Restorative Justice Is Wrecking Schools – My Opponent Helped Write the Rules.
School should be the safest place a kid goes every day. But for too many Nevada families right now, it isn't.
A big reason why is a discipline idea called “restorative justice.”
It sounds nice. It sounds like something a caring teacher would want.
But look closer, and you'll see a policy that trades real consequences for “feelings circles,” and leaves victims paying the price.
The Wall Street Journal just laid it out in painful detail.
Writer Tony Woodlief looked at school districts across the country that adopted restorative justice instead of suspensions and expulsions.
In Little Rock, Arkansas, one district paid a consulting group almost $1.5 million to run “restorative circles” instead of disciplining students.
The result? Student assaults on other students jumped 118 percent since the district's restorative justice rollout began, and assaults on teachers and staff climbed 151 percent.
It gets worse.
One school board learned that even though the district poured money into restorative justice, black male students, who make up 29 percent of enrollment, committed 54 percent of disciplinary infractions.
Instead of questioning whether the approach was failing, board members blamed teachers.
A school district in Pennsylvania told a similar story.
An internal survey found less than half the teachers said students treated each other with respect.
Forty percent of middle schoolers said they didn't feel safe at school.
More than half of elementary kids were scared to use the bathroom.
That's not restoration. That's a school system that gave up on discipline and called it progress.
Here in Nevada, we didn't just watch this trend from the sidelines. We put it into law.
Back in 2019, the Legislature passed Assembly Bill 168, which defined “restorative justice” in state law and required schools to try it before suspending or expelling students.
Then in 2021, lawmakers went further with Senate Bill 354, which ordered the Nevada Department of Education to build a statewide restorative justice framework for every public school in our state.
My opponent, Sen. Marilyn Dondero Loop, was in the Legislature for both votes.
She voted for the original bill in 2019.
Then in 2021, when the Senate voted to expand it into a full statewide mandate, she voted yes again, on a bill that passed the Senate on a near party-line vote.
She had the chance to say no to a program that trades discipline for “feelings” talk. She said yes, twice.
To be fair, supporters of restorative justice mean well. Nobody wants to see a nine-year-old permanently expelled from school over a bad day.
That's a real concern, and reasonable people can talk about how young kids should be disciplined.
But there's a big difference between showing mercy to a child and building a statewide system that makes it harder for teachers to keep order in the classroom.
Nevada families deserve schools where teachers can actually teach, and kids don't have to worry about the bully who never faces real consequences.
That means discipline that means something. Not a “calming corner” and a conversation about feelings while the kid who got hit still has to sit in class with the kid who hit him.
As a parent and as your next state senator, I believe school safety comes before political trends imported from Washington D.C. bureaucrats.
I'll work to give Nevada teachers and principals the tools they need to keep order in the classroom, and I'll push to roll back the parts of this law that put “feelings” ahead of “safety.”
Gov. Lombardo tried to fix this problem and roll back the worst parts of restorative justice.
Senate Democrats – including Dondero Loop – blocked him.
If Nevada families want a senator who'll finally get this right, they're going to need to send someone new to Carson City.
That's exactly what I intend to do.
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