Boosting community involvement and supportive school environments

Making sure students feel welcomed and valued is essential for their safety, well-being, and academic success — and so is engaging families and communities in their children’s education.

Setting our students up to succeed means standardizing evidence-based restorative disciplinary practices and investing in restorative schools that repair harm and build belonging. Lawmakers should expand access to care coordination and wraparound services — including school-based health supports, culturally relevant afterschool programs, and community schools that connect families to resources. We’re working to ensure schools have the infrastructure, funding, and staffing needed to address root causes rather than punish symptoms. We’re building public schools that promote healing, accountability, and restoration — not harm — where every student can learn, grow, and thrive.

Overview:

Resolving conflict through restorative practices improves academic outcomes for all students, teaches socioemotional skills, and strengthens the overall school climate for staff and students.
Expanding access to physical, mental, and behavioral health supports ensures schools address the root causes of behavior — providing care, not punishment, when students need help.
Investing in family and community-based care, in-school and out-of-school partnerships, and sustained family and community engagement creates a unified approach to keep students covered, connected, and supported.
These investments reduce Medicaid and SNAP churn, foster community-based youth violence prevention, and help schools maintain the essential funding needed to sustain partnerships that promote healing and belonging.

Restorative Practices

An investment in creating positive school climates is an investment in the success and safety of our students. Punitive and exclusionary discipline processes do long-term harm to students by reducing classroom time and creating a negative learning and teaching environment. Evidence is clear that these policies are disproportionately utilized against students of color and students with disabilities:

59,090 in-school and 65,060 out-of-school suspensions were issued in 2022–23. 65% of suspensions stemmed from non-violent infractions like defiance, minor physical altercation, or disruption.
During the 2022–2023 school year, Black students made up only about 22% of Virginia’s students but received 42% of all suspensions and law enforcement referrals
During the 2022-2023 school year in Virginia, students with disabilities received approximately 24% of all referrals to local law enforcement for school-based infractions while they represent approximately 13% of K-12 enrollment
Divisions such as Brunswick County, Franklin City, Amelia County, and Lancaster County show the highest exclusionary discipline rates for students with disabilities, approaching or exceeding 40%.

These disparities erode trust, disrupt learning, and widen achievement gaps. Restorative approaches, on the other hand, help schools strengthen safety, belonging, and accountability—without pushing students out of the classroom.

Research has shown that restorative practices are a way to increase student achievement, reduce mental health challenges, build community and teach students the strategies to resolve conflict. Restorative practices are evidence-based approaches that repair harm, build relationships, and maintain accountability through interventions such as community conferencing or peer mediation, mentoring or peer jury programs, restorative circles or community service initiatives, preventive or post-conflict resolution programs.

Restorative practices are designed to prioritize students’ safety by creating environments where they feel welcome and supported, which leads to fewer disciplinary issues and a more positive overall school climate. They emphasize conflict resolution, accountability, and repairing harm rather than harmful and punitive discipline that pushes students out of the classroom. Restorative practices can help to:

Promote accountability with care: Students take ownership for harm while remaining connected to learning.
Improve safety and climate: Build communication, empathy, and problem-solving across school communities.
Reduce suspensions: Keep students in supportive environments and out of the justice system.
Center equity and belonging: Ensure culturally responsive, trauma-informed interventions.

Increasing the use of restorative practices goes alongside reducing the use of harmful or unfair disciplinary methods, which lead to more time out of the classroom and less time learning. More than a dozen Virginia school divisions have already employed restorative practices with great results, including Prince William, Alexandria, Chesterfield, Richmond City, Harrisonburg, Fairfax, Spotsylvania, Loudoun, and Roanoke, among others. It’s time for our state government to invest in supporting these practices and other community supports across more localities.

Investing in student health and well-being

Schools are navigating rising coverage gaps:

Federal proposals threaten to cut $863B from Medicaid and $295B from SNAP, destabilizing care access for 719,000 Virginia children—36% of the state’s youth.
188,000 Virginians risk losing Medicaid due to redeterminations and administrative barriers, potentially displacing 9,000–27,000 children.
SNAP cuts could reduce or eliminate benefits for 447,000 Virginians, including 73,000 families with children
Such disruptions directly affect school-funding formulas (CEP/ISP) and reduce access to critical services for students and families.

Students are navigating a mental health crisis:

According to the 2023 Virginia Youth Survey conducted by the Department of Health, 33% of high school students in Virginia experienced persistent sadness, characterized by feeling so sad or hopeless almost every day for two or more weeks in a row.
- Student groups dealing with the highest rates of persistent sadness included female Hispanic students, female mixed race students, and LGBTQ+ students.
- 17% of Virginia high school students in 2023 seriously considered suicide, 13% made a plan about how they would attempt suicide, 7% attempted suicide.
JLARC’s 2022 report on COVID-19’s impact on public K-12 education called student mental health issues “concerningly prevalent” with half of middle school students and nearly two thirds of high school students reporting feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge.
According to The Shape of Youth Mental Health in Virginia (2023), half (47 percent) of students who attend public middle or high school in the state reported having a mental health need in the current or past-year.

Virginia schools are not adequately equipped to support student mental health:

93 of 133 (91%) Virginia localities are federally designated Mental Health Professional Shortage Areas (MHPSAs), meaning roughly 37 % of Virginians (~ 2 million people) live in areas with inadequate behavioral-health supply.
Only four counties in Virginia have sufficient child and adolescent psychiatrists, and the state average is ≈ 14 per 100,000 children, well below national recommendations.
In schools, the shortage means one social worker, nurse, psychologist, or psychiatrist often covers multiple schools or entire divisions, stretching care thin.
Virginia ranks 39th lowest among states for the number of psychiatrists, psychologists, licensed social workers, counselors, and behavioral-health APRNs per capita.

Because licensed providers are scarce and often supervise frontline health staff, deploying school-based health teams within existing school hub models allows schools to expand capacity and increase access to care. Virginia already has a strong foundation to build upon, with 82 School-Based Health Centers statewide, Family or Parent Resource Centers in 46 school divisions, and 59 Community Schools implementing integrated supports. These hubs already deliver vital services; leveraging them as infrastructure amplifies their impact through coordinated, team-based health systems that connect education, health, and community support while reducing Medicaid/SNAP churn.

Boosting community involvement

Schools are most effective when families and communities are part of a student’s educational experience. They are also essential community spaces where everyone should be welcomed and engaged, and can be crucial spaces for making sure that students and their families are fed, housed, and have their basic needs met. After all, students learn best when they can focus on their classwork.

Family engagement helps make sure that students are getting academic support at home, not just at school. Community school models, leveraging culturally relevant afterschool programs and credible messengers to create safer communities, and school-community partnerships help make sure that students and their families are supported and involved beyond the classroom, which is essential for their well-being and academic success. Investing in community involvement and support initiatives will help families stay engaged throughout a child’s education.

What steps can we take to cultivate community involvement and supportive school environments?

When we create supportive school environments, we’re prioritizing our students’ well-being and setting them up for future success. It’s up to Virginia lawmakers to ensure every student has the support they need in school by:

Standardizing the use of evidence-based restorative disciplinary practices by codifying the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) Model Guidance for Positive, Preventative Code of Student Conduct Policy and Alternatives to Suspension.
Funding “Restorative Schools in Virginia,” a two year pilot program that will establish evidence-based restorative practice(s) schools in localities with highest discipline gaps.
Providing additional funding to the Safer Communities Pilot Program to invest in community-based interventions to reduce violence.
Expanding the Community Schools Grant Initiative and planning long-term to build state support for these models into the funding formula.
Deploying multidisciplinary school-based health teams to increase access to culturally relevant physical, mental, and behavioral healthcare, care coordination, and reduce Medicaid/SNAP churn.
Increasing utilization and serviceability of Medicaid billing and reimbursement in schools by establishing a Medicaid Billing Support Program within the Virginia Department of Education.

Updated December 2025