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  • Matt Hamilton/The Daily Citizen Chasity Puckett, 13, accepts a bus buck from her bus driver Michael Ray at Spring Place Elementary School Wednesday.

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May 21, 2010

Rewarding good behavior

Rachel Brown Dalton Daily Citizen

DALTON — SPRING PLACE — When Marcus Richardson noticed a student sitting in the hall quietly reading a book, he popped out a Tiger Buck as a reward.

The next day, nearly every student in his class had a book during that wait time as they all hoped to get one of the incentives redeemable for various toys and rewards as part of the school’s Positive Behavior Support program.

“It’s like a ripple effect,” Richardson, a sixth-grade English/language arts teacher at Spring Place Elementary explained. “You’ll see the entire room getting quiet.”

PBS is a state-sanctioned program piloted in five Murray County schools last year and implemented this year system-wide as well as on buses. Students with discipline issues will continue to be subject to the school system’s punishment procedures, but PBS is an effort to go beyond just punishing bad behavior to rewarding good behavior as well. The bus bucks or school bucks students receive are redeemable at each school’s spirit store for items ranging from homework passes and extra library time to pencils, erasers, small toys and T-shirts. At some schools, students who report good behavior over long periods of time are eligible for larger prizes, like bicycles.

Some $25,464 provided through a federal grant has been spent on the program since June 2009, according to program coordinator Allison Oxford. The funding comes through the federal Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act funds and stimulus funds. Some 15 percent of the nearly $2 million provided must be used on specific programs that support “academic and behavior progress” of students, Oxford said, and PBS is one of them.

“Our data has shown that this program has decreased office discipline referrals, resulting in increased instructional time on task,” Oxford said.

Bagley Middle School and Murray County High School, two campuses with the most year-to-year comparison data, both saw significant drops in the number of student referrals. At Bagley, the number of discipline referrals from September to March dropped from 330 last school year to 248 this year. During the same time at the high school, there were 1,025 referrals last year and 953 this year.

For both administrators and students, less time spent on discipline referrals means more time spent on education, officials say. MCHS officials estimate they’ve saved the equivalent of two days’ time for both administrators and students with the drop in referrals while Bagley officials estimate they saved five days’ of student time and three days for administrators.

Introducing the concept to a group of bus drivers at the school last month, PBS coordinator Jill Hyde said officials understand positive reinforcement won’t stop all bad behavior with all students. Yet it still encourages good conduct, she said.

“It’s not necessarily that we’re bribing them to behave,” Hyde added, “but the behavior that we expect may not be what they’re expected to do at home.”

Michael Ray, a bus driver at Spring Place Elementary, said he notices a big difference on days when he hands out bus bucks to select students for good behavior.

“It gives the kids something to look forward to,” he said. “You put 67 kids together — that’s a handful.”

Sixth-grader Chasity Puckett helps Ray on some days with handing out bus bucks.

“I think it works really good because kids actually sit down and stay in their seats,” she said. “It gets them quiet and gets them sitting down.”

Teachers at some schools began volunteering to ride buses this year, Richardson said, helping to cut down on the number of discipline issues drivers would normally face. There are also more definitive policies educators must follow before sending students to the discipline office, he said. Except for severe misbehavior, like fighting, an adult must first talk with the student. If the bad conduct continues, students must choose between a set of punishments while the next step before an office visit is a parent-teacher conference, he said.

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