Principal’s coffee- March 25
PBIS Meeting Notes
Annie Murphy Present- Head of Student Services at USD
Question Posed: What would success look like at your school for everyone, everywhere, every day?
Group answers: safety, connectedness, confidence, growth in relationships, ownership of the neighborhood and community, focus on learning and behavior outside of school.
Ms. Leamons: PBIS is a program that focuses on how to be safe at school. It has been around for years. A great deal of research and practice has gone into this program and this creates a system of support that allows students to grow into safe and responsible students.
Annie Murphy: Positive Behaviors Interventions and Support. This program developed out of University of Oregon and Annie was trained by one of the developers of the program. It changes the structure of schools. This is a data driven, decision making, multi-tiered framework. It established a social structure. Lietz was starting PBIS before COVID and COVID delayed the roll out of the program at USD.
– It is a 5 year process to develop.
– Referral data is collected, highlighting where problems are happening.
– Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs (physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem and self-actualization). PBIS addresses most of these domains.
– Risk Factors are anxiety, depression, trauma, environmental factors, thinking errors, inconsistent rules/expectations.
– Resilience Factors: life satisfaction and happiness, strong social relationships, building blocks of well being (gratitude, empathy,), Social Skills, Healthy interactions (minimal bullying and high support), Basic Needs are met.
– BIG IDEAS:
1.) The goal is to reduce exclusion and punitive strategies.
2.) Explicitly teach and acknowledge expected behaviors.
3.) Focus resources on building skills to help students succeed
4.) Provide consistent, instructional strategies for behavior.
Crista Leamons:
Values that came out of PBIS (PAWS)
Problem Solver
Act Respectfully
Wise Choices
Spread Kindness
Explicit Teaching:
– Prepare students for success by teaching them how to be successful.
Monitor and Acknowledge
– Paws Tickets, tell stories of success and reinforce (rallies and recognition).
Whether you look for the negative of the positive, you’ll find what you are looking for.
-Relationships thrive with a 5:1 ratio of positive reinforcement/interactions to punitive / negative interactions.
-Research shows that Children who struggle the most have 1 positive interaction to 23 negative interactions.
Teachers have been trained to share a story to explicitly share why the student is receiving the PAWS ticket (you’re getting a ticket because you shared so nicely and spread kindness).
5 Year Roll Out of the PBIS program (we are between year 2 and 3)
1.) Exploration/adoption
2.) Installation
3.) Initial implementation
4.) full implementation
5.) full implementation (increase efficiency).
20% of our students need some extra support to continue to grow these positive values and behaviors to be more successful.
Support/Correction: Process to responding to contextually inappropriate behavior.
1.) clearly defined behavioral expectations.
2.) Teachers working together to define behaviors and clarifying supports
3.) consistency across settings
4.) using data to inform next steps and monitor progress
5.) progressive discipline
6.) Lietz handbook page 21
Connecting Systems to Support all Students
– PBIS
– Activity Leaders/Recess Facilitation (we need more yard duty)
– Project Cornerstone
How do we connect systems and supports
1.) If you see something, say something.
2.) Tell a caring adult (staff. Parents, volunteers) to check in/ask for help.
3.) Contact Ms. Leamons at leamonsc@unionsd.org
How can families partner with us?
– Volunteer in Project Cornerstone, Clay and Art Vistas
– Join the Lunch Team by yard duty, lunch clubs, lunch games
– Speak up: Connect with your child’s teacher, connect with Ms. Leamons, community input.
Thursday lunch club is mindfulness and run by our mental health therapist.
Ms. Leamons asked what are some next steps we could take to promote success for everyone, everywhere, everyday.
Annie Murphy: All staff takes a PBIS survey showing how the staff is growing into the program.
Sarah Rizvi asked for disclosure of the data to parents.
Ms. Leamons: due to the pandemic we had an interruption of data collection but we have one year of baseline data.
Statistically, we could expect that:
20 percent of students need moderate support
5 percent of students need intense support
We are actually below the stats.
Psychologist and Leamons are first line of support in terms of brain storming how to support kids in the moderate level of support.
New Psychologist: Interviewed and offered and in contracts now. They may not start until fall.
We have a Behavior Certified Behavior Analysis who steps into help the the ones who need higher levels of support. Her name is Jackie. She supports teachers and students struggling with those intense 5 percent of behaviors.
USD does have some psych interns in the district and the district partners with some universities with school psych programs. If we had enough in the pipeline we could try to funnel some towards Lietz if we get a psychologist to supervise them.
Meagan Serra: Meagan is a mental health professional at Darmtouth Middle School and a Lietz Parent. At Dartmouth the data showed that there was a subset of students struggling but to staff it could feel a bit more globally. Meagan highlighted that things can feel intense on the ground but from a bird’s eye view, the numbers might show actually there isn’t a higher report of incidents.
Meagan observed the kids on campus last week and gave examples of how adults were able to monitor and implement strategies to support students who were engaging in potentially unsafe behaviors.
– Parents can help educate their kids on having empathy for children who may be struggling.
Ms. Leamons:
How do staff support kids on the receiving end of aggression:
-Teachers comes in and checks in with students who were on the receiving end of aggressive behavior.
– Teachers will notify Ms. Leamons if there have been multiple issues
-A Mental Health counselor may be called into speak to the student.
– Low level items where no one got hurt is something teacher handles. If the student ends up in the office with the health clerk, parents will be notified. -Crista can offer the student a facilitated conversation where the victim can share their voice with the aggressor.
Annie Murphy: One issue is that kids don’t tell us in the moment what is happening and it is a little difficult to go back and collect data on the incident.
Nancy Huang: How do we prepare kids to go from K playground to the bigger playgrounds?
Leamons: First grade team helps facilitate this. Often first graders are wandering around near their own classrooms and activity leaders give them structured games to participate in. Also older grades are on the playground at a different time from younger grades. Playground is also divided into upper and lower grades.
Ms Leamons: Kids who tend to have trouble at recess are coached by staff/Leamons to find an activity/space during recess.
Yard duty and activity leaders are paid positions: $20/day. You don’t have to commit to a specific schedule. School provides support and training.
Sarah Rizvi: It would build trust with families if the victim’s parents can be notified earlier.
Jasmin Canty: Gave an example of how teachers have helped resolve classroom conflicts.
Ms. Leamons: It is partially up to teacher discretion to see if the scenario was worth notifying parents about or if it was resolved. Sometimes teachers think it was resolved and parents can email them to let them know more support is needed.