Schools Enlist Student Mediators to Stem Violence

As adolescent crises go, theirs was a good one.

The two girls, eighth-graders at Garvey Intermediate School in Rosemead, had been the best of friends. But one of the girls invited a boy to the winter dance whom the other girl had liked for months. The news devastated her friend, releasing a sea of tears and recriminations that neither knew how to cross.

Such conflicts have been known to snowball and lead to name-calling, fistfights and a visit to the principal’s office. But instead, these girls were talking it over in a soundproof room, steered delicately through the emotional morass not by the principal but by two other eighth-graders.

Called “conflict managers,” the student counselors had undergone several weeks of training on mediating disputes. With outlines of the process in front of them, they sat the girls down at opposite ends of a long table and calmly explained the ground rules--tell the truth, don’t name-call or interrupt, and don’t get physical.

Then the mediators asked each girl what had happened and how she felt about it--”Do you feel she betrayed your trust? Why do you feel bad?”--and patiently led them through tears to resolution.

Pressed by the need to combat rising violence on campus, schools such as Garvey are trying to turn students into playground peacemakers. And agencies offering dispute-resolution training to schools say they are getting more requests for help than they can handle.

Schools are still more likely to suspend students for fighting than send them to mediation, according to a 1994 survey by the National School Boards Assn. However, 61% of the 720 schools responding said they have begun to teach conflict resolution classes or train students to arbitrate disputes.

In a school as ethnically diverse as Garvey--its enrollment is 53% Asian and 42% Latino, and the student body speaks 15 languages--”empowering” youths to solve their own conflicts without violence is seen as crucial to bridging the cultural gaps that often feed campus tensions.

In other schools across the country using Garvey’s approach--called peer mediation--the suspension rate has dropped dramatically, a sign, administrators say, that the tactics help avoid fights.

In the Oakland school district, for example, the suspension rate fell 30% to 40% on most campuses that offered conflict resolution courses and mediation training for students and staff.

“We’ve got less fights now,” said Randy Traylor, 14, one of 31 student mediators at Calvin Simmons Junior High School in East Oakland, where some of the best mediators are gang members. “We’re trying to say, ‘If you got a problem, you can come to us and we’ll help you out. You don’t have to turn your fist up and hurt somebody.’ ”

A number of surveys suggest the scope of the school violence problem. In a nationwide study released last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, 42% of high school students reported that they had been in at least one physical fight in the preceding 12 months. Almost one-fourth of students said they had carried a weapon at least once during the preceding month, and 12% said they had brought a weapon to school.

But despite pressure to reverse the trend toward violence, peer mediation has encountered skepticism, misunderstanding and outright rejection from parents in some communities.

In Dallas recently, a student was kept out of the mediation training program because his fundamentalist Christian parents disapproved of the nonjudgmental thrust of mediation, believing that schools should punish wrongdoers and provide moral education.

The Rev. Lou Sheldon, who heads the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition and lobbies Congress on conservative Christian issues, said his organization has received complaints from parents about peer mediation. “This is a Band-Aid on a major injury,” he said. “We need strong discipline in public schools. That [is what] we have lacked.”

In California, however, interest in peer mediation is growing, said Kathy Grant, executive director of the 400-member California Assn. of Peer Programs. Five years ago, schools seemed more interested in training students to educate their peers about AIDS and drug abuse.

Now, she said, “violence prevention is such a big issue that conflict mediation is gaining.” She estimated that about 65% of the state’s 2,000 middle and high schools have adopted some form of peer help, either for tutoring, counseling or resolving disputes.

The peer mediation process is modeled on techniques long used to resolve labor disputes and international conflicts.

Mediators first introduce themselves to the warring parties, assure them that the session will be confidential and ask them to abide by simple ground rules, such as not interrupting or fighting.

Then the mediators give each side the chance to describe what happened, helping them make their points in a non-accusatory way (“I felt hurt . . .” instead of “You made me cry . . .”). They make a list of the most important issues and ask the students to discuss them.

Finally, they ask each student what they would do differently if the same situation were to arise again, and help them find a mutually satisfying solution.

In many schools--particularly on elementary campuses--students roam the playground in brightly colored T-shirts identifying them as mediators, available to resolve problems on the spot.

In junior and senior high schools, mediators are called in when trouble arises or are stationed during their free periods in a room set aside for conflict resolution.

Teachers or other staff members generally refer cases to mediation, although at schools with well-established programs, students often seek out mediation themselves. Cases involving physical violence, reportable crimes such as sexual abuse, or other situations requiring professional intervention are handled by the adult counseling staff.

The types of incidents typically handled by peer mediators include name-calling and shoving, the “he-said, she-said” disagreements that routinely fill up the principal’s office.

One of the selling points for peer mediation is that it can help free adult counselors and administrators to concentrate on the most serious discipline cases. At San Gabriel High School, for example, a staff of eight counselors serves 2,500 students--a ratio of more than 300 to 1. But this year the school has 120 students in training to handle a variety of tasks, from one-on-one counseling to crisis intervention and mediation.

“Peer counselors are a real asset, and very cost-effective,” said San Gabriel High counselor Michael Donnelly, whose 15-year-old Peer Resources program is one of the oldest and most comprehensive in the country.

Patrick Tolan, co-director of a massive youth violence prevention project at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said most conflict resolution programs fall into one of two basic categories.

In one approach, all students in a school are taught about alternatives to aggression, including what Tolan calls “perspective thinking”--understanding what the other side in a conflict is saying and what the consequences of various reactions to the problem would be. This may be offered as an elective and could include role-playing nonviolent problem-solving methods, such as mediation. Ideally, the faculty and staff also receive the instruction.

Peer mediation, on the other hand, focuses on a select group of students, often school leaders, who are given training and the opportunity to arbitrate their peers’ disputes.

Tolan said there is little hard evidence that either approach is particularly effective. But Melinda Smith, executive director of the New Mexico Center for Dispute Resolution in Albuquerque, said there is some research suggesting that experience mediating disputes helps students stay out of trouble.

The center found that youths in the state’s juvenile corrections system who used their mediation skills had fewer disciplinary referrals. The recidivism rates showed similar results: Of the trained mediators, 28% were rearrested within six months of their release, compared to 33% who took conflict resolution classes and 35% who received no mediation education.

“The mediators benefit the most because they get to use the skills,” Smith said.

At Garvey, the peer mediation program, officially launched last month, was the product of a partnership with Claremont’s Pitzer College, which brought in experts, including a professional mediator, and 12 Pitzer students to serve as role models.

In exchange, the college students, who were enrolled in a course called “Roots of Social Conflict in Schools and Communities,” gained firsthand experience in some of the issues they would be studying, such as the consequences of demographic change. Garvey was a perfect laboratory.

The collaboration was spurred by Principal Ted Huling’s concern that racial and ethnic issues brought to the fore by the passage of Proposition 187 were fueling unrest on the 1,000-student San Gabriel Valley campus.

“Kids began to split between those perceived as American-born and those new immigrants who might not be documented,” he said. “Kids were showing less than appreciation of each other’s culture.”

Huling got in touch with Pitzer’s Conflict Resolution Studies Center, which spent three months teaching 27 Garvey seventh- and eighth-graders the principles of mediation, including a look at ethnic stereotyping and how prejudice can lead to violence.

“We basically learned how to work together on little problems like misunderstandings and big problems like racism,” said Garvey student Jackson Wong, 13.

On a rainy morning recently, Jackson and fellow mediator Karla Armendariz, also 13, tried out their new skills. Program coordinator Bea Mercado chose them to mediate the dispute between the two eighth-grade girls.

The case was a good one for mediation, Mercado said. Without a resolution, “the friendship could dissolve or lead to other problems [like] a division among their friends,” she said.

And so, in a slightly dingy room down the hall from the principal’s office, it began. (The girls’ names have been changed for this article.)

May, a giggly Vietnamese girl with long black hair, described the problem. “I like this guy--for six months. She knows him. She asked him to the dance.”

“So how do you feel about that?” Karla asked gently.

“I feel . . . really hurt,” May said. Her voice choked and tears rolled down her face.

Her friend Carrie tried to explain. “I know she liked him. I didn’t know it would cause that,” she said softly. If May told her to break the date, Carrie said, she would.

But May did not want Carrie to break the date, and Carrie’s apologizing “a million times” would not ease her pain or sense of betrayal. Still, both girls said they wanted to remain friends.

So Karla, feeling pressed to make some progress, asked if they thought they could just forget the incident and resume their friendship.

Although her suggestion came close to offering advice--a no-no--it seemed to break the logjam.

May wiped her tears. “Gosh,” she laughed, “it’s only a guy.”