Brooklyn Friends School Head Crissy Cáceres Explains Why Cancel Culture is an ‘Impossibility’ on Her Watch

Cancel culture has permeated educational discourse across America, with schools grappling with how to address student mistakes while maintaining community values. At Brooklyn Friends School, a 158-year-old Quaker institution in downtown Brooklyn, Head of School Crissy Cáceres has taken a definitive stance: cancel culture cannot exist within the school’s walls.

“Everything I’ve just said would make the cancel culture an impossibility,” Cáceres stated during a conversation about the school’s approach to conflict resolution. “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.”

Her position stems from deeply held Quaker principles that have guided Brooklyn Friends School since its 1867 founding. Members of the Religious Society of Friends maintain a core belief that divine light exists within every person—a conviction that shapes how the school responds when students make mistakes.

Truth as Foundation for Growth

Crissy Cáceres implemented a restorative approach that prioritizes honesty over punishment. When three seventh-grade students recently used coded language for inappropriate words, they spent a full day in restoration beginning with an 8:20 a.m. meeting in her office.

“The first thing is that we cannot have a conversation unless you begin with truth,” Cáceres told the students. “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.”

Students responded with immediate honesty. One admitted he had lied to his father about his involvement, saying his father threatened that whoever was responsible should be expelled. When Cáceres asked what changed after his father learned the truth, another student observed: “Because his father now had empathy because it was his own child.”

Conversation shifted to discussing empathy’s relationship to proximity. Students learned that empathy becomes easier when one maintains connection to another person’s humanity—a lesson that extends far beyond the immediate situation.

Developmental Understanding Over Punishment

When parents report their child experienced bullying, Crissy Cáceres offers what many consider a challenging perspective. She tells them such an occurrence is “impossible” given children’s developmental stage.

“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,” Cáceres explained. “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.”

Reframing does not minimize harmful behavior. Rather, it acknowledges the neurological reality that children lack the cognitive development required for the calculated cruelty that defines bullying. Brooklyn Friends School can address harmful actions while maintaining belief in students’ capacity for growth.

Cáceres also reminds parents about reciprocity. “Someday your child’s going to be in the seat of making that mistake and you would want me to have this orientation,” she tells families. “So I suggest you do that in this conversation.”

Brooklyn Friends School maintains specific policies outlined in its student handbook for addressing harmful behavior. Restorative processes focus on understanding what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent recurrence while keeping students connected to the humanity of those they have hurt.

Community Restoration in Practice

Visitors to Brooklyn Friends School witnessed the restoration process firsthand when a second-grade student engaged in disruptive behavior during class observation. An educator immediately brought all students into a circle for restoration.

Students at the center described their actions while classmates asked questions: “What made you do that right now? What were you thinking about?” Peers then offered suggestions for different choices before their teacher returned to the lesson.

When observers asked whether the response was staged for their benefit, Cáceres responded simply: “Nope.”

Such scenes reflect standard practice rather than performance. Brooklyn Friends School has integrated restorative justice practices throughout its four learning communities, from Early Childhood through Upper School.

Commitment to restorative practices extends to the school’s most significant decisions. Under Crissy Cáceres’s leadership, which began in 2019, Brooklyn Friends School has not counseled out a single student 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 explained.

Even in these rare circumstances, the school maintains partnership with families. “I cannot be responsible to uphold our end of our agreement to you if we say that we can and we don’t,” she stated, framing departures as honest assessments of institutional capacity rather than punitive measures.

Students who spent that full restoration day with Cáceres later sent unsolicited letters to her. When she asked why they wrote, they explained: “You told us that what was about to be happening in your office 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.”

Building Proximity to Humanity

Restoration models at Brooklyn Friends School center on maintaining connection to others’ humanity. “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,” Cáceres told the seventh-graders. “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’?”

Her question reflects the school’s fundamental approach: preventing harmful behavior by teaching students to recognize their connection to others rather than through fear of punishment. Cancel culture, which permanently removes individuals from community, contradicts this philosophy entirely.

For 700-plus students across Brooklyn Friends School’s four divisions—from two-year-olds through 12th graders—the message remains consistent. Mistakes offer opportunities for learning. Truth creates space for growth. Humanity cannot be canceled.

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