Restorative Practices

Restorative Practices 

Student Accountability and Restorative Practices (SARP) is committed to cultivating a connected campus community by building relationships, fostering empathy, and facilitating meaningful conversations grounded in restorative justice principles to promote accountability, learning, healing, and growth. 

SARP utilizes restorative practices that come from the larger theoretical framework of restorative justice. Restorative Practices focuses on involving the affected parties and seeks to repair harm that was done. This approach is fundamental to our work in upholding community norms. This does not mean that students who violate policy and cause harm do not face consequences. It means those consequences are grounded as much as possible in determining what harm occurred and what can be done to repair it. 

The goals of restorative justice [practices] are to identify: 

• What happened? 
• What harm was caused? 
• Who was harmed? 
• How can the harm be repaired?

Restorative Resolution Options 

In SARP, we use restorative approaches in a number of proactive and responsive ways, for example: 

• We train decision-makers in our process on how to use restorative tools such as inclusive decision making and restorative questions.
• Our sanctions focus on restoring harm to individuals involved and the community as a whole. 

By using restorative approaches to address conflict and harm, SARP is able to provide both accountability and support to the parties involved in an incident while balancing the needs of all parties, including the community. 

These strategies promote real accountability, genuine efforts to repair harm, and active efforts to resolve conflict. 

Harm can take many forms. Harms can include emotional/spiritual, material/physical, communal/relational, and inflamed structural/historical types of harm. A focus on identifying, acknowledging, and repairing harm in our restorative practices and conflict management strategies highlights the impact of behaviors on others and requires a dialogue on those impacts. These practices in turn support student development and build trust with the community. 

Restorative Practices can be requested by students, student organizations, or community members as one of the resolution options. The case can be a result of an actual student code of conduct violation as outlined in the student handbook or can be the result of a conflict or harm created that is not in direct violation of the code of student conduct. 

Typically, before parties come together for a restorative process, an intake meeting will be held in which a SARP staff will determine whether the conflict, harms, and the participant(s), are a good fit for a restorative process and if so, the most appropriate method of response. However, the facilitator(s), in consultation with the Director of SARP or designee, reserve the right to alter this procedure in order to uphold the intent of the restorative practices process. 

If it is determined a restorative process will be pursued, the following applies to the restorative practice process: 

• In cases where there was, or may have been, a policy violation, a restorative process is not intended to replace the criminal, civil, or SARP disciplinary processes. A restorative process at times can happen before, after, concurrently, or as an alternative to the disciplinary process for the resolution of student violations.
• If a restorative process is to be utilized in lieu of formal resolution of charges, all parties must agree to the process as an option for addressing their concerns. 
• All parties will have an opportunity to help develop expectations and agreements for the process. 

There are numerous options of restorative processes that can engage all stakeholders, including but not limited to, apology letters, conflict coaching, restorative conversations, shuttle negotiation, restorative conferences or restorative circles. The context and the needs of those involved will be taken into consideration when determining how best to repair and address the harms caused by a given conflict.