Positive Behavior Intervention and Support (PBIS)
Forestville Elementary School
Positive Behavior Support is a systems approach to creating safer and more effective schools. Positive Behavior Support focuses on improving a school’s ability to teach and support the positive behavior of all students. Each school’s Positive Behavior Support Leadership Team designs, implements, and evaluates specific school-wide practices that are for ALL students and ALL staff in non-classroom settings. Positive Behavior Support IS NOT a program or curriculum. It is a team-based process for systemic problem-solving, planning, and evaluation.
School-wide Positive Behavior Support is being implemented today in schools throughout the United States and Canada. Each of these schools invested in training on Positive Behavior Support practices, formed a school-based leadership team that co-ordinates implementation and actively monitors the impact of implementation on student outcomes (Sugai & Lewis-Palmer, 2005).
As one of these Positive Behavior Schools in FCPS, a task force of administrators, specialists, and teachers from Forestville attended an FCPS sponsored training session in the summer of 2007. They worked together over the summer to introduce a Positive Behavior Support Initiative at Forestville.
The effort focused on reinforcing good behavior to increase its reoccurrence. A trademark of Positive Behavior Support is the issuing of Cardinal Compliments, to individual students or classrooms, to recognize respect for self, respect for others and respect for the environment. Extremely popular, there were over 14,000 compliments issued in each of the first three years of the initiative.
Each year the Positive Behavior Support Committee identifies an area or areas of the school for Continuous Improvement. Past efforts have focused on Hallway behavior, Safety and security on the school buses, bullying, and sustainability of the process. In each of the areas identified we have followed a collective inquiry approach to precisely define the problem, and then engaged in a Plan-Do-Study Act implementation process to obtain the desired outcomes.
If you would like more information on Forestville’s Positive Behavior Support system please contact Susan Kim at sskim1@fcps.edu