The essence of Restorative Practices rests on two tenets:

1. It’s ALL about RELATIONSHIP and COMMUNITY; and
2. No matter how good we are at developing positive connections, things will occasionally go wrong; so the next most important tenet asks, “How do we make things go right after they have gone wrong?”

Applicable Restorative Practices principles include helping people  to:

• Prioritize connectedness as leverage for all other goals and outcomes;
• Stimulate connected relationships and a sense of belonging, voice and agency;
• Facilitate meaningful conversations where listening for understanding is key;
• Learn, teach and practice non-violent communication;
• Improve social and emotional well-being for all;
• Promote overall safety and health of individuals within groups of all kinds;
• Encourage more rewards and recognition for positive and prosocial behavior;
• Understand the impact of behavior by each individual, and improve behavior so collective outcomes are better;
• Do what it takes to repair any harm done and make things right wherever possible; and
• Enhance professional growth and development of those responsible for these outcomes.

• Generations of experience and significant research both clearly show that the school environment is often the most empowering environment that young people will encounter as they develop and mature.  It is also clear that schools are part of a larger community, and the more various community members engage in best practices for reaching academic and other goals, building life and learning skills, and promoting social and emotional learning, the more prepared we all will be to engage an ever-changing and challenging world.

  Schools and communities must be characterized by a safe and empowering culture and climate.  Our collectives must be places where people WANT to be and where they feel that their experience is relevant, useful, fulfilling and empowering.

  Increasing devotion to these principles and practices, makes a feeling of connectedness and belonging, with high expectations and high support the foundation of a more inclusive and safer environment. Key to creating places where everyone feels welcomed and a part of the fabric of groups of which they are a part are behaviors such as  caring, listening, encouraging, bearing witness to human suffering, and  instilling hope.

  Altogether, these approaches build healthier relationships, decrease violence and aggression, reduce exclusions from society, enhance various successes, and promote social and emotional learning. Patience, consistency, and modeling the behaviors we want to see are the strategies which work.  The more we all commit to restorative practices, the more we build a true experience of community.

To have the basics of  a restorative practices Attitude at your command, this expression from the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) works, and should be familiar to you:

“People (adults and children) are happier  and more likely to make positive change  when those in authority do things WITH them rather than  TO them or FOR them, [or NOT at all.]

Then, for the core of the restorative  Attitude, add two more concepts:

• It’s ALL about RELATIONSHIPS! (The primary focus of RP)
• No matter how well we develop relationships, sometimes, things will go wrong and there’s a need to make things go right again. (The secondary focus of RP)

Once we commit to the Attitude of RP, we have won  more than half the battle toward creating stronger communities. Then, only two steps are left: developing our Skills and increasing supporting Knowledge.

Delivering restorative practices with fidelity is always about these three things: Attitude, Skills, and Knowledge.

Key Skills for building strong relationships and powerful communities include active listening, empathy, effective communication, emotional intelligence, and conflict resolution – tempered with, reliability, vulnerability, mutual respect, trust and collaboration above competition within groups. 

There is a lot to KNOW about RESTORATIVE PRACTICES, but to begin, Knowledge supports the paradigm of highly prioritized, proactive and concerted efforts to build relationships and community where strong supportive connections create empathy, belonging, and safety to leverage better achievement of intended mutual goals. It’s also about reactive strategies to repair the harm or impact of conflict and achieve positive behavioral changes through structured dialogue, understanding, and accountability rather than punishment.

The story of the Center for Restorative Communities begins in approximately 2011 when the two founders had an opportunity, first, to receive training in mediation through an organization called the Kansas institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (KIPCOR) based at Bethel College in Newton, Kansas. From there, they were encouraged to pursue opportunities to promote a paradigm… a framework ... way of viewing the world called Restorative Practices (RP).

The leaders who offered this invitation recognized that founders Dr. Janet Fox-Peterson and Rob Simon were both engaged in education and poised to help schools develop a focus on a way of being that prioritized building relationships as a point of leverage for all other outcomes in school settings. It was clear to all of them (as it is to others) that schools were a primary milieu for establishing these sensibilities, and also that Jan and Rob were more qualified to pursue this aim than the lawyers, Gary Flory and Kirsten Zerger who were promoting Restorative Practices by offering training of facilitators.

In particular, their campaign was motivated by recognizing disparities in the application of in-school and out-of-school suspension practices and other forms of punitive school disciplinary measures, the documented prevalent existence of what is known by many as the “school to prison pipeline,” and an obvious difficulty educators have in responding to misbehavior among students, who often arrive at school from a background of trauma know as adverse childhood experiences (ACES) ...and more. Gary and Kirsten were determined to be catalysts for a proactive approach to reversing these developments ... a process which they knew was growing in acceptance and reputation all over the world.  They also knew that this framework was generations old among indigenous peoples world-wide, and thus far beyond theoretical.

As a result of their prodding, Jan – despite her full-time position as a school psychologist for the Wichita Public Schools launched a book study with two handbooks published by the International Institute for Restorative Practices (IIRP) with what she liked to call “the coalition of the willing” among her colleagues at Wichita West High School.

Those folks who engaged in the book study saw the value of trying out some of the proven approaches to restorative practices, and got the ball rolling. Later, Jan was in the right place at the right time to have a conversation with Kent Reed of the Kansas State Department of Education who provided an opportunity for writing a grant application to continue the work that was starting at West High School in earnest.

With that opportunity, Jan, and Rob, and Gary Flory sat at a table and wrote an initial grant which was funded and also renewed to provide structured opportunities for developing restorative practices as a demonstration model they hoped would get the attention of upper tier leadership in the school district.

The rest, as they say, is history.  Once the unfolding process was boosted by grant funding, which provided training, and materials, and other human and concrete resources, the paradigm started to prove itself in practice and the unfolding continued to expand from those humble beginnings to a place where the Wichita Public Schools are now engaged fully in becoming a school district defined by the restorative approach.

Jan and Rob began innovating and developing broad-based and creative curricula almost from the beginning and expanded their network to include many other resources, individuals, organizations, and entities that are now more fully coalescing into the Center for Restorative Communities (CRC). The CRC website is a NEW hub as of 2026 –  having met with an untimely delay thanks to COVID, Jan’s retirement from school psychologist work, and Rob’s primary focus on work to cement their legacy in the Wichita schools over the last two years.  Our hope, though, is that CRC will now be in the thick of restorative work for a long time to come.