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DIGGING DEEPER ROOTS
Restorative justice helps students open up at Englewood high school
BY MARISSA BOULANGER // PHOTOS BY BRIDGET MURPHY
Michael Meyer, 28, holding items used in peace circle at Paul Robeson High School.
Walking into Paul Robeson High School, a security guard checks bags as students make their way through metal detectors. Student-made art and inspirational quotes on the walls lead to large and sparsely decorated classrooms, some converted into oversized offices.
Michael Meyer leaves one of these offices and walks to the in-school suspension room carrying only a binder and a potted plant.
“The kids that I haven’t interacted with, all they know is I’m the guy that walks around with a plant,” Meyer said.
As he enters, Meyer greets Coach Q, the security guard monitoring the students and places his plant in the center of a circle of plastic chairs.
The room quiets as Meyer invites Coach Q and the students to take a seat. The five boys don’t respond, but eventually make their way to the chairs.
Meyer takes them through the circle process, starting with ground rules, then beginning with questions such as “How is your day?” leading to “What holds you together?”
Answers from the students are minimal, but Meyer pushes forward. A boy mentions his daughter. Another admits marijuana is the only thing keeping him in his classes.
When Meyer asks what the school would be like without metal detectors, he finally gets a response from most of the students. None of them would come to school anymore. The threat of weapons would be too high.
Meyer, 28, is a restorative justice practitioner. His job is to provide justice in schools in a non-judgmental and equal way.
“[I] look at not just the victim, but the victim’s needs caused by the harm, the offender’s needs that led to the harm, and the community’s needs as well,” Meyer said.
He does this through one-on-one conversations, often visiting classrooms and spurring discussions about values, storytelling and the circle process.
Circle, sometimes referred to as a peace circle, is a technique where people impacted by a situation come together to talk about it and find a resolution. It’s designed to put everyone on an equal level. The circular arrangement of chairs makes people equidistant from the center, not making one person as the center of a situation.
Michael Meyer, 28, leading the peace circle at Paul Robeson High School.
“If everyone [in the school] was willing to do a circle and be open and honest, we all would be like a family,” wrote one of Meyer’s students. “Everyone would be able to talk to one another with respect or know when and when not to say the right or wrong things.”
Circles are meant to promote growth, which is why Meyer carries around his plant. It’s a symbolic reminder that there are roots beneath the surface, and that, like plants, people need to be cared for.
“The way that Michael works is able to bring people into a conversation that would not otherwise be had,” said Nisha Sajnani, a thesis supervisor at Lesley University, a small college in Cambridge, Mass. Sajnani was Meyer’s supervisor for his master’s in expressive therapy in 2013.
Though he runs into some resistance, Meyer tries to make social justice relevant to students, especially through music. While working for Roca Inc., a justice organization for high-risk young adults in Massachusetts, he used hip-hop to help young men get back on their feet. Now at Robeson, Meyer is fundraising for drums to add to circle. The drums would be used as a way for students to nonverbally express what they feel.
Chicago Public Schools is using restorative justice more and more, with Chicago-based organizations such as Alternatives Inc. and Umoja Student Development Corp. providing training and practitioners.
Meyer, who earned his bachelor’s in music education at DePaul University in 2011, works with Alternatives, which collaborated with CPS to bring restorative justice into the CPS Student Code of Conduct.
Meyer is at Robeson in Englewood, a South Side neighborhood consistently ranked as one of the most dangerous in Chicago.
Robeson has low levels of student growth and some of the lowest student attainment rates in the city, according to its CPS Progress Report. The student population is 99.4 percent black and 99.7 percent low income. The school is on an 18-year probation and has a student body of 295 despite its 1,300 student capacity.
There is much uncertainty around the future of Robeson. Meyer said it brings up the question, to him as well as teachers, “Is this all for nothing?”
Since restorative justice started at Robeson in 2013, suspension rates went from 99.3 suspensions per every 100 students in 2012 to 70.5.
“The first day I was in school, teachers connected the dots,” Meyer said. Teachers have told him his work prevented violence and improved reading levels in their classes.
Meyer does not believe it’s all his work, but the work of community as a whole.
“I’m not bringing a lot to the table, but I’m setting the table,” he said.
Meyer finds it important to utilize other school faculty and community members to make circles work. One of the people he brings in is Robert Miller, a Robeson security guard.
The halls of Paul Robeson High School are filled with art.
“He knows the students, knows their families, where they’re coming from,” Meyer said.
But Miller believes Meyer takes on a lot of work.
“He’s got a hard job. He has to build relationships, form bonds,” Miller said.
And these bonds are not easy to make.
At Robeson, students are scared to even be outside after school hours, a big difference from Meyer’s high school experience in a suburb of Chicago. The track team practices in the halls rather than the track field outside.
Meyer just wants kids to see they matter and people do care about them.
“I hope they see they’re part of a global movement,” Meyer said, “And I hope to be standing there with them.”
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