After a decade in classrooms, cheering on young people and believing in their progress, David Levine’s faith finally wilted. Three of his top students had walked into the front office at Big Picture High School reeking of marijuana at the precise moment that a donor stopped by with a $1,000 grant for new sound equipment.

Years ago, Levine might have recommended suspension for each young woman. Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time, went his general thinking, right in line with prevailing American beliefs.

But discipline at Big Picture in the Highline School District has changed. In the process, its teachers have, too.

Rule breaking is now treated as harm done to a relationship — in this case, that between Levine and his students — rather than a reason to mete out punishment.

Instead of sending the three smokers home with a litany of their failings, Levine sat face to face with each, explaining what it felt like to have his trust violated. He read them testimony from other teachers, who spoke of their belief in the young women — how they had a chance to go to college, build a career, leave their difficult family lives behind.

By the end of her hourlong conference, 18-year-old Monae Trevino was weeping.

Afterward, she signed a contract setting out ways to make amends: by leading three student discussions on questions surrounding drug use, each of which meant significant research; reading two works of college-level literature and writing a related essay.

“It’s a lot harder than a regular suspension,” said Trevino, who had been kicked off campus multiple times at other, more conventional schools. “You can’t run from anything, and to have people talking good about you, telling you they’re truly disappointed — it hurts. It was kind of overwhelming, actually.”

Trevino’s conference was part of a practice known as restorative justice, and while rare in the Puget Sound region, the approach has been embraced elsewhere — not just at small schools like Big Picture in Burien, but across entire urban districts — as awareness grows that suspending kids often does more harm than good.

New research correlates typical zero-tolerance punishment with lower academic outcomes overall, even for kids who never step out of line. Further, the vast majority of suspensions are leveled against students of color, who come back to class more behind and less engaged than ever.

As described in an Education Lab story last month, Kent schools use in-house suspension — a de facto study hall — to keep kids connected to an academic atmosphere after low-level offenses like back talk or cutting class. But students still get tossed for insubordination.

Highline Public Schools uses “re-entry specialists” to discuss behavior with suspended youths before allowing them back in class.

But no school locally has gone as far as Big Picture, where discipline has become an avenue for students to face themselves and those they have harmed. In other words, educational.

“It confronts people with their choices, and that can get quite emotional,” said Levine. “But it also gives them a chance to creatively repair the harm. That never happens when you send a kid home.”

All of which might sound hopelessly idealistic were it not for the data.

San Francisco public schools began widespread use of restorative practices four years ago and has watched suspensions shrink by 49 percent.

At a middle-and-elementary school in Baltimore, Md., office referrals all but vanished in five years.

In Denver, academic achievement climbed steadily after the district switched to a restorative approach in 2006.

So far, such results — mirrored in San Antonio, Texas, Chicago and Philadelphia — count only as intriguing case studies. But they have prompted enough interest that randomized control trials, considered the gold standard for proof of success, are under way in several states.

Breaking the mold

Restorative justice, however, is no out-of-the-box program. It requires costly training, a significant investment of time and the willingness of teachers to cede some of their traditional authority.

Instead of being sent to the principal’s office, disruptive kids are scheduled for in-depth conferences like the one Trevino had with Levine. To keep everyone honest, a circle of advocates for each party watches, listening as both share their perspective on what happened and why.

“There’s definitely a new level of vulnerability for the teacher,” said Matthew Imperato, who coaches educators in San Francisco on using the approach. “They have to give up a little bit of their power.”

Restorative practices also reshape day-to-day dynamics. In an unruly math class, for example, the teacher might halt her lesson on graphs or tangents to ask why students are so distracted.

The strategy is an updated version of Maori tribal tradition that treats rule-breaking as damage to community bonds and seeks redress in the form of repair. (“Let shame be the punishment,” a Maori proverb says.) It has been used extensively in schools overseas.

But not until American educators began searching for ways to stem suspensions did restorative justice take hold in the U.S.

Last year, 3 million students were sent home, adding up to a staggering loss of instructional time just as government and business leaders are clamoring for better academic performance.

In San Francisco, Denver and Baltimore, that trend is seen as a nothing less than a crisis, and restorative justice is among the best hopes to change course.

“There’s promise of tremendous transformation,” said Anne Gregory, a school psychology professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who has researched the effects.

“The challenge is, this is more than just a workshop. It’s a philosophical change in approach. We have a very ingrained sense of the importance of punishment, and people think if you’re not excluding kids from school, you’re not holding them accountable.”

Locally, that tension is evident. At various schools individual educators have dabbled in restorative justice, though none — other than Big Picture — with the sustained effort and high-level backing required to see deep change.

“Without a shadow of doubt, it helped transform the culture,” said Brad Brown, former principal at First Creek Middle in Tacoma. But after he relocated to Kent, the school abandoned those practices.

“It can be very powerful, a truly educative tool,” said Catherine Brown, an assistant principal at Cleveland High in Seattle, where a number of teachers use the restorative approach, though in scattershot fashion, and without full-bore commitment from the school district.

Highline is the furthest along. As recently as five years ago, schools there were suspending kids by the thousands — “just throwing them away,” said Superintendent Susan Enfield.

Today, those numbers are dramatically reduced, and teachers are pushed to focus on students’ emotional state, rather than resorting immediately to removal.

“Restorative justice is the next level,” Enfield said. “We’re not there yet, but that’s the direction we’re heading because suspensions don’t work — we know that.”

Still, she has stopped short of mandating the practice in every school, unlike San Francisco, which did so last year with the support of its teachers union.

Time and money are probable factors.

San Francisco, which educates 57,000 students — comparable to Seattle — spends about $900,000 annually on training, coordinators and other expenses related to the restorative approach.

Even there, the effort is not unanimously embraced. Teachers pressured to cover vast amounts of material in preparation for state tests have been skeptical of the time required.

Similar concerns echo here. Yet at Big Picture, students do as well, or better, than the district average in reading, writing and science. And when judged on discipline, the school appears transformed.

Four years ago, before restorative justice became the norm, principal Loren Demeroutis assigned 700 days of suspension. This year, there have been eight.

“It’s true, teachers and principals don’t have time for any of the billion things we’re supposed to be doing, so you have to make choices,” he said. “In the long run these practices actually save time.”