Conflict Resolution Education - National Criminal Justice Reference ...

say, “My dad says if somebody hits me, I can hit
them back.” By incorporating parents into the
whole-school project, schools provide youth and
parents with effective alternatives for dealing with
conflicts peacefully on school grounds and at home.
Parents are encouraged to become involved in a
variety of ways. They can begin by creating a core
committee—a planning and implementation team
comprising teachers, counselors, administrators,
students, and parents. Based on the needs of the
school, the committee develops an action plan and
timeline and oversees the project. Depending on
the parents’ time and availability, they can help by
participating in outreach and publicity, training
new student mediators, taking referrals, scheduling
mediation sessions, keeping records, facilitating
biweekly student mediator meetings, following up
cases, and fundraising. Parents can perform some
functions with limited training, but certain duties,
such as training conflict managers and facilitating
biweekly meetings, require intensive training. Parents
may join teachers in a 2-day mediation training
or attend a series of workshops introducing them to
effective family communication and problem-solving
skills for use in the home. Some schools create a
parent support group to discuss concerns and participate
in ongoing skills training and practice.
Parents can assist schools in securing support for
a whole-school conflict resolution project by presenting
information at parent-teacher association
meetings, student and/or parent assemblies, staff
meetings, town meetings, and students’ classes. A
well-informed parent group also serves as an important
referral source. It can refer school-related
conflicts to the peer mediation program and familyand
community-related disputes to a community
mediation program. CBP provides free outreach
presentations to parent groups on methods for
referring cases to the program.
Conflict resolution is what I need and I won’t
quit until all my friends know about it.
Student, Funderburg Youth Program
59
The use of conflict management skills by
everyone in our school community is the
key component of our district’s efforts to
become a multicultural organization.
School superintendent,
Ann Arbor, Michigan
Partnerships Between School and Community
Mediation Programs. Partnerships between schoolbased
mediation programs and their communitybased
counterparts strengthen and benefit both
programs. The Community Board of San Francisco
and the San Francisco Unified School District foster
their strong relationship by using the following
strategies:
Sharing Mediators. Youth as young as age 14 are
trained to become community mediators. If students
are already trained as peer mediators in schools,
they only need to participate in an orientation session
to join the pool of community mediator volunteers.
Such student mediator “sharing” provides
important additional resources for the community
mediation program. The youth involved learn valuable
lessons about effective citizenry and advanced
conflict resolution skills.
Cross-Referral System. Even if a school has no
peer mediation program, educators can benefit
from understanding the sorts of disputes that might
be referred to community mediation programs.
These include serious incidents involving nonschool
youth or a range of parent, educator, and community
issues. Certain complex disputes may benefit
from both school-based and community-based
mediation sessions. Volunteer community mediators
and “shared” student peer mediators perform outreach
to schools by distributing fliers and making
presentations.
Parent-Child Mediation. Youth who may be having
attendance or behavioral problems can benefit from
a parent-child mediation session from the community
mediation program. This service is especially
useful for youth who are making the transition from
special schools that deal with behavioral difficulties