Claudia Rojas had a regular routine she followed most days during the 2012-13 school year, the year she took a job as one of three principals at the newly opened Augustus F. Hawkins High School in South Los Angeles. She would get up in the morning, have breakfast and then cry her way to work.
Hawkins, as it’s known, is a part of the Los Angeles Unified School District’s Pilot School program, which was established in 2007 to relieve overcrowding at Belmont High School in central L.A. The idea behind the program, which now includes more than 30 schools, is to create small, innovative new schools that devote themselves to a specific mission.
Rojas, who had never been a principal before, was tapped to lead the Community Health Advocates School, which is one of three separate schools under the same roof at Hawkins High. The health advocates school incorporates research and advocacy for improved health outcomes in South L.A. neighborhoods into its curriculum. From the beginning, Rojas and the rest of the school’s founders agreed that restorative justice would be the foundation of the school’s discipline policy.
As a leadership team, we had bought into the theory of restorative justice,” said Tony Terry, who at the time was principal of Hawkins’ Responsible Indigenous Social Entrepreneurship School. “But as a collection of individuals we didn’t know how to do it.”
Four years later, a visitor to Hawkins can see how restorative justice has been woven into the fabric of the school. Each Friday, the vast majority of students participate in a community building circle during their advisory period. And harm circles are part of the process in 90 percent of discipline cases, Rojas said, adding that CHAS had just one suspension during the recent fall semester.
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