I just have to tell you about the phone calls that Jeanna Bolton, Principal of Riverside High School in Tasmania, started receiving from parents.
It’s not the call you’re imagining. Not the “I want to know why my child got that consequence” call, and nor is it the “I’d like to speak to someone about what happened to my little cherub today” call. We all know those calls too well.
This was different. Parents were calling Jeanna to request that the school conduct a restorative conversation with their child.
That’s just the first bit that I love. They’re not demanding or insisting; they’re requesting. They’ve seen what these conversations do for their kids, and when something difficult came up at home, their instinct was to pick up the phone and ask the school for a hand.
On today’s adversarial and transactional home-school landscape this stands out. A parent, with a problem, calling a school and saying – I trust what you do. Can you do it for my child?
That’s not a home-school relationship built on fear or damage control. That’s true expertise being authentically recognised. That’s a community that has watched a school do something consistently well, over time, and decided to lean into it rather than reject it.
Jeanna and the team at Riverside have been doing the slow, unglamorous work of building a genuinely restorative culture – student to staff, staff to staff, staff to parent – everyone. They put together a ‘Working Restoratively’ one-pager and shared it with their families and on social media, not as a marketing exercise but as a frank explanation of how they operate. It’s a promise of practice that they can keep, and kept promises are the best way to build trust.
But the reach beyond their community surprised them too. Three neighbouring schools have since come in to visit, wanting to understand what Riverside is doing and exploring the replication possibilities.
Riverside’s suspensions are down, their attendance is up and their academic expectations are being exceeded. And parents are calling to ask for help instead to assign blame. I can see why their neighbours are peering over the fence.
I’ve spent a long time arguing that schools should position themselves as experts – not as friends – to parents. Parents should not view us as service providers, but as professionals with hard-earned knowledge about how young people grow and what they truly need. That positioning only works if the expertise is real and the results back it up. Riverside is the proof of concept.
Too many schools inherit a parent culture and then manage it. Jeanna’s school changed theirs. That’s a different and considerably harder thing to do, and it deserves to be celebrated.
Keep fighting that good fight,
P.S. My next online workshop, The Bullying Myth, is on Tuesday 27 October at 2.00pm AEDT.
We’ll look at what schools getting better results with bullying are doing differently, the cultural conditions you can influence, and practical ways to give bullying less room to grow in your school.
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