The School Meeting at Hudson Valley Sudbury School is undertaking a great experiment in how it protects safety, manages conflict, and maintains order on campus. While a few may grimace in consternation, we know that many more will shake with ecstasy and speak in tongues at this announcement: after 18 years, School Meeting has canceled the Judicial Committee (JC).
We tinkered with JC significantly over the last several years and made what many community members felt like were significant improvements, and we also created a tandem entity, the Restoration Committee, to support individuals navigating the system and especially with interpersonal conflict. The Sudbury JC system is fairer and more effective than most systems we are aware of, there have been stirring and generative moments in our JC, and many students have cut their leadership teeth clerking the committee. But this is not the place for singing its praises. If you asked alumni and alumni parents for complaints about the school, most would relate to JC. The primary emotional outcome of the system has been resentment; the energetic outcome, enervation. The community has not felt ownership of it, and in the absence of buy-in JC has haunted us as a boogey-man of institutional authority, dividing individuals from the collective and each other. Our community believes JC has facilitated the outsourcing of conflict resolution and undermined the cultivation of interpersonal skills among us. Rather than each individual sharing personally in the responsibility for managing boundaries at school, the entire responsibility has been claimed by a community institution. School Meeting (SM) wishes to experiment with processes which will support all of us as individuals to take more responsibility for our own experience at school and for maintaining the boundaries (“laws”) we all agree to when we sign enrollment or employment contracts. At the same time, SM wishes to reduce the total labor and especially paperwork associated with such boundary maintenance. For all JC’s bureaucratic brilliance, it relies heavily on a byzantine string of clerical tasks and hand-offs between elected officers – it’s too much work, especially when the results produce neither harmony nor truth in the community. Finally, despite impressive efforts by many individuals to make JC restorative, we have found that simply being called before a tribunal is experienced as punishment by many folks of all ages, and while the experience of punishment may have its place in a healthy community, minimizing it promotes authentic restoration. SM believes it can only redress this unfortunate (but understandable) cultural phenomenon by dissolving the tribunal and trying something else.
And so we did, beginning last week. We owe special thanks for this experiment to our School Meeting Chair, who has spearheaded it and fomented our energy around it since last spring. We also owe attribution to Summerhill School in England, which for a hundred years has used a system similar to what we are putting in place. Here are the spark notes version of how it will work:
SM has created a new Resolution Committee (RC) with the purpose of assisting School Meetings Members (SMM) in resolving conflicts, focused on boundary (“law”) violations.
Any SMM may fetch a Resolution Committee Member (“Resie”) at any time during the school day when they experience conflict or otherwise have a complaint about a potential boundary violation. Resies, who are elected by SM and subsequently trained by the RC Clerk, will respond immediately by listening, investigating, potentially facilitating conversation, and encouraging and assisting towards a resolution all parties are satisfied with. Issues may be resolved by conversation itself, and/or they may be resolved by further actions(s). Resies do not have any coercive power to define what resolution looks like in any particular case, but if they are not satisfied that genuine resolution has occurred, they may send the issue to SM for its consideration, and SM does retain coercive power to impose what it considers a reasonable outcome, if it comes to that. For that matter, if the aggrieved party or the party which has crossed a boundary does not believe the initial meeting with a Resie produced a genuine resolution, they may also send the issue to the meeting.
SM’s hope is that this system, created as it is by this community, will get the buy-in and ownership any system requires to succeed. So far, the chances look good: at the mandatory meeting at which this change was approved, there was almost no objection raised by SMM, and there is excitement around it. An additional intention in trying this is that our entire community will, bit by bit, become expert in navigating, negotiating, and maintaining boundaries. We also hope that because this system will be so easy to access, it will be more widely used than JC. And – less paperwork!
I appreciate very much that our School Meeting is flexible, alive, and bold enough to make such a significant change, and is ernest enough to continually seek the best way to create a vibrant community of connected, autonomous individuals free to be who they are and develop naturally, held by attentive community. There will be a steep learning curve, and lots of kinks to straighten, and – perhaps we will fail! I don’t think so, though. We’ll be reporting back soon – thank you for reading, and for your support!