The Progress Report: San Diego Unified Leaders Expand Restorative Discipline Policy As Funding Dips

By Jakob McWhinney, the Voice of San Diego

July 9, 2025

Inequities in discipline have long been a reality in schools. Poor, minority and disabled students have often experienced suspension and expulsion rates much higher than their counterparts. For many of those students, that meant school didn’t put them on a path to receive an education, but a fast track toward the criminal justice system.

Discipline at San Diego Unified has reflected those trends. In past years, Black students have been four times more likely than White students to be suspended or detained by district police.

But how best to address those inequities has been elusive. In the mid-aughts a new school of thinking about discipline began to emerge. It was called restorative justice and focused more on repairing the harms than the punitive disciplinary methods of the past.

In 2020, San Diego Unified’s board passed its first restorative justice policy, and despite the initiative’s admirable intentions, it has had some mixed results. The number of students being disciplined has dropped, but stakeholders have raised concerns that half-baked policies have led to uneven implementation across the district. The perception that restorative discipline policies produce lax punishments has also inspired pushback by some community members.

Earlier this week, San Diego Unified officials approved a new policy that fleshes out many of the blank spots that made implementation so difficult. But even as that policy is inspiring new confidence in the initiative, a grant that funded key positions that have led the charge on restorative justice on campuses has run out.

San Diego Unified officials declared itself a restorative justice district all the way back in 2014, but little was done to actually make that a reality. Then in 2017, the district created a department to begin to integrate restorative justice strategies into the district’s practices. Then, in the nationwide furor following the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020, district leaders finally passed a restorative justice policy.

In many ways, those policies made a lot of sense. Research has long shown that disciplinary strategies like suspension and expulsion can often make student behavior worse. Restorative justice strategies on the other hand can have a powerful impact.. Research shows they improve student behavior, reduce suspension and expulsion rates and even reduce arrest rates.

The restorative justice approach tends to respond to misbehavior with dialogue rather than suspensions. The strategies also focus on creating healthy communities to discourage bad behavior.

“It’s really about prevention through belonging, building those communities where our students want to be and where they feel invested in taking care of one another and themselves,” said Ebonee Weathers, San Diego Unified’s director of equity and belonging.

But the strategies haven’t been all sunshine and butterflies. Sweeping changes like restorative justice initiatives are only as effective as their implementation, and when implemented poorly can even lead to more violent classrooms. The way California schools have implemented restorative justice has been mixed bag and so have the results.

San Diego Unified’s 2020 policy explicitly sought to “eliminate racist discipline practices and policies by acknowledging and dismantling systemic structures that contribute to any form of racism or racist outcomes.”

The policy instituted a new response matrix that guided teachers and administrators about how best to respond to various levels of student misbehavior. It also deemphasized the role suspensions and expulsions should play in student discipline, focusing instead on keeping students in class. As part of that effort, it counseled administrators to “exhaust all site interventions,” prior to issuing suspensions to students.

The district also began offering more regular trainings in restorative practices to employees. That’s how Renee Thomas, a teacher at San Diego Unified’s Marston Middle, first came into contact with the approach.

Thomas was initially skeptical of restorative justice. She felt like the approach stripped accountability from students and could potentially make disciplinary problems even worse. One training session changed her mind.

“Restorative justice has so much potential,” Thomas said. “It creates community in the classroom. It creates community on campus.”

Over the past couple of years, she’s leaned into the practices and said they’ve transformed her classroom. Not only have they helped build trust and respect with her students, they’ve helped ensure behaviors aren’t repeated.

Thomas’ initial understanding of restorative justice is a common misconception, said Weathers. She’s led much of the district’s restorative justice work over the past couple of years.

“Restorative practices are not a removal of consequences, but really an effort to focus consequences, on accountability, on community and ensuring that that students are safe while also understanding behavior and learning tools so that we don’t see the behaviors repeated over time,” Weathers said.

The policy also seems to have had some results. Expulsions and suspension rates have continued to dip from highs in the mid-aughts. But while the policy change eased the district’s disproportionate discipline figures, they didn’t erase them.

Black students, for example, are still nearly four times more likely to be suspended than White students. And suspension rates for Black students with disabilities were so disproportionate during the 2022 school year that the district was put under monitoring by the California Department of Education.

But even given the embrace by some at the district, the initiative also quickly became a lightning rod. Many parents perceived the policy as eliminating consequences for misbehavior altogether and worried that it may make misbehavior even worse.

When crafting the policy passed by San Diego Unified’s board this week, Weathers said the main goal was to create something easy to use that gives teachers more tools in their toolkits. The new policy is nearly twice the length of the old one but features hundreds of links to additional resources for teachers. Much of the policy also mimics requirements laid out in California’s education code.

Many of these changes are responses to the feedback officials have received over the past five years. For example, district officials say the new policy places a greater emphasis on progressive discipline, where punishments get more severe based on the severity and frequency of the behavior. Consequences have also been increased, officials note, like the addition of a category of behaviors for which expulsions are voluntary.

Like the previous policy, this new one separates behaviors into separate categories depending on severity. Each behavior has a recommended response. The responses to some behaviors, like academic dishonesty, top out at classroom interventions that could include having students journal or role play despite how many times they’re repeated. Others, like domestic violence or serious sexual harassment, could result in expulsion after the second offense.

During Wednesday’s meeting, San Diego Unified Board President Cody Petterson said that change was especially important. When he joined the board, one of the biggest problems with the policy was unclear instruction as to what administrators should do when behaviors accumulated, he said.

“We would see it in closed session where you would have 5 years of the same behavior and parents are frustrated, other students are frustrated,” Petterson said. “Before, if you didn’t do the big five, it was just groundhog day,” he said, referring the group of five behaviors that California law requires students be expelled for, like committing a sexual assault or possessing an explosive.

But even with the sleek new policy, there’s less funding for restorative justice. Overall, during the 2024-25 school year, the district spent $1,484,940 on the restorative justice initiative. Next year, the district is spending $904,569 on the initiative. A big part of that dip is because a $2.1 million state grant for restorative discipline has been spent down.

More Policy, Less Funding

That grant money was used to hire teachers who led restorative work on the ground, a position the district called restorative community leads. Over the past two years, the funding ensured each middle school had one teacher who could spend two periods a day doing restorative justice work. At high schools, the leads were given one period a day.

The expiration of the grant means those positions are going away.

School sites can use discretionary funds to pay for that role, but many haven’t been able to make it pencil it out. That’s the case for Martson Middle, where Thomas served as the restorative community lead. She’s worried the elimination of those positions is a big step back.

“In order for the program to perform at its potential, we need those positions,” Thomas said. “I think it’s just not fully understanding what the impact of those roles are.”

The new policy, which features hundreds of potential behaviors and even more interventions, may be difficult for each teacher to master without a specified site lead. Weathers, though, said she thinks the investments the district has made into staff training in restorative policies will go a long way toward closing that gap. She also said the refinements made to the policy will make a difference.

“I think it’s going to make for a really smooth implementation process, as opposed to just sort of dropping a really long, convoluted document onto a group of people,” Weathers said.

But Kyle Weinberg, the president of the union that represents San Diego Unified teachers, echoed Thomas’ view. Weinberg and the union fully support restorative justice, but he thinks the elimination of the positions will inevitably mean implementation is more piecemeal. It will also require teachers to exert superhuman effort to keep the strategies and structures developed over the past couple of years in place, he said.

“We’re going back to what it was before the pandemic, when we said we were a restorative district but we were not putting the resources in place to be able to do that effectively,” Weinberg said. “At the majority of schools, the capacity isn’t there to do more with less.”

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