CROWN HEIGHTS — A struggling Crown Heights middle school is about to get a full-time staffer to help them resolve conflict in the classroom and drive down the school's suspension rate, officials said.
Ebbets Field Middle School (M.S. 352) has struggled with discipline issues in recent years, advocates said, suspending 88 students — at a rate of 30 out of every 100 students — in the 2013-2014 school year, according to the most recently available Department of Education data analyzed by the NYCLU, which monitors suspension and arrest data in the city.
At the same time, 60 percent of students, parents and teachers who said they don't think the school maintains "order and discipline," according to a city survey last year. It was also among the 94 struggling “community schools” flagged by the city last year to receive extra funding and support.
But starting in November, a “restorative justice coordinator” will seek to address that, thanks to a pilot program launched by the Partnership With Children, an education nonprofit chosen to work with schools to reduce traditional disciplinary measures like suspensions in high-poverty areas.
“In some schools, teachers have no other outlet besides sending the kid out. [They say] ‘Get the kid out of my classroom, I can’t operate a classroom with this disruption,’" said PWC director Margaret Crotty. "You not only want to address the disruption, but you want to address the culture so that those disruptions don’t happen."
Crotty said they are still hiring for the position, which they expect to fill by early November.
Changing the culture of Ebbets Field will start with the creation of a school-wide plan about how to deal with conflicts made by the new coordinator in conjunction with parents, teachers and students, Crotty said. That will include peer mediation and “restorative circles” (i.e. group discussions about disruptive issues).
Specifically, the school will work with the new restorative justice coordinator to focus on ways to find an outlet for all kinds of stress, Crotty said, including “the stress of growing up in poverty,” which includes “the uncertainty of living situations,” hunger, fear and anger.
Through specially-themed activities or groups like a student newspaper, gardening club or bereavement counseling circle, PWC hopes to reduce that strain — or at least, find a way to manage it.
“If you lower the amount of stress and if you give kids an outlet for their stress, the amount of acting out and behavioral crises decreases,” she said.
The program also will include training for at-home conflict resolution for parents and guardians because Crotty said “these types of things only work if all the environments the children are in support it."
The new program at Ebbets Field, which will begin next month and continue for four years, is one of four restorative justice programs starting at three other Brooklyn schools in Coney Island, East Flatbush and Downtown Brooklyn. It is made possible by the Brooklyn Community Foundation, which launched the pilot program with four $100,000 grants made to each school taking part, the group announced last week.
The effort to change Ebbets Field's disciplinary practices is not new, said Kenyatte Reid, the DOE’s Director of School Climate and Culture. the school's staff has already been working to learn restorative justice techniques to reduce suspensions.
“They’re already on the road to improving school climate,” Reid said.
He added that he hopes at the end of the program, the school community will be "rooted in mutual trust and respect."
"We’re going to see school communities that value one another completely. We’re going to see school communities that listen to children and listen to each other," he said.
