Move your middle schools from adult-dependent conflict management to student-led conflict resolution.
MediatorSPARK helps you equip the students you already have to resolve conflicts before they escalate, so your team spends less time on discipline and more time leading, year after year.
Middle school is where conflict peaks, and it lands on your leaders' desks.
A comment posted at night becomes an argument in first period, a crowd in the hallway by lunch, and a suspension by dismissal. Students this age often don't have the tools yet to work it out on their own, so the adults step in.
This spring we surveyed 66 leaders responsible for middle-grade students, and 97% said a significant share of their team's time goes to resolving conflict.
Every dispute students can't resolve pulls a teacher off instruction and an administrator off their priorities. Hiring another counselor or assistant principal is rarely in the budget, and even then it does nothing to teach students to handle the next one.
As one student in our Stratford, Connecticut partner district put it:
We just don't know how to talk to each other.
Your students aren't the problem. They're the solution.
The resource your schools are missing isn't another adult. It's the students themselves, trained and trusted to become the ones who settle a dispute and repair a friendship for everyone coming up behind them.
A year in, conflict resolves before it reaches your desk.
Picture your building in the spring. Two students walk into a quiet room down the hall, upset over something posted the night before, and walk out with an agreement they reached themselves, guided by two of their peers.
Your coordinator runs it. Your leaders watch the program working on a live dashboard. And the students who learned to do this are already training next year's team.
That is where the Peacemaker Pathway takes a middle school: student-led conflict resolution that runs on its own and grows stronger every year.
Built to remain, not to be repeated.
The usual model is a two-day workshop. A company trains your students and leaves. Then students graduate, the one adult who ran it moves on, and the program dies. We built the opposite: a year-round service, not another platform your team has to run. It comes down to three things.
The Pathway is a roadmap embedded in the school, so it lasts no matter which students or coordinators come and go.
Scheduling, requests, and tracking run on your own Google Workspace. You own the tools, we don't collect or store your student data, and your leaders get a live dashboard that shows the program working.
Instead of two days, we're with you all year: coaching, courses, the full student curriculum, and a national community of coordinators.
It started with one teacher and forty students.
Before MediatorSPARK was a company, Samuel was a teacher at a 1,300-student Title I middle school in New York City. He trained more than 40 student mediators who resolved over 100 conflicts at a 91% success rate, with zero confidentiality breaches.
In the last week of school in 2023, five girls turned a social media conflict into seven separate disputes, with a fight already planned for after school. So, over two days, his peacemakers completed more than three and a half hours of mediation and resolved all seven peacefully. No suspensions, no one hurt.
This year, seven schools across six states ran the Pathway, training more than 70 student mediators and rating the staff training 4.58 out of 5. Four are already mediating, two are trained for next year, and one has selected its team.
In Stratford, Connecticut, both district middle schools launched the Pathway and ran seven mediations, and all seven reached an agreement.
The model itself is well established: across independent research, peer mediation reaches an agreement in roughly 93% of cases (Burrell, Zirbel & Allen, 2003).
I've been looking for something like this for over a decade.
Built for a district, not just a building.
One consistent system in every building.
Same stages, same process, same tools, so you support every school the same way.
A coached leader in each school.
One coordinator per building, coached one to one, at about two and a half hours a week.
Data you own.
Every tool runs in each school's own Google Workspace. You own your data and control access; we don't collect or store it. Not collecting it keeps FERPA simple, and our tooling aligns with NIST-CSF.
A way to pay for it.
Because we train and coach your staff, the Pathway qualifies for Title II professional-development dollars, and we'll walk your team through it.
How a pilot works, from your first day to your first mediation.
We do the heavy lifting, and the timeline runs from the day you start, whether that's the fall or in January.
- Build
You name a coordinator, we set you up.
We equip your coordinator with the curriculum, set up the systems on your own Google Workspace, and start their one-to-one coaching.
- Ignite
Your students get trained and start mediating.
Your coordinator recruits and trains the student team, and the first student-run mediations begin within a few months of your start.
- Grow
It expands and takes hold.
Students take on more of the program and train the next class, with our coaching all year.
From then on it's one coordinator, about two and a half hours a week, on the tools you already have. It's a trade, not an add-on: it absorbs the low-level conflicts your counselor already handles and heads off the escalations that eat administrator time.
From California to Connecticut.
- Hutto Middle SchoolHutto, TX14 mediators serving 746 students
- Wooster Middle SchoolStratford, CT14 mediators serving 538 students
- Flood Middle SchoolStratford, CT19 mediators serving 466 students
- Mt. Auburn PrepCincinnati, OH8 mediators serving 96 students
- Wibaux SchoolsWibaux, MT8 mediators serving 73 students
- Grundy Center Middle SchoolGrundy Center, IA7 mediators serving 164 students
- Connersville Middle SchoolConnersville, IN18 mediators serving 434 students
- Laton Middle SchoolLaton, CALaunching fall 2026
- Providence Classical AcademyBossier City, LAJoining 2026-27
- Desert Ridge AcademyIndio, CAJoining 2026-27
- Casey-Westfield Jr/Sr HighCasey, ILJoining 2026-27
- Dimmitt Middle SchoolRenton, WAJoining 2026-27
- South Junior High SchoolBoise, IDJoining 2026-27
- Beckwith Middle SchoolRehoboth, MAJoining 2026-27
- Parker Junior High SchoolFlossmoor, ILJoining 2026-27
- Armstrong Middle SchoolFlint, MIJoining 2026-27
Founded by a teacher and an engineer.
MediatorSPARK was founded by Samuel Rabkin, the New York City teacher whose student mediators resolved over 100 conflicts at his school, and Michael Mahoney, the engineer who builds the systems that make it last. We started the company to close the gap Samuel kept hitting in the classroom: there was no clear path to help a middle school sustain student-led conflict resolution year after year.
Questions district leaders ask.
Your students are ready to lead. Give them the Pathway.
We're partnering with districts that want their middle-schoolers resolving conflict and their leaders back to leading. If that sounds like your district, let's explore a pilot.