Students Rule

 

Earlier this summer I offered a proposal for a number of changes to enrich ROHS school climate.  Here is one in summary:

Activate a student court to address non-disciplinary issues between students.  There are several models to build from.  Recommend: three justices and two secretaries per case to hold cases during lunch periods. Verdicts would be in the form of restitution (reparative and restorative justice), service, opinions, or referrals to administration. Contempt would become a disciplinary issue.

I thought I would develop this a bit today and offer us all a chance to discuss and develop it into a formal proposal if it has enough support.

Goals and Rationale

Student courts are hardly new.  They have existed at the college level for decades, less frequently at high schools.  The goal is simple: help students set up a common expectation for community behavior in larger schools through discussion and judicial debate.  And one thing ROHS needs, I believe, is a common understanding of acceptability.

Student behavior codes can be achieved in two ways. The first is traditional:  administrators can design and implement a code of conduct, and teachers and administrators can be tasked to enforce it.  The second is for such a code to be developed from the community of students itself, working in collaboration with the teacher/administrative community. The first method almost always leads to an adversarial relationship:  students are disempowered and told to follow the rules.

Jurisdiction

Some guidelines are in order, however.  First, some disciplinary issues are clearly outside the purview of student responsibility.  Criminal cases, for instance, should remain with the police component.  Issues of physical fights and the like should, perhaps, be left with administrators.  Even so, there are myriad disputes between students which 1) go to administrators to resolve which ends us escalating the problem with punishments; 2) never go to administrators yet are important and unresolved conflicts which could use some arbitration.

The student court would hear all cases where all parties have agreed to comply by its rulings in advance.  Contempt of court or refusal to comply by its rulings would mean a referral to administration, itself a punishable offense.  We would have to revise the current Student Code of Conduct to reflect this.  In other words, if a student elects to have her case heard by the court, a later refusal to abide by its ruling is itself punishable.

Further, the types of arbitration and resolution possibilities should be limited to a philosophy which promotes a better environment for students.  I foresee a few possibilities:

1. Actual “trials” with a limited number of jurors for issues where guilt is uncertain;
2. Hearings and arbitrations with three students justices for minor matters;
3. Advisory Panel discussions to determine general policy and building management recommendations.

Consequences and Rulings

Finally, the types of consequences a student court would be empowered to implement would be limited.

Justice can be forward-looking or backward-looking. That is, we can work to make things better in the future, or work to punish what was done in the past. Vengeful of Punitive styles of justice are generally backward-looking and I cannot see how using them would create a credible reputation for the court. Therefore I think the best types of justice for a student court would be restorative, reparative, rehabilitative, or even working to seek forgiveness.

A student court would more likely seek to have a destroyed bulletin board put back in order by the vandal than simply suspend him (reparative over punitive).  A student court would more likely recommend a mini-course in sexual harassment for a student rather than give detention (rehabilitative over punitive). A student court would more likely see feuding friends reconciled through an objective and fair arbitration than ignore the problem or impose a detention (reparative vs. . . . irrelevant).

The Student Court could offer four kinds of rulings, I think:

1. Restitution rulings (reparative or restorative justice)
2. Service requirements (reparative or rehabilitative justice)
3. Opinions—which would be passed along to appropriate administrators around issues of building policy and the like. These would be advisory, though, as other stakeholders (teachers, parents, and insurance agents!) would have a say as well.
4. Referrals to Administration – where the case escalates into matters beyond its jurisdiction.

Next Steps

Other issues would need to be discussed.  Training and elections of justices; roles of advisors; appeals processes; court proceedings; teaching the student body about it; locations and times of the court, alignment with administration and police, counselors, and teachers; and the inevitable question of whether staff could be called before it (this does not happen even in college student courts because there are legal implications of it).

However, I believe that a student court could be one (and only one) method of building a community of expected behaviors for students different from impositions of policies.  Imagine opinions published on cell phone use, arbitration around pre-Powderpuff pranks and vandalism, or rulings on harassment.

If there is enough interest, maybe someone will put it forth as a formal proposal. . . .