Discipline that works?

My district has adopted a discipline strategy called restorative justice to help curb the expulsion and suspensions rates. This program focuses on more positive conflict resolution skills using meaningful accountability and consequences for students. Instead of suspending a student for 3 days and sending them home this strategy focuses on more positive outcomes and consequences. For example, staff and students involved in the incident try to get to the “root of the behavior” by engaging in dialogue of better choices. It is also interesting to see the increase in accountability for actions; this idea is to have the student responsible (the offender) to work positively to repair the relationship with the student or students that were affected by the incident. This program is in its third year of implementation and our district reports that expulsions have decreased nearly 60%. This looks like a remarkable decrease but it is also important to know that our school board also voted to give more discretion to school administrators for disciplinary actions. Previously 15 offenses that were mandatory expulsions were reduced down to 5. The other 10 are considered discretionary expulsions(3rd fight in a year, causing serious injury, assault or battery on school employee, possessing a knife, possessing a dangerous object, using a controlled substance, possessing controlled substance, robbery/extortion, smoking, and causing serious injury in hate incident) So in conjunction with restorative justice practices our revised expulsion and suspension policy has helped decrease discipline issues. Does your District or School Site use restorative justice practices? If not, what types of positive discipline strategies are used to keep the schools safe yet students accountable for their behavior? http://www.kpbs.org/news/2015/jun/02/year-later-san-diego-unifieds-school-discipline-ch/