Kindness Matters

Over the past several years, we have worked to develop a positive climate for both students and staff through the use of a Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support approach (PBIS). This approach is based on teaching and reinforcing kind school behaviors as well as tracking how well our teaching and reinforcing of behaviors is working through the analysis of data by school-wide PBIS teams. Our goal as the District PBIS Implementation Team is to increase our students and staff’s kindness to self, kindness to others, and kindness to our environments.  Why kindness?  Because kindness is contagious!  Check out these short videos about how our brain craves kindness:

As we increase kindness across the district, we will decrease the behaviors that interfere with positive environments.

To continue improving our overall school climate, our district PBIS Team has made a few important decisions. 

First, as we prepared for students to return to in-person learning last school year, we learned that each school had its own expectations. While all of the expectations were appropriate, having different expectations for each school can be confusing for: our families with children in multiple schools, students when they move between schools, and staff who travel between schools. As a result, we determined a need for common expectations districtwide anchored in kindness: Kindness to Self, Kindness to Others, and Kindness to our Environment. 

 

Our focus as a district team was to create the framework for PBIS that includes guidance for:

We are excited to have a PBIS framework! As you read through our digital manual and work with your teams to develop your school-specific implementation of PBIS, you will likely recognize artifacts our schools have developed over the last several years. Thank you for sharing your work and what you have learned. You have helped us immensely as a team to learn and develop our district-wide approach to PBIS!