If you’re like me, you might have seen these nightmare “restorative practices” videos making the rounds on social media. I put restorative practices in quotes because seeing a kid misbehave, get a lollipop, and go back to class with no consequences seems like insanity to me; nothing is restored, and I would argue that, if that’s what is happening, it is making the relationship worse.
So, when I read Amanda Jamerson’s story (she won the 2026 National High School Assistant Principal of the Year), I knew her story would give us some insight. Amanda, or “AJAM the Advocate” as she’s called online, tells how her team cut office discipline referrals by 69% over three years and how they built a cell phone policy that is actually working on a five-building campus. I also like that she calls her work “heart work” because it is.
An editorial note about the word “repair.” I do want to make a note. While I like the word “repair,” I think part of teaching kids consequences is recognizing that some things inexorably break and cannot be repaired. You can try to repair, which I think Amanda is really saying on the show, but we don’t want anyone to think all harm can be repaired.
As someone who had to work through the repercussions of bullying in my own life, the process of coming back stronger had nothing to do with the people who did the bullying, some of whom were never sorry and others who didn’t really know they did it even to this day. (And granted, quite a few have apologized as adults.)
In short: Restorative practices in schools are working in some places. Amanda Jamerson says they work when students (and teachers) are taught expectations before they are held to them, when teachers call home before an office referral is made, and a suspended student reflects on who was harmed and how to work to repair the relationship. Amanda Jamerson and her team of teachers and administrators used these steps to cut office referrals from almost 300 to about 45.
Jump to the spot in the conversation where each question is answered.
Here’s where the facts in this episode come from, with the time stamp so you can hear each one. Checked October 19, 2026.
This transcript was generated using AI and has been reviewed by humans for accuracy. Minor errors or artifacts may remain but I worked my best to find any issues with the transcript as I reviewed the show. – Vicki
Vicki Davis (00:00): Why do kids who get lunch detention with today’s guest almost never come back? And what does she check before she’ll even act on a referral? Today we’re talking about restorative practices in schools with a motivating principal who also has a cell phone policy that actually works. This is Motivational Monday, Episode 1011.
Announcer (00:27): This is the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast with your host, Vicki Davis.
Vicki Davis (00:31): Today, we’re talking with Amanda Jamerson. Now, today, I will be calling her AJAM because that’s her online presence, but a lot of the people around her call her AP, so you may hear both. She is an associate principal at Shorewood High School and the 2026 National High School Assistant Principal of the Year. She and her team built a restorative discipline framework that cut office referrals by 69% and a cell phone policy that actually worked.
And she calls it heart work. Let’s hear how she and her team did it. First of all, AJAM, why do you call this heart work?
What does “heart work” mean for a school leader?
Amanda Jamerson (01:17): First, thank you, Vicki, for having me. I’m super excited to share about the amazing work happening in Shorewood School District, just the amazing work our students are doing, the work and our staff who are doing it. Why I say heart work, because every day you are not going to feel it. You’re not going to feel excited. I know that it doesn’t always feel good, but if you can go home every night knowing you’ve made a difference in your heart, that is what matters.
I lead with my heart and my students know that. They know I’m always going to share that with them. Like, hey, you could always talk to me. My door is always open. I don’t sit in my office. If I am sitting in the main office, it’s in the conference room or I have my rolling desk just so that students see me and they know that they can always talk to me about anything.
Why would an assistant principal use a rolling desk instead of sitting in an office?
Vicki Davis (01:58): This is a big trend, the rolling desk.
Amanda Jamerson (02:01): So the rolling desk just allows me to be out more with students. We have a unique campus. We actually have five different buildings on our campus that classrooms are in. It’s like a set up like a college campus. I will roll and I’ll get on the elevator, go up and down the floors and the different buildings just for kids to see me. I’m doing observations. I have all my things and I just can pop in.
It’s actually funny because when we were introducing the cell phone policy that first year, students would see me collecting. I have a little bag that I carry on my rolling desk and they’d be like, how many did you get today? Did you get 20? It became a cooler thing for them to see how many phones I was collecting because they knew that they were like, oh, my phone’s in the caddy.
I listen. They’ll even say the most random things to me. Like, I have a fun fact for you. It is just because I’m just rolling in the hallway. It reinforces heart work where kids know like, okay, Ms. Jamerson truly cares. Even if I see them doing something, I’ll just give them my eye and I’ll just look and then they’ll be like, okay, okay, okay, okay.
How do you make a high school cell phone policy actually work?
Vicki Davis (02:55): So you have a cell phone policy that actually worked. Describe your policy, how you made it work, and any improvements since you did it?
Amanda Jamerson (03:03): I’ll start with the improvements. We are actually seeing students talk to one another. We’re seeing them actually engage, which to me is amazing in a high school, especially having the different buildings, being able to walk into a classroom and seeing students actually talking to one another, even during an advisory timeframe where it’s relaxed, they’re engaging with their peers, which is phenomenal across the board.
What has made it work is our staff. Our staff and our community having that buy-in. We made sure that we involved stakeholders. When we were creating the cell phone policy, we knew it was a need because our staff kept letting us know, hey, cell phones are an issue. And so we wanted a policy that would reinforce the expectation, but we also thought about safety. We do have the different buildings.
And so what happens if a kid just is only able to keep it in their locker, their locker is in building B and they are in building C. So we thought about all of the complexities as it relates to that. And so we have cell phone caddies. They see their cell phone. They can look and see, okay, my cell phone’s right here. Teachers are able to check that off. Some teachers, they use that as their way to take attendance.
So it’s easy because staff wanted this.
How can parents reach their child during the school day if phones are put away?
One of the feedback early on that we got was parents were like, well, what if I need to talk to my student during the day? Because anyone in education knows, especially a high school, parents do reach out to their students a lot during the school day. And so we were like, hey, we’ll have a phone in the main office. If you call and say you need them to give you a call.
We’ll get them from class. They can make that call. Go back to class. And that has not created any issues. Students are just coming down. They’ll say, hey, I got to use the phone. I’ll call my mom and go back to class. So that’s been great.
Vicki Davis (04:40): And that’s the way we did it for years, right? Yeah.
Amanda Jamerson (04:42): And I was like, when I was a kid, I had to go to the main office to call home if I needed to call home for something. Students seeing that it’s an expectation in every classroom has been key, it’s really reinforcing that to staff. Okay, well, let’s talk about this scenario. What if this happens in my classroom?
Why did office discipline referrals go up when attendance improved?
Vicki Davis (04:57): You’ve also done some really awesome things with your discipline practices. How does discipline look at your school and what changed?
Amanda Jamerson (05:05): This is ending my fifth year. And so in coming into Shorewood, one of the things I noticed right away, there were some wandering students. So students will wander in the hallways. We revamped the attendance policy to make sure we have students in the classroom. And as soon as that occurred, I started to see a spike in our ODRs. And I knew what it was because most students who were typically wandering or leaving campus because it’s open campus, they weren’t in the classroom.
Now that they were in the classroom, we were having some issues as it relates to behavior.
Do students actually know what counts as a code of conduct violation?
So what I started to do in just preliminary things is talking to students. So if a student got an ODR, so office discipline referral, I’d say, hey, did you realize that this was behavior infraction? Did you realize this is a code of conduct violation? Majority of the students who I talked to were like, I had no clue.
And I was like, OK, that was the first entry into, OK, we’re not really teaching expectations for what behavior looks like or what even is a code of conduct violation. So one of the first things like my secretary and I work together on this is we give students assignment notebooks So we were like, hey, let’s just plop that in there. Let’s make sure it’s front and center so students are able to look at it and then we refer back to it when we do our class meetings and school-wide assemblies and so that was just the catalyst so that kids even knew expectations because.
I am a big believer in if we’ve never shared something explicitly. How do we expect for people to follow? Even my teachers, like if I’ve never shown you how to do this or the why behind it, I don’t expect you to just fall in line and say, OK, we’re going to do this. That’s one of those things really great to see. But then also in talking to staff, I wanted to understand why certain behaviors were accepted in classrooms and why certain ones weren’t.
Relationship was big. If a teacher had a relationship with a student, they did have the ability to redirect the kid without them getting overwhelmed with the redirection because they’re like, oh, I have this relationship with the student already established. Right away, I’m like, okay, well, we need to make sure this is more restorative. Looking at all of the different pieces of feedback that I gathered from survey data to what are you seeing when I do parent reinstatement meetings, and that’s still something that was done prior to the new policy for our restorative actions framework, talking to parents.
Should a teacher call home before writing an office referral?
Parents sharing, hey, I never even received a call from the teacher. I didn’t know this was an issue in their classroom. And then it came to the main office. Really being explicit in my expectations about, hey, we’re going to call home. We’re going to email home. We’re going to make sure we do all of these proactive steps to make sure we’re engaging our families and our community so that they understand what’s happening in the classroom.
What I love the most about it is there’s a reteaching that occurs with the student and the teacher. And there’s that small bit of time where the teacher and the student can work together and discuss what occurred and how there was harm in the classroom and look at moving forward together, which does not involve administration. Instead of kids just being sent to the AP, students stay in the classroom.
Teacher will say, hey, I want to talk to you after class or come see me at lunch. And they’re able to have that conversation. And they’re like, hey, I don’t want this to have to go to administration. So kids feel validated in that because they feel like their teacher is actually taking the time to talk to them versus just saying, hey, go to administration. So we have like four levels.
And then the fifth level is if this is like a reoccurring behavior, there is a ODR process because with all of the amazing things, things still happen. And so I’m a realist when it comes to that. And so I always want to make sure I’m honest about that with staff. I’m not expecting any referrals to never be completed. I expect that we are going to get those. And so staff know that.
And I want to know because I want to know about what’s happening in the classroom. At the end of the school year, when I looked, we were at maybe 45 at most office discipline referrals. And so I just think about being in the 200, almost 300 to where we are now. It’s really… Students are aware of expectations, but they’re also a part of like, hey, why do we have this policy? Why is this in place?
That is another layer that we have because I still did all this work and it was great. But then I noticed we saw some reoccurring students that were popping up. So I was like, okay, the student was already suspended or this student got an ODR in this class for this behavior.
What is a restorative reflection, and what does a suspended student have to answer before coming back?
Another area that we added is we have the parent reinstatement meeting, but we also now added a restorative action.
So it’s like a restorative reflection, essentially. And a student, when they are suspended, I look at whatever their code of conduct violation is, I look at the ODR, and then I work to create a reflection for it. So they have to literally sit down, complete this before they return to school. So we talk about that during the parent reinstatement meeting with their parent present.
And it’s a shared document between myself and the student. We talk about who did they cause harm to, who do they need to talk to, and how do they repair that harm. What I can truly say is we’ve had some more uncomfortable topics that I’ve had to work through with students. What I can say is the learning that they’ve received from that and what they understand now and just how their words and how they can be harmful to certain groups of people has been really amazing to see just students being able to be like, wow, I knew this was wrong to say, but I never knew why it was wrong to say.
Now I understand why this is so horrible to say. And that to me is the real work. So that’s why I say it’s heart work because that to me is a character. That student is now going to always think about, okay, wait, this could be harmful. This could really cause harm to someone. And they’re high schoolers. Everything is funny until it causes harm. So that is where really working together and getting feedback.
I’m all about like, hey, let’s revamp it. Like, hey, you want to change this? Let’s do this.
What can a teacher say in a heated moment instead of “I’m done with this”?
And explicitly, another thing to add is on the process for teachers that they have, the document they have, it actually gives them verbatim wording they can use. Because we all know when those feelings are high and things are happening and you’re frustrated, like, you know what, I don’t know how to say this and how it’s going to come across.
And so I wanted to explicitly give them language because that’s something teachers share is like, hey, when I’m really elevated and I feel like this student is not listening, I might just say I’m done with this today. Instead of saying I’m done with this, you can look at this document and it’s in all of the classrooms and they can literally just read off of it and say what they need to say to a student.
And it’s aligned to our restorative actions framework so that students, again, it’s more restorative. It is not further putting them in silos where they feel as if, oh, I’m part of this group that’s always in trouble.
Why do restorative practices fall apart in so many schools?
Vicki Davis (11:29): Why do you think in general… that schools are getting wrong, that are struggling with restorative practices. Because you see it, a teacher sends a kid out and they come back with a lollipop going, oh man, I got some candy.
Amanda Jamerson (11:41): I think sometimes what happens is, so you learn something in August and then September’s okay. You get a few things, but it’s okay. October, you’re like, oh, the honeymoon is over. And everything you’ve learned, you kind of are like, okay, I don’t remember it anymore. And so it’s really reinforcing that for staff and then also reinforcing that for students. And I’m big on that with staff is, okay, let’s stop now.
Now let’s role play. Let’s look at this together. Let’s look at some different scenarios. How would this scenario play out in your classroom? Because the more that we use real life scenarios, we’re able to then practice those in real time and internalize them. I have an amazing staff who are totally behind it. I think what happens is the learning stops sometimes. It’s like, okay, I learned this.
I had this one great PD about restorative practices and. All of these things. And then it goes away. And I also know, If administration is not following the same steps every single time, then it does create those inequities. And so staff then sometimes can feel like, OK, well, if you aren’t doing this, then why do I have to do it? So I’ll follow up just a quick email. Hey, just an FYI.
I know this is an issue in your class. I talked to the student. These are my next steps. So staff know in real time what I’m also doing.
Does lunch detention work for high school students?
What I’ve done more this year, actually, than I’ve ever done is like lunch detention. We have open campus lunch. So students love to leave. And I’m like, you know what? I think this is causing an issue. How about you do detention with me, like lunch detention?
And the amount of kids who do not want a lunch detention, I’m amazed. They’re like, oh man, I got to do lunch detention. And I literally see them once for lunch detention, never again. What I’ve found is like, that’s a great time because I’m keeping them in, they’re not leaving out. And so sometimes even if they like, hey, you didn’t finish this test, you need it. I’m like, you know what, since you’re already in here, you might as well just do it with me.
It also creates an opportunity for me to just build that relationship with that student too, for them to see, hey, I’m not suspending you from school. How about you just do this lunch detention? Or going back to our cell phone policy, we’ll just take their phone. I’m like, hey, I’ll keep your phone for two days. They get it at the end of the school day, but it’s like they return it back at 8 a.m. the next morning.
And what I can say is our student body does amazing with that. Even one student, he said to me, he was like, I was like, I’m going to take your cell phone. He was like. That’s fair, Ms. Jamerson. I understand. Just the fact that students are able to have those conversations are now just becoming amazing for us as a building.
Vicki Davis (14:07): Wonderful. So we’ve been talking with Amanda Jamerson, known online as AJAM the Advocate. She’s associate principal at Shorewood High School and 2026 National High School Assistant Principal of the Year. AJAM, congratulations, and thanks for sharing all this on the show.
Amanda Jamerson (14:28): Thank you so much.
Announcer (14:28): Thank you for tuning in to the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast. Join us here every weekday and subscribe to the Classroom Matters newsletter. See you later, educator.
Amanda Jamerson, also known as AJAM the Advocate (ajamtheadvocate.com), is an accomplished educational leader and advocate recognized for advancing excellence in teaching, learning, and student support across Southeastern Wisconsin. Throughout the Greater Milwaukee area, she is known for her deep passion for serving students, families, and school communities with purpose and integrity.
Amanda currently serves as the Associate Principal of Shorewood High School, where she leads with a strong commitment to equity, growth, and excellence. She believes deeply that showing up for students and school communities is heart work, and she leads each day with purpose, compassion, and an unwavering commitment to equity and excellence. During her tenure, she designed and implemented a Restorative Actions Framework that reduced office discipline referrals by 69 percent over three years, while deepening student understanding of empathy and accountability. She also co-launched a comprehensive cell phone policy that promotes digital balance and has resulted in improved classroom focus and fewer peer conflicts.
Her impact has been recognized at both the state and national levels, as she was named Wisconsin’s Associate Principal of the Year and selected as a national finalist for NASSP’s 2026 National Assistant Principal of the Year. In April 2026, NASSP named her the 2026 National High School Assistant Principal of the Year.
If this episode helped you, share it with a teacher or principal who is working on restorative practices this year.
