different. We have the same problem behavior with two different kids and we have to approach it differently. We have to build more relationship in advance with one student or lean on an adult in the building or another student in the building who has that relationship with that kid in order to leverage and push and sometimes cajole a young person into taking responsibility for actions and eventually sort of making amends. Whereas another kid is like, oh yeah, this makes sense to me. Same same outcome, same sort of problematic behavior. They're excited about it and they're like, yeah, one thing responsible for my actions and whatever. Like there's lots of different things and that feels difficult.

Nicholas Bradford [00:09:10]:
It didn't mean it doesn't feel difficult. It is difficult to do. And so when I talk about restorative justice, relational, personal conflict, or trying to balance relational and the engaging in the conflict at the same time.

Sheldon [00:09:21]:
Interesting take. Most people that I talk to in regards to restorative justice, they talk about the proactive side. Gotta create, you gotta create the culture. And the circle should be utilized not just for when something happens. So when they, when the teacher say it's time to circle up, teach the students. Students aren't saying oh well, who did something or what happened now, but they're used to being in circles and sharing and their weekend or whatever, whatever. So I've always had folks say it needs to be approaching it from a, like let's reduce any type of situations or instances. So I just want to make sure that I'm hearing this correctly because it sounds like you're just clarify what do you mean by that?

Nicholas Bradford [00:10:03]:
Yeah, for sure.

Sheldon [00:10:04]:
Okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:10:05]:
So the work of relationship building, the culture building in school has to happen all the time. But we've run circles, I've run personally run circles with young people both in juvenile detention or associated with criminal behavior and in schools without any pre work, without any sort of like preamble or culture building or anything like that. And so that's, that's harder. If you have the opportunity to build a culture, whether it's on a team, a sports team or a school, you're going to have way easier outcomes. You're going to be able to rely on those relationships to encourage Joel, help have other young people reflect in meaningful ways the impact that their actions had on the school, school community like that, that, that improves the possibility of positive outcomes greatly. But that's not where restorative justice starts or begins or it starts or ends. Like really the magic of restorative justice is in the conflict. And there's lots of programs and lots of systems that do a lot of that pre work too.

Nicholas Bradford [00:11:01]:
The culture building, social, emotional, learning, trauma, informed practices, equity work, all those types of just being compassionate, like all those things are really important and set us up. And there's some practices inside their sort of justice system that we talk about that does that pre work for sure. Both at the school level, the classroom level, small groups, young people who might be struggling to build social relationships, find connected, connected adults. You're going to have smaller groups and smaller support systems for them so that we can rely on those relationships strong, like more directly when bad things happen. But if you're trying to pbis, you know, positive behavior interventions and supports your way into a positive school culture, that's fine. You know, we can talk about implementation of that and stuff like that. And where, where I might draw some lines on, on philosophy. You're going to have conflict, right? You're still going to have kids into the fight.

Nicholas Bradford [00:11:55]:
You can PIs your way like as much as humanly possible, have reward systems and good expectations and clear expectations and positive relationships. But you're going to have kids who get into fights. You're going to have kids who pull a fire alarm because they're like, oh, what's going to happen? I'm going to pull the fire alarm. Like then what do you do? So if I were to break it down, I don't know, 30 to 60%, right? 30% is like the pre work and then 70% is like the hard nuts and bolts of like when kids get into fights. Not just fights, just like the little altercations of not meeting regular daily expectations. What do we do then? Do we just tell kids, hey, do the right thing. Hey, do the right thing. If you do the right thing, you get this reward or you get this sort of like positive thing over here.

Nicholas Bradford [00:12:35]:
Like no, like first for me. And the way we think about this is like that's an opportunity to talk about accountability. Young people, when they get into trouble, quote, unquote, they are really, really apprehensive about taking responsibility for their actions. And I don't care what grade level it is, if they're in a comprehensive public school, they're very adverse to taking responsibility for actions. I've got a four year old, I've done a ton of work with him about taking responsibility for your actions. He's still sometimes Most time he's pretty good about it, but sometimes he struggles. And at different developmental ages, you get different levels of struggle. I want to see young people take responsibility for actions like really from the beginning, from the smallest stuff of like, hey, you relate to class.

Nicholas Bradford [00:13:16]:
I don't need to say that, hey, I noticed something. Hey, let's take responsibility. Let's, let's just go around and take a little bit of responsibility at a time when we weren't responsible. That's low level, broad based, our sort of practice, and that's not built into any other kind of culture building system. And that sets us up for like when that kid gets into a fight in high school or that kid pulls a fire alarm because his friend dared him to in ninth grade. Because it's like first two weeks of school and you're like trying to be cool or whatever, like as you move up, then if I can get that young person to take responsibility for their actions, that's, that's the win. And we talk about later on how to, how to manage impact, how to manage repair. I would say, you know, back to that first question.

Nicholas Bradford [00:14:00]:
30% of it maybe is a sort of culture building and doing this stuff in the classroom and being like kumbaya, you know, and then like 70 of it's like, all right, we, we're doing some stuff at the classroom level for expectations. We're doing some group accountability stuff. We're doing some small group detention, which detention book look very different for us than it does in, like how we sat in detention staring at a wall for, for an hour. Very different. But there's extra time that we can sort of devote. And then obviously before or after a suspension, a fight or drugs or, you know, the fire alarm stuff, bomb threats, that kind of stuff. Like, how do we have those conversations? That's, that's the 70%.

Sheldon [00:14:40]:
Okay, thank you. Thank you for clarifying that. Let's jump into a scenario then.

Nicholas Bradford [00:14:44]:
Yeah, yeah.

Sheldon [00:14:45]:
Let's say we got high school, two rival gang members. So let's just say one is from one gang, one is from another gang. You set up as much as possible to try to keep them from conflicting with each other, giving them different schedules. But parent teacher conference comes up one day, or testing day comes up, and we forget because you got 100 kids or whatever, and we're, you know, you knew that you're supposed to keep these two individuals separated, but you forget because it's a testing day. And so they all, they both show up together at the same time. One thing leads to Another. There's a conflict that ensues.

Nicholas Bradford [00:15:20]:
Yeah.

Sheldon [00:15:21]:
Now you have the. The choice of, I don't know, disciplining them or. Actually, I'm gonna stop there.

Nicholas Bradford [00:15:26]:
I'm gonna stop there.

Sheldon [00:15:27]:
If I'm school administrator, what are your suggestions as far as how do I proceed? They've got into a fight. What's next?

Nicholas Bradford [00:15:33]:
Yeah. So if there were an actual fight, I mean, like, blows thrown. Yes.

Sheldon [00:15:38]:
So my.

Nicholas Bradford [00:15:39]:
My initial response is those kids are going to go home. And then you want to see about, like, what your. What your tolerance level is for how long they need to stay home. My entry point at any point. So they go home right away. We conference with them, we talk about, like, hey, this is what's going to happen. We're going to send you home when you're ready to take responsibility for your actions and you have a conversation with me. Great, let's.

Nicholas Bradford [00:15:59]:
Let's do this. Let's have this conversation. And this is what that conversation is going to look like. We're going to talk about you need to be responsible for your actions. What part did you play? How does it impact yourself, other people, the community? How does it affect other. That other individual directly? That's the conversation we're going to have. I need you to be willing and able to sit down with me and this other student in the same place and work on a plan to sort of move this thing forward.

Sheldon [00:16:23]:
Now, is this a suspension that they're staying home?

Nicholas Bradford [00:16:25]:
Yeah.

Sheldon [00:16:26]:
Okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:16:26]:
Yeah. We work with all kinds of different schools from, like, very kind of quote unquote, nice private schools where kids, like, the worst thing that they do is they cheat or their social media, like, excluding kids. And to kids, the places where there's guns and knife violence and kids are getting killed, that we run that gamut. So we got to be real about how we make schools safe and how young people can feel safe at school when those kind of things happen in and around school and also off campus. So, yeah, that's a suspension, but the entry point back in. Give them, like, the 30 days. You give them whatever the sort of, like, district recommended policy is. 7 days, 10 days, whatever it is.

Nicholas Bradford [00:17:01]:
I don't. That doesn't matter. But my recommendation is you get that kid back into school, into the office, have a conversation with you and some student or adult community members as quickly as possible, next day, day after, and we just run through these things like, hey, what happened? Tell me about the circumstances that led up to this, and I'll give you the whole backstory. And if there's other stuff going on. This kid killed another. His. His brother, something like that. Maybe this isn't the sort of circumstance that we want to handle in this circumstance or with whatever sort of conference.

Nicholas Bradford [00:17:29]:
But if it's traditional or like, regular kind of things that we would think about, just beef, whatever, then we're going to go through the process. What happened? What was the thinking? What was the impact kind of package those three things up, and then we talk about, like, what are we going to do now to make things better now? Are we doing it separate?

Sheldon [00:17:43]:
Just so I'm clear, are we. This is two separate meeting first.

Nicholas Bradford [00:17:46]:
Separate first. Yeah.

Sheldon [00:17:48]:
Okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:17:48]:
Yeah. In this, like, big cases, separate first. And we go through the whole. For all four questions beforehand, and then we get them down and we'll role play. We'll role play. Like, all right, okay, so one of my students will be here or I will sit in, or another adult will sit in as this, like, other young person. I'm going to ask him, like, all right, Nicholas Sheldon's going to be here tomorrow or the next day or whenever we're going to meet. How are you going to say, like, how this is your responsibility taking to Shelton.

Nicholas Bradford [00:18:13]:
And Nicholas says, well, if you didn't and you shouldn't have, and fuck you, and okay, cool. Like, let's try again. We're gonna role play and role play and role play until we're in a spot where I think this could go well. I'm. It's not a hundred percent not gonna be perfect, but I want to be over that 50% line of, like, yeah, my odds are in my favor that this is gonna go well. And then we did the same thing with other students. And if they're both good, we're gonna bring them together day three or four, even day two, depending on the level of violence that happened inside the school. Depending on the level of, like, administrative support from the district.

Nicholas Bradford [00:18:44]:
Bring them together and then what's. There's two pieces that we mess up as we're sort of practitioners. One is the accountability. We're not clear. We're not. For whatever reason, I don't want young people. When I'm in facilitation and, like, people like me are in facilitation to be like, whatever language they used, they'll say instead this euphemism, like, I was really rude to you to a teacher, or I was mean, or I did something that was inappropriate, like, get out of here. I don't want any of that.

Nicholas Bradford [00:19:11]:
I want specifics. I punch you in the face. I said the F word. I called you a fat whatever, like, and I turned over a desk and I stormed out the classroom. Like, I want you specific. So accountability is really, really important. And then we go through the impact and the harm. Excuse me, the thinking and the harm.

Nicholas Bradford [00:19:26]:
And then the other place that we mess up is the action of repair. So what happens is, you know, I'll give you an example. Like, we had these. This group of girls that were kind of just social media teasing, mean, like, all the girl drama at each other. Their parents were on there, either side. This girl's teasing my, My, my, my baby, like, how she, you know, she needs to suspend all this stuff. And this mom over here is saying the same thing about her kid down and was like, oh, no, you both are being, like, real mean to each other. Like, you have a lot.

Nicholas Bradford [00:19:57]:
And so moms on both sides are like, oh, you're being. You're instigating this stuff. You have responsibility to take. So we do all this, like, real unpacking of the mess that these girls had made. The parents and the girls are like, cool, let's hug it out and let's move on. No, don't do that. They may. You said, don't do that.

Sheldon [00:20:14]:
Don't hug it out.

Nicholas Bradford [00:20:14]:
Do that. Don't hug it out. I mean, you can hug, but, like, you got to do the work. You got to do the work after you hug it out.

Sheldon [00:20:23]:
Okay, okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:20:24]:
Like, you buried the hatchet. Awesome. That. Because what we forget is it's not just these two or four girls that messed up. They were inside a school community where they were causing other extraneous harm to the. To the classrooms, to other students, to younger students. These were eighth grade girls at a middle school. So these other seventh graders are seeing this kind of behavior.

Nicholas Bradford [00:20:45]:
So their responsibility is to the school is to give back. So they got to do the presentations, they got to make, the posters that put them in the hallway. They got to talk to the seventh graders as they're coming in, or the staff, sixth graders as they're coming up to visit. Like, whatever it is, they got to do the work, what we have. And so back to your example of the gang violence. Like, we get these two kids who are, like, real tough, real hard, struggling to show emotion at any other point in their life. And you get them in front of you and a couple adults and another couple young people, and they emote, they cry or whatever, or they say, I'm sorry. And you, like, want to put, oh, great, I put that in the wind.

Nicholas Bradford [00:21:22]:
Call that's true. But it's not over. It's not over. You've got to do the work. And so that's where we mess up is we see these kids who really struggle to emote, show emotion, show care for their classmates and their school and really, like, you know, want to hug this teacher that they were, like, really rude to and like, disrespectful and kind of the ways they were, like, what happened? You got to do the work. Because the teachers as. As well will say, oh, it's okay. Like, I appreciate you really coming in here and sharing your perspective.

Nicholas Bradford [00:21:48]:
And I didn't know that about your mom. And like, you've been in a hard spot.

Sheldon [00:21:52]:
Yeah.

Nicholas Bradford [00:21:52]:
And it's also not okay to tell your teacher and storm out the classroom. That's not okay. We can't, like, sort of just be permissive about that behavior. So these are the two places that we go wrong, which is the pre work, which is the accountability, and then the post work, which is the work, the work of apology, what we call the action of apology. Like, we've got to do that work really well. And that has to coincide with the. Ideally, kind of the relatedness to the harm is really key. It's not just community service for community service's sake.

Nicholas Bradford [00:22:26]:
While in some cases that can be an appropriate response. But I want it to be, like, connected to the harm that they caused. So if you're talking about those. Those four, that group of girls, they're bullying and harassment toward each other. Like, let's. Let's talk about what they can offer to their school community and even the elementary school as ways to kind of combat bullying, harassment in the. In the school community. There's lots of different ways.

Nicholas Bradford [00:22:50]:
Don't just make community service up. Make it connected to the work that they're doing that they should be doing. Is that kind of make sense?

Sheldon [00:22:55]:
Yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. I'm with you. So is there ever a time. Well, I actually got a couple questions. First question is, let's say that student is not ready or either of the parties. Let's say one of the kids is not ready to talk about it. Like, they still upset.

Sheldon [00:23:09]:
We just give them a couple days. Does the other student. So let's just say, all right, so going back to the two, the two gang members, one. One. One of the students, after a day or two, they're ready to talk. They're willing to hash it out, if you will. The other one, we're past a week and we're like, the student's still not cool with it. We don't send both.

Sheldon [00:23:30]:
We don't send that one kid that's ready to talk early back to school because it hasn't been resolved. So now they're missing out on instructional time and they're missing out on opportunities to grow while one is trying to figure out, so how does that work out then?

Nicholas Bradford [00:23:44]:
Yeah, that's great. That's a great example. So the community has a responsibility. If what we call authors or victims, which in this case sort of both are authors, one of the two parties isn't ready, isn't willing, that doesn't prevent us as a community from sitting in. So what we would do is either have an author stand in, excuse me, impacted party stand in, or something like that. You can sort of do this just as a community, like a circle and. But you go through the same things. You're like, what happened? And then this young person, Nicholas, takes responsibility in a way that's meaningful to a larger group of kids and adults.

Nicholas Bradford [00:24:18]:
And we talk about what was the thinking? You know, I was thinking about respect. I was thinking about fear. And like, this kid's going to get me and I need to get him first. And then what's the impact? And then we let Nicholas talk about the impact. We let the community also share their impact and, you know, places that he had maybe missed in his. In his thinking. And then the same discussion around, what are you going to do to make things better? How do we move forward from here? What actions are we going to take? So in collaboration with the community, you come up with a plan. Like, it's the stuff we're going to work on.

Nicholas Bradford [00:24:47]:
I would put first on that plan. I want you to be ready to have a conversation. If this other student gets come to a place where they're ready to have a conversation, that's first and foremost. That goes on the list. That's an agreement, not a prescription. I need to let Nicholas know, like, this is important. It'd be really helpful for both you and this other kid. But I can't force you to do stuff that you don't want to do.

Nicholas Bradford [00:25:05]:
So on that, on this topic of like forcing kids, which is really like, I had this experience with a middle schooler who got into sort of a tussle with a security guard. Him and a couple friends were going to jump this other kid. Security guard intervenes. They can just get in the office. He kind of punches and kicks at the security guard. And so we have a conference and he assistant Principal, it was great and says, hey, you want to do some community service to make things better? Yeah, sure, I'll do that. That's not a real, like, positive, like, statement of, like, this is what I want to do. But we.

Nicholas Bradford [00:25:33]:
We had to talk about some stuff a little bit. And then like 30, 45 seconds later says, you know what? I don't want to do community service. I don't want to pick up trash. I don't want to work in the community with the janitor. I don't want to do lunch duty, Something like that. He's like three or four things that he didn't want to do. I was like, great. What do you want to do? You can tell.

Nicholas Bradford [00:25:50]:
Tell me. No all day long. As long as you're also offering things that we can do, and as long as a school and as a facilitator, I have options to put it in front of the student, then, like, then we can start working. Because if a kid tells me no, great. We got options, man. What do we want to do here? Got this and this and this. And you can work with this student or this teacher or that here we got community spaces outside the school that you can do community work at. And so that's a really important part of the system.

Nicholas Bradford [00:26:15]:
So with this young person we're talking about in this example, if they're. If the other party is unable to come for the table, we just got to figure out the work that makes sense.

Sheldon [00:26:23]:
Okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:26:23]:
So it could be. Find a mentor, be a mentor, stuff like that.

Sheldon [00:26:27]:
Thank you for that. That was a question that I've come across before. It's like, okay, well, one was ready to talk, but the other one isn't. So does that mean the one student can't go back to school until the other one's ready, and then again, that can cause a whole thing? Yeah. So I'm glad you're able to explain that. Let's do this. Because for the sake of time, I want to throw out maybe something that might be on an elementary level. What are some.

Sheldon [00:26:49]:
Maybe a challenge that you've seen at the elementary level. How. How should it be handled?

Nicholas Bradford [00:26:54]:
Elementary level stuff is. Is a little bit different because there's less kind of big harm that happens. So what I focus on at the elementary is these two things. The first two questions, which is, I guess there's like question one and question three.

Sheldon [00:27:06]:
Okay.

Nicholas Bradford [00:27:07]:
Which is what happened? And then what's the impact? So with my son, who's four, we just do. What was the what happened Question? And today So I literally. We're going from having lunch, we're going to go upstairs. He kind of puts himself in the doorway. His little sister, who's two and a half, is trying to get through. He says, no, you can't get through. She's trying to squeeze through. He kind of pushes her down and then falls on top of her.

Nicholas Bradford [00:27:29]:
So what do we, what do we do? We, like timeouts. What, you know, what kind of options are there? So for me, I just focus on. Because he's at this level, he's four and a half. My goal is for him to be very comfortable talking about what happened. Hey, what happened? I sit him down as he sit on stairs. I check on my, my. My little girl. And she.

Nicholas Bradford [00:27:48]:
She's as tough as he is. Even though she's two years younger. She kind of bounces up. She's like, I'm good. But I hold her for a second and then she goes off and, hey, what happened? And then he's. He says, I was trying to give her a hug. Okay, cool. Yeah, but that's not what happened.

Nicholas Bradford [00:28:01]:
You didn't actually give her a hug. And then he says, I grabbed her and then I fell on her. Okay, cool. That's what happened. And he knows that she cried and stuff like that, and that wasn't cool. And like, we're in this sort of situation. I don't need to go through that and that, developmentally speaking, I don't think he's ready for that focus. But after first grade, then we start focusing on impact.

Nicholas Bradford [00:28:19]:
So kids who have problems at recess, kids who are kind of like maybe hallway roamers, we call them elopers. You know, kids who elope, like, cool, let's sit them down. Hey, what happened? You know, you can get two or three of them at the same time, so we're not wasting a bunch of time. Hey, at recess, what happened? And we've got these kids at one of those elementary schools that we're working at. A couple years ago, we had a lot of Afghani refugees come into the Seattle area and lots of trauma, you know, new language, new culture, wild experiences. But you can't just slide tackle each other on the pavement. Like, that's not okay. They're playing soccer and.

Nicholas Bradford [00:28:55]:
But we can bring them in. Hey, it's not a timeout. It's that sit on the, on the wall. It's just, come here, let's talk about this thing. Let's take some time. What was. What just happened? And then each of them go around. We need to make developmentally Appropriate requests of that kid.

Nicholas Bradford [00:29:12]:
What's the smallest thing that they can do in order to make amends? They get some wins in their column. A lot of kids in elementary school who are struggling with big behaviors, we got to figure out how to give them small wins in their column. And so having an adult say, hey, thank you, I really appreciate the K community service that you did, even though it was an hour and a half, two hours, 45 minutes of supervising the elementary school or going in and doing some additional reading with the first breakers, like, whatever that win is, they gotta get some wins in the column. So it looks similar as far as, like, a sort of conference for those big behaviors. But one, that's pretty rare, and two, we gotta make it that, make expectations that work developmentally appropriate. So we're going to bring that down to where they're at. But the lion's share of work in elementary school is accountability circles. Big classroom disruption type stuff where kids are just kind of like, in, like, too loud and disruptive and not being on task.

Nicholas Bradford [00:30:06]:
Then recess, lunch. Also, obviously, you can pull a table of kids who are messing around, who are struggling to sit, struggling to clean up their messes. You can take them aside and either do accountability work or kind of that detention level stuff, which, the accountability and the impact, I'm say it out loud. This is what I did. This is how it impacted myself, the school, the classroom, other people, and just rinse and repeat. If you got, if you have to do that 17 times with a group at lunch, then maybe we got to level that up and talk to their parents, like, all right, we're going to have a bigger conversation. But that's rarely the case. So, yeah, that's what I like.

Nicholas Bradford [00:30:42]:
The elementary school space is like those bottom two tiers of restorative justice. Get a lot of work. And then when you get into middle school and, and in high school, then you sort of have that, that upper tier. And it just depends on your school, like, where your, where your balance is balancing toward a lot of, like, fights and fire alarms and bomb threats and stuff like that. Are you balancing toward, like, not having accountability?

Sheldon [00:31:04]:
So it just depends. Okay. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. I, I'll tell you this, Nicholas. I, I, I'm glad that you were able to break a lot of this down and provide, provide some actual solutions. How do we kind of navigate through this? I'd love for you to take us home with any final words of advice you want to provide to our listeners.

Nicholas Bradford [00:31:20]:
Yeah, we're sort of justice. The reason why it's qualitatively different than our traditional punitive systems or our, like, care and compassion is because it's a really active process in the sense that the system doesn't move forward until the young people or the adults who impacted our community or other people actually start the process. And what I mean by that is that first question about what happened. I'll give you the example of my son, who's again, like four and a half. You know, a year ago we started the process. A year and a half ago, I started this process. And he would say, like, I don't want to talk about it. I'm like, cool, all right, that's fine.

Nicholas Bradford [00:31:55]:
We can sit on the couch until you want to talk about it. And then for him, trying to wait me out was like 30 seconds, 15 seconds, probably more likely. But for elementary, them waiting us out becomes a little bit longer. Middle school is even longer. High school, like, days, weeks sometimes, where they don't want to take responsibility for their actions. And so that's a really important part of this process, is we can't. It doesn't move forward and they. Until they actually participate meaningfully.

Nicholas Bradford [00:32:23]:
And that means taking responsibility for actions first and foremost. And then later on, it doesn't end. The process doesn't end until. Until we say, like, hey, what are we going to do to make things better? And then I stop making suggestions, say, hey, what makes sense to you? How would you like us to move forward? And that. That kid, that student of that school will say, I don't know. Oh, cool.

Sheldon [00:32:42]:
Yeah.

Nicholas Bradford [00:32:43]:
This is the first time you've asked. You've ever been asked this question about, how do you make amends for the mess that you've made? It makes sense that you don't know what they. How to answer that question here. And I turn over a list. I've got, like, a little, like, form letter. I turn around this. Hey, here's a bunch of examples of things that people have done. Which one of these things do you want to explain? Or.

Nicholas Bradford [00:33:00]:
And they'll, like, randomly point to something and say, what's that? And then I'll explain. Oh, yeah, that's a letter of apology to the person that you've impacted. I don't want to do that. Okay, cool. Start going down. I said, what's this one? Oh, that's some mentoring. You could either be a mentor. You're in high school, middle school, you can be a mentor to younger kids.

Nicholas Bradford [00:33:19]:
You're fifth grade, you can even be a mentor toward first graders. But sometimes middle School and high school kids need to find an older mentor. Hey, we've got this, this program with boys, big boys, big brothers, big sisters. That might be something you'd be interested in. So, yeah, that could be cool. All right, now we start asking questions. What's this look like? And they start the ball rolling on a topic or an interest area where they think that they can author that repair. And that's why restorative justice is so different than our digital systems is because it really demands that people who impacted the community or other people or sometimes themselves are the first movers.

Nicholas Bradford [00:33:56]:
School administrators and teachers are the first movers for safety. But when it comes to repair and sort of how do we move forward from here, those people who author those actions, those students are the first movers. And that's why restorative justice is like one of the best systems that I've come across to heal from harm, to move forward from harm, and to make a school culture of connectedness and success.

Sheldon [00:34:17]:
Nice. Well, I'll tell you this. I really do appreciate your time. If we have some folks that want to connect with you, you, Nicholas, what's the best way to reach you online?

Nicholas Bradford [00:34:24]:
Yeah, best way probably is me personally. LinkedIn. Nicholas Bradford. You can just find me and probably thoughts on there and then nationalcenterforrestivejustice.com or nc4rj.com and hopefully you'll see folks at a training or maybe even at the conference. It's coming up real soon in June.

Sheldon [00:34:39]:
Okay, well, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for your time.

Nicholas Bradford [00:34:41]:
Yeah, thanks, man. Appreciate it.

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