Navigating Conflict & Shaping Safe Communities: Restorative Agreements Meetings in Schools

LCJP staff pose with Longmont’s School Resource Officers at a restorative skills training.

Longmont Community Justice Partnership is excited to announce our new intervention for supporting restorative practices in schools: Restorative Agreements Meetings. Restorative Agreement Meetings are interventions designed to prevent bullying and violence in schools by supporting youth who are experiencing conflict. It is similar to our Community Group Conferencing model, but instead of focusing on creating a contract to repair harms, the goal is to create agreements for people to be successful while in community with one another, preventing further conflict.  This project started in late 2022 from a discussion we had with our School Resource Officers (SRO), and grew to include our partners in REWiND, the youth of Longmont, and SVVSD. My name is Aiden Allen and this is our story.

In November 2022, fresh out of grad school as a fledgling newly recruited member to the LCJP Community Programs team, I spent some time getting to know members of the SRO team in Longmont and how LCJP could continue to support them and the students in their schools. I had the opportunity to sit down with Officer Zach McDonnell, the school resource officer for Longmont High School. We were finishing up a six-part training series giving SROs restorative tools to use when interacting with students and resolving conflict in schools. We didn’t want the partnership to fall off after the training was completed so I got in contact with Ofc. McDonnell to figure out what was next.

Youth participating in LCJP’s Your Story, Your Power program

Fast forward to spring of 2023; I was sitting in our restorative theatre program, Your Story, Your Power, and each youth was sharing about the incident that had prompted their referral. Strangely enough, every kid there seemed to have almost the same story: another youth had been picking on them, insulting them, and sometimes even getting physical with them. 

These youth felt frustrated, isolated, and like they didn’t have any support. Each youth expressed feeling like they didn’t have any choice but to retaliate because they felt like nobody was looking out for their needs or doing anything about the harassment. I went to look back through various referrals and reports to see if there were other instances like what the youth had described and I noticed this was a pattern throughout all the schools that year. In the first half of 2023, around a third of all youth offenses in Longmont involved a fight, harassment, bullying, or assault.

I recalled the conversation I’d had with Ofc. McDonnell at the beginning of the school year and how he’d mentioned an issue the schools were having with what is called a “No Contact Form.” A No Contact Form is a document that students sign when they’ve experienced conflict with another student, the form states they won’t communicate with the other student who they have had conflict with. These forms exist districtwide in one shape or another and are usually enforced by an administrator or school resource officer. “The issue,” Ofc. McDonnell said, “is the kids never follow them.”

This seemed like the perfect opportunity to sprinkle a little restorative justice magic, on the process of navigating conflict, to support the youth and schools confronting this challenge. So I sat down again with Ofc. McDonnell to figure out how we could support the resource officers and the schools in building out an accessible yet effective way to help kids communicate their needs to one another after they have been in conflict.

We completely updated the process, and No Contact Form itself, and this new framework became what we now call Restorative Agreements Meetings! Now SROs have the training to guide students who are in conflict through a conversation about what they need to be in community with one another. The students create specific boundaries and agreements that they can hold themselves to, and identify strengths and coping tools that will help them avoid conflict and respond with intentionality should the agreements be broken or conflict arise again. 

To ensure that students are not holding this work alone, each student also identifies a support person in the school community that they can talk with or problem-solve with if the contract is not working. This individual and the School Resource Officer can also let LCJP know if we need to assist in bringing the students together for another conversation.

The process is ongoing to ensure that we are using this opportunity to build community and resiliency in the school community. This creates a fully restorative model for conflict management in the schools that will hopefully support youth and schools, and lead to fewer instances of youth being referred to the criminal justice system in Longmont.

LCJP also recognizes that SROs and school teams might not always have the time to hold drawn-out conversations to address conflict so we are working on training our volunteers to support this new process. We recently completed our first volunteer training on Restorative Agreements and have developed a new referral process for schools to refer cases of conflict directly to us so that we can hold Restorative Agreements Meetings outside of the school. 

A picture from an LCJP volunteer training on Restorative Agreements

We even received our first referral in September from a Longmont school! The referral involved a conflict that was escalating rapidly between two groups of students who shared a class. Silvana, one of our program specialists, and I went into the school and facilitated a Restorative Agreements Meeting involving six students, their teacher, and two administrators.

It was incredible seeing these students be able to be vulnerable with each other, express their unique experiences and needs, and come to an agreement with one another about what they could each do to ensure they felt safe with one another. Afterward, the teacher who was involved reported that not only did the conversation have an impact on the youth, but also helped her to see perspectives on the situation that she hadn’t even considered.

We are excited about the burgeoning possibilities of this work in schools and are thinking critically and reaching out to our community partners to figure out how restorative justice in Longmont can continue to flourish and evolve.

After having some opportunities for implementing this intervention, we have been able to further develop this model as another one of our core offerings. We can now accept criminal referrals when individuals need to focus on moving forward successfully and less on repairing harm. We can even offer this conference model to organizations when they need assistance in guiding conversations about creating community agreements between parties who have been in conflict. 

This year has been an incredible opportunity to expand the work that we do, and the ways that we engage our community, diversifying our offerings and being more flexible with our responses to the community’s needs. This is only one small part of that mission, so look forward to more exciting news and possibilities in the coming year!

Aiden Allen is LCJP’s Community Programs Manager, if you would like to make a referral or want support navigating a community conflict reach out to Aiden at aiden@lcjp.org.