Our Bright Spot this month comes from Trinity Elementary school in New Rochelle, where administrators and staff are working to implement the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) framework with fidelity.  Look at the positive impacts they have achieved!

What were students able to achieve?

Office discipline referrals during the first two months of this school year have decreased by over 50% since the same two months last year, from 190 to 89. Students are engaging in appropriate behaviors and are not losing opportunities to socialize and interact positively, especially during recess.

What practices or systems made this possible?

The principal and PBIS team identified recess as a source of frequent behavioral incidents and office referrals.  They changed a number of practices and systems that resulted in significant improvement:

* Instead of having all students in a grade go to recess together, students are grouped by class for recess.

* Instead of having all monitors supervise all recess areas, each class now has an assigned monitor .

* Each day, each class has a designated play area and play equipment.

* The principal is training all monitors in active supervision practices.

What can we learn from this Bright Spot?

One of the critical components of the PBIS framework is on-going collection and analysis of data across school settings.  When this is done well and consistently, specific changes in practices and systems can be tried and tested to identify and sustain improved student outcomes.