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Student Led Peer Mediation is a project of the Conflict Resolution Center – St. Louis, funded by a grant from the St. Louis Mental Health Board.

SLPM in schools offers the innovative opportunity to establish and improve healthy communication between families and schools. It’s confidential, creating an environment of open and peaceful communication that allows for students and their surrounding community to excel.

The SLPM program is designed to be easily picked up by schools and scaled to meet the needs of the students, ranging from voluntary, extracurricular mediations to integrating mediation into the school’s disciplinary process. CRCSTL provides the training and technical assistance necessary for schools to fully implement the program using existing resources and offers ongoing support as needed.

School Tools is a resource website developed by the Western Justice Center. Lesson plans are developed for educators interested in quality materials on conflict resolution to enrich their students’, as well as their own, knowledge and skill base. The tools are useful for resolving conflicts in school and daily personal settings.

Teachers can access full conflict resolution lessons for their classes/clubs and also find first-rate resources on a variety of topics, including effectiveness of conflict resolution education, building support in their schools, and implementation of programs.

The site content is enhanced with original videos for a more rich and interactive learning experience.

On November 30, 2015, the Ontario Ministry of Education Safe Schools Branch approved and funded a project proposal “to gather, create, integrate and disseminate knowledge of restorative practice tools and strategies to support achievement, healthy relationships and leadership in Ontario schools from a restorative perspective.”  The website and various reports that have been produced are all designed to be copyright free and re-useable.

Disparities in the use of school discipline by race, gender, and sexual orientation have been well-documented, and continue to place large numbers of students at risk for short- and long-term negative outcomes. In order to improve the state of our knowledge and encourage effective interventions, the Discipline Disparities Research to Practice Collaborative, a group of 26 nationally known researchers, educators, advocates, and policy analysts, came together to address the problem of disciplinary disparities. Funded by Atlantic Philanthropies and Open Society Foundations, the Collaborative has spent nearly three years conducting a series of meetings with groups of stakeholders – advocates, educators, juvenile justice representatives, intervention agents, researchers, and policymakers–in order to increase the availability of interventions that are both practical and evidence-based, and to develop and support a policy agenda for reform to improve equity in school discipline.

The project has funded eleven new research projects to expand the knowledge base, particularly in the area of intervention, and commissioned papers from noted researchers presented at the Closing the School Discipline Gap Conference. A culminating report of the Collaborative’s work is the formal release of the Discipline Disparities Briefing Paper Series three papers on policy, practice, and new research summarizing the state of our knowledge and offering practical, evidence-based recommendations for reducing disparities in discipline in our nation’s schools.

Since the mid-1980s peer mediation has been the most commonly used conflict resolution education program in the United States. Research indicates that as many as 25% of US schools have had peer mediation programs serving grades 3 to 12 and many programs in large urban districts are district­wide.

However, three important changes in the educational and social context now suggest the need for an online version of peer mediation.

1 ­ Significant and Increasing Online Public Education
In formal educational contexts (K through 12) the increase in online schools has skyrocketed. Approximately 3 million K through 12 students are now enrolled in free, online public schools, which are not served by peer mediation.

2 ­ Prevalence and Preference for Online Communication
Current school­ age generation prefers to communicate online. For the millions of students in conventional K through 12 schools, community groups, or youth organizations, online peer mediation opportunity is more congruent with their use of social media and communication technology.

3 ­ Global Peer Mediation Growth
Peer mediation programs have been growing not only in the United States, but also around the world. In fact, much of the increase in peer mediation since 2000 has happened in Europe, Australia and South Asia.

For the reasons listed above, in December of 2014 the Association for Conflict Resolution Education Section received a 2 year grant from the JAMS Foundation to launch a new project called Online Peer Mediation Platform (OPMP).

Online Peer Mediation Platform Goals
The four goals of our Online Peer Mediation Platform are:
1. Show how students from ages 10 to 18 can learn online how to become peer mediators.
2. Show how students can practice their peer mediation skills online with the assistance of qualified mentors.
3. Show how students can offer online peer mediation services. This OPMP component will be available in 2016.
4. Provide anyone who is interested in peer mediation extensive information on this topic.

For more information, visit the OPMP website at http://peermediationonline.org and contact our team.

OPMP Team
Judy Tindall – President, National Association of Peer Program Professionals
Dr. Cynthia Morton – Chair of Education Research and Teaching Section, ACR
Prof. Karen DeVoogd – MA, Director Mediator Mentors, California State University Fresno, Fresno CA
Jay Edwards, Website Consultant -­ ReelFire Productions.
Giuseppe Leone – Founder of Virtual Mediation Lab

The Hague Appeal for Peace is an international network of organizations and individuals dedicated to the abolition of war and making peace a human right. The Global Campaign for Peace Education was launched at the Hague Appeal for Peace conference in May 1999. The Global Campaign for Peace Education (GCPE) seeks to develop the capacities, in teachers and learners, to face challenges of unprecedented proportion: the continued development of weapons of mass destruction, armed conflicts between states and ethnic groups, the spread of racism, gender inequality, community violence, the huge and widening gap between the rich and the poor throughout the globalized economy, massive violations of human rights and the degradation of the environment.