Student behavior and student attendance have been massive concerns in schools all around the country over the past few years. Especially in the older grades.

Improving those two problems – even in incremental amounts – pays huge dividends to all of the various factors we use to determine school success. 

But what if you could do better than incremental improvements? 

Wirt County High School was able to decrease ODRs by 48% in just 3 months. Not only that, but attendance raised 4% during that same period. 

So how’d they do it? 

The Problem

First, let’s introduce you to the team at Wirt and dig a little deeper into what sets them apart from other schools.

First, let’s meet Callie. Callie Daugherty has been the Technology Integration Specialist for Wirt County High School in Elizabeth, West Virginia for the past 3 years. 

Like many of us, Callie and her team at Wirt have focused on academic recovery over the last few years. They have been desperately trying to “catch up” students who lost instructional time over the pandemic and have skill deficits as a result that the school needs to remedy.

Wirt was also not alone in noticing that attendance was dropping and student behavior was becoming a major issue... So they asked their community, "why?"

“Our students were telling us that it’s not fun to come to school anymore, and that’s why our attendance rate is going down.”

In order to improve behavior and get their students to enjoy coming to school again, Callie and her team had to get creative. They needed a new approach, and they needed a new tool to make it all happen. 

That new approach was a decision to base the discipline plan at Wirt around Positive Behavior Interventions and Support (PBIS), and the tool they chose was LiveSchool.

The Solution

What followed was a dramatic shift in how Wirt was operating as a school. They surveyed students and staff and learned that:

• Expectations and consequences were being applied inconsistently
• Students didn’t feel like those expectations were relevant to the real world
• School just wasn’t as fun as it was before the pandemic

As a result, Wirt decided to implement PBIS to  1) emphasize positive behaviors that were relevant to student success and 2) reinforce those behaviors with awards that students cared about. The leadership team predicted that PBIS would improve behavior, attendance, and the overall culture of the school.

The PBIS program focuses on student leadership and real-world skills that will pay dividends for their students as they enter the workforce.

Building a Relevant Behavior Rubric for High School

Callie and her team recognized that any plan put into place with high school students needs to have their support and participation to be successful. 

To support this, Wirt’s staff decided to change the responsibilities tasked to the student council at Wirt High School. For students to create the kind of school they wanted WCHS to be, they would need more than ceremonial leadership. 

The old student council was traditionally only responsible for planning homecoming.

Now the new council was being charged with, among other duties, creating the first draft of the new behavior rubric for WCHS.

By allowing elected members of their student council to create the first draft of their behavior rubric, Callie and her team ensured that the behaviors they were reinforcing through LiveSchool were relevant and important to student success.

Callie estimated that 80% of the final rubric was the original set of expectations drafted by her students. The categories they settled on were:

Citizenship

The students at Wirt felt that citizenship was important for them because it encouraged them and their peers to engage in their school community, develop empathy and understanding between each other, and encourage kindness in their interactions. They chose to measure citizenship through everyday actions like:

• Acts of Service
• Helping Others
• And Displaying Conflict Resolution Skills

Leadership

Wirt chose to focus on leadership as a school because they wanted to place greater emphasis on preparing students for life after high school. By building leadership skills they felt that their students would have advantages in post-secondary school, the military, or any trade they chose to pursue. They chose to measure leadership through everyday actions like:

• Accepting Criticism
• Displaying Leadership Initiative in Class
• Working Well With Others

Self-Management

Wirt also felt it was very important to emphasize independence and hoped that by measuring traits associated with self-management they could instill responsibility and accountability into their students. They chose to measure Self-Management through everyday actions like:

• Asking for Help
• Absence Notification
• Being On Time for Class

The Results

Teacher buy-in can be a notoriously sticky subject when rolling out new programs in schools. That wasn’t the case here. Because the program had so much student investment, teachers immediately saw the benefit. 

The rubric wasn’t a new set of standards they had to adjust to and force on students. This was a set of expectations their students felt they needed to adhere to succeed! 

It’s pretty easy to get on board when students collectively decide they want to improve in areas like:

• Conflict Resolution
• Accepting Criticism
• Displaying Leadership in Class
• Effectively using Class Time
• Telling the Truth

It’s an even easier sell when students are asking for your help in reinforcing those behaviors so they can help make school a better place for everyone.

Relevant Student Rewards

Most schools assign the job of sourcing rewards to staff members who have little time to carry it out – and often fewer funds than time! For rewards to be effective, they need to be appropriate to the grade level, and they need to be valued by your students. They focused on things that were low cost but would be coveted by their peers nonetheless. 

The daily options available to WCHS students through their LiveSchool Store were: 

• Leaving 5 Minutes early for Lunch
• Free Entry to a Sporting Event
• Missing Assignment Pass with Teacher Approval
• Detention Pass with Administration Approval

Your School's Turn

The system Wirt settled on to run their LiveSchool store is beautifully simplistic and is a template that can be easily applied to High Schools everywhere! 

The process is replicated on a bi-weekly basis and works like this:

1. Student Council members stop by the office to retrieve an iPad and tickets for rewards on their way to lunch.
2. They get their lunch and pull up the LiveSchool app on the iPad once they get seated.
3. Their peers know that in order to make purchases they need to stop by the Student Council table and check out with them using the app.

And that's it! Super simple and sustainable for the staff and students at Wirt! This also has the added benefit of creating more honest conversations around the effectiveness of the rewards being offered because students are much more forthcoming with opinions when speaking with a peer as opposed to a staff member.

To build a successful behavior program, Callie Daugherty and her team leaned on their students to identify the challenges that were inhibiting strong relationships between students and teachers to form. The results speak for themselves: the team reduced behavior referrals by 48% and attendance is already up 4% in just one semester of implementation. 

We’re proud to be partnered with leaders like Callie to help make this happen. When we emphasize and reinforce positive behavior, distractions are minimized, and students spend more time learning and growing.