Samina Hadi-Tabassum was a 21-year-old first-year teacher fresh out of college when a student brought a knife into the classroom, she recalls.
“He wasn’t there to kill anyone or hurt anyone, but according to the code of conduct, this was zero tolerance,” she said. “So we measured the knife and it was more than two inches, which was enough for him to get expelled. I never saw him again and I don’t know what happened to him.”
Hadi-Tabassum, now an education professor at Dominican University in River Forest who works extensively with West Side youth, said that the current methods of policing students, rather than guiding them, has only produced more cases of disappeared students and futures lost to the street—like the one she lost decades ago.
“How can we remediate our problems without having to rely on the police so much?” she asks.
Recently, that question has been reverberating in Oak Park as well. Last December, the OPRF school board convened a retreat to evaluate the district’s disciplinary system—which many feel is rife with racial inequities and biases similar to the ones Hadi-Tabassum found during her research.
“I’m working on a study right now of teacher biases and how they look at students of color,” she said. “I’ll show a picture of two white males wrestling on the floor and they’ll think this is just playful. Then they’ll see two black males and the same scenario turns violent.”
There are echoes of Hadi-Tabassum’s findings in the testimony of 16-year-old OPRF junior Ieva Ambraziejus, who recounted her experiences at last December’s retreat, held at the Oak Park Public Library, before an audience of staff members and administrators.
“One thing I see about discipline is that I can be walking through the halls without ID, and I’ll be walking with black friends and my black friends will get stopped and asked ‘Where’s your ID? Put your ID on.’ But for me, I can just walk past without getting anything said to me,” Ambraziejus said during testimony that was reported by Wednesday Journal.
At a Jan. 29, D200 board meeting, Richard Gray, one of the facilitators of that December retreat, reported to the board some of his findings.
Gray, a co-director of community organization and engagement with the Annenberg Institute for School Reform in New York, reported on what many students consider to be “two schools within OPRF High School.”
In a memo of recommendations, Gray suggested the board amend or revise its “current code of conduct using restorative justice principles and practices” and to consider “renaming it the ‘Code of Respect and Conduct.'”
In addition, he advocated for the more extensive implementation of peace circles, a practice that D200 board candidate Michelle Mbekeani-Wiley, a member of Oak Park’s Community Relations Commission, has been instrumental in implementing in the high school.
In fact, several D200 board candidates—namely Sara Dixon Spivy, Mbekeani and Jennifer Cassell—have placed the racially tinged issues of disciplinary reform, restorative justice and the academic achievement gap squarely in the center of their campaign platforms—an indication that Gray’s memo may only be the beginning of a more robust experimentation with measures, such as peace circles, that might mitigate the effects of racial inequity at OPRF.
Hadi-Tabassum explained that restorative justice is centered less on criminalizing and policing troubling behavior than on understanding it and refocusing it in a way that is empathetic and sensitive to cultural needs.
“It’s what we’ve been doing since the beginning of human history,” she said. “I worked with a 14-year-old in Austin who broke into someone’s house and got caught by police. Instead of taking him to 26th and California, they took him back to his high school and convened a circle that included his parents, teachers—even the person he robbed. This is just a better way of meting out justice, because when kids get into that prison system, they can’t get out of it.”