“Moderate” Virginia governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill on Monday requiring public schools to consider “restorative disciplinary practices” like “peer mediation” or a “restorative circle” before suspending or expelling students, the Free Beacon’s Peter Hasson reports. The move follows controversial attempts to swap “exclusionary discipline”—what normal people call “discipline”—with “restorative justice” in liberal strongholds like New York City and Portland. It’s a far cry from the affordability-focused agenda on which the “centrist” Spanberger campaigned.
The bill states that “no public elementary or secondary school student shall be suspended, expelled, or excluded from attendance at school unless the school first considers at least one evidence-based restorative disciplinary practice.” Examples include “mentoring,” “a peer jury,” “peer mediation,” “a restorative circle,” and “any other disciplinary practice” that “provides solutions tailored to students’ cultures” and “includes community members reflecting the cultural and demographic diversity of the school community.” Though the bill does not detail how to organize a “restorative circle,” a guide from the left-wing Center for Justice Innovation says such circles are “rooted in centuries-old indigenous practices” and include an “opening ceremony” like a “breathing exercise” before “passing around an object that serves as the talking piece” which “gives the speaker a chance to share openly and uninterrupted.”
You won’t believe this, but after New York City, under former mayor Bill de Blasio, allocated millions of dollars toward “restorative justice” initiatives in schools, chronic absenteeism among city students rose to 34.8 percent in 2022-23 from 26.5 percent in 2018-19, while the number of incidents that required a response from the New York Police Department’s school safety division rose to 4,120 in the first quarter of 2025 from 1,200 in the first quarter of 2016. High-profile incidents exposing the pitfalls of the policy also emerged: In one case, a Jewish high school teacher in Brooklyn sued her district after students who subjected her to Nazi salutes and threats were sent to a “meditation room” rather than suspended.
Hellbound and Down 