At Brooklyn Friends School, a 157-year-old Quaker institution in downtown Brooklyn, Head of School Crissy Cáceres takes a distinctive approach to addressing conflicts among students. Rather than employing the term “bullying,” Cáceres frames these situations as opportunities for growth and development.
“Bullying is not a hot topic issue at Brooklyn Friends School,” Cáceres states directly when asked about the subject. “And that is not to diminish that there are incidents where the outside world would describe it as bullying. And we would describe it as children growing.”
This perspective doesn’t dismiss harmful behavior but rather recontextualizes it within children’s developmental journey. When incidents occur, BFS applies a restorative approach grounded in Quaker values of peace, integrity, and community.
Cáceres shared an example of addressing seventh graders who had attempted to use coded language for inappropriate words. The students received “a full day of restoration” beginning with an 8:20 AM meeting with Cáceres herself. She established truth as the foundation for the conversation: “The first thing is that we cannot have a conversation unless you begin with truth. So you have the gift of taking this opportunity to only connect to the truth. And without that, I actually can’t help you and you can’t help yourselves.”
This truth-centered approach yielded immediate results, with students honestly sharing their roles in the incident. One student admitted he had initially lied to his father about his involvement. This revelation led to a deeper discussion about empathy when Cáceres asked the student what changed when his father learned he was involved. The student recognized that his father “no longer used the word expelled,” and when Cáceres asked why, another student observed, “Because his father now had empathy because it was his own child.”
The Developmental Reality of Children’s Behavior
When parents report that their child was bullied, Cáceres offers a challenging perspective. “That was impossible,” she explains. “In order for bullying to occur, there had to be active intent, there had to be a connection to what you thought you gained from the bullying, there had to be a measure of trying to hide or omit yourself from the impact of that. And their frontal lobes have not fully developed enough for all of those three things to be true. So that is not bullying, that’s mistake making.”
This framework shifts the conversation from punishment to learning and community restoration. Cáceres reminds parents that their own child may someday be in the position of making similar mistakes, and they would want the school to maintain this restorative approach rather than a punitive one.
The distinction between “bullying” and “mistake making” reflects BFS’s broader educational philosophy rooted in Quaker principles. The school’s mission prioritizes “intellectual growth and moral development” within a framework of Quaker values including “peace, integrity, community, simplicity, and stewardship.”
Building Proximity to Humanity
Cáceres emphasizes that the goal of addressing interpersonal conflicts at BFS is to deepen students’ connection to the humanity of others. After the conversation with the seventh graders about their inappropriate language, she explained how distance from humanity enables harmful behavior: “When you do these things, you’ve taken yourself further away from the humanity of the person who’s hurt, and we can’t do that at Brooklyn Friends School. We can’t do that.”
She challenged the students to consider how staying close to another person’s humanity might prevent such behaviors: “How do you make sure that you stay close to that such that that’s the thing that says in you, ‘I shouldn’t be doing this’?” This focus on maintaining connection with others’ humanity reinforces the school’s commitment to community-building rather than punishment.
The impact of this approach became evident when the students later sent unsolicited letters to Cáceres. When she asked why they wrote to her, they responded that she had shown them how the conversation “wasn’t about what was happening at Brooklyn Friends School right there, that it was about our lives. That if we took seriously what we were about to have a conversation about, it would affect us for our whole lives.”
The Rarity of “Counseling Out” for Behavior
Brooklyn Friends School’s approach to behavioral challenges stands in contrast to many private schools that might ask students to leave when they repeatedly violate behavioral expectations. Cáceres notes that during her tenure, zero students have been “counseled out” of BFS for behavioral reasons.
“The only times, handful of times where a child cannot be here is because the social emotional nature of their points of anxiety or angst and/or their academic needs supersede what we currently have in our ability to support them,” Cáceres explains. Even in these rare cases, the school maintains its commitment to partnership with families, having open conversations about the limitations of what BFS can provide: “I cannot be responsible to uphold our end of our agreement to you if we say that we can and we don’t.”
Restoration Rather Than Punishment
Brooklyn Friends School utilizes restorative practices as standard procedure when addressing behavioral issues. A visiting committee observing the school witnessed this approach firsthand when a student engaged in disruptive behavior during a second-grade class. Cáceres recounted their observation: “The teacher brought all of them into a circle and they went into immediate restoration, where the child at the center of this naughtiness had to describe what is it that they just did.”
The other students actively participated in the restoration process, asking questions like “What made you do that right now? What were you thinking about?” They then offered suggestions on “What could you do differently?” before the teacher smoothly transitioned back to the lesson. When the observers asked if this performance was staged for their benefit, Cáceres responded, “Nope.”
This systematic approach to conflict resolution through community conversations represents the school’s rejection of what Cáceres calls “cancel culture.” She emphasizes that such a concept contradicts everything the school stands for: “Everything I’ve just said would make the cancel culture an impossibility. The idea is that nobody is cancelable. To say that is to say that your humanity and your life suddenly got snuffed and it went away. No. No. That can never be true.”
