Author: Loyola SMHAPP Certificate Students

Does Restorative Justice (RJ) work? Or better yet, to the extent that RJ does work in K-12 schools, how would we even know? Is it because the program that is offered at our professional development day claims to be “evidence-based,” or because we know that it is? And even more directly, how would we figure out if something is evidence-based, and where would we start in looking for that evidence? These are the questions I asked the 4th cohort of the Loyola School Mental Health Advanced Practice Program (SMHAPP) students. As part of the “EBP in School Mental Health”hey were asked to examine these questions around RJ and school violence prevention programs, and to create a Research Brief (RB) that described the evidence for a study that looked at RJ. Several of the students also wrote short descriptions of what they found, why they chose that specific article, and what they learned from the SMHAPP EBP class. What follows are their RBs, and some selected references from the articles they drew from.