Students call for a #RestorativeRestart

You can't just open the buildings, call back as many teachers, staff and students as you can find, and expect education to resume as if 2020 never happened. The past year has been disorienting, frightening, and grief-filled. Students want help to move beyond the trauma. 

Fortunately, there's some funding for re-opening and a lot of good ideas, many of which are in described a research brief, “Reimagine and Rebuild: Restarting school with equity at the center,” issued by a broad coalition of teachers, academics, funders, and youth organizations. 

In an article in EdSource, Taryn Ishida, executive director of Californians for Justice, described what the young people who worked on the brief brought to the project.

“In education, we talk a lot about students, but rarely do we talk with them. The brief was developed by working with Black, brown, Asian Pacific Islander and low-income students to lay out their blueprint for an education system that is built to support every student to thrive.”

These students know that they want to learn, but after the interruption of the pandemic, they need help and support from teachers and the education system at large.

Imagine being a first-year high school student. On campus with 3,000, maybe even 4,000 students. You’ve never met your teachers, let alone seen your fellow classmates in more than a year. You’re in a brand new school, the hallways are crowded, and you feel overwhelmed. What are you going to do?

Nobody thinks it is going to be easy to make up for the loss of a year of in-person instruction. But the young people are at work on a vision for a #RestorativeRestart.