What makes your team work so well?  Please discuss in detail (e.g., what is your administrator’s role on the team, how is staff represented, etc.)? One of the main reasons our team at Windmill Point works so well is because we have been fortunate enough to have the majority of our core team members for the past four years!  Our members' experiences and expertise are very diverse and bring to the team a positive perspective that is reflected in our school wide PBS plan.  Our core team members include our acting principal, district coach, guidance counselor, pre-K ESE teacher, a primary and an intermediate teacher, media specialist, behavioral analyst and an ESE teacher. Each member's input is valued and welcomed; we pride ourselves in the open communication and problem solving skills we share.  We also have a supportive peripheral team that meets once a month; their input and ideas are an integral part of our decision making. The enthusiasm of our administration, particularly our acting principal, is the driving force behind our team.  Under her leadership, we have progressed this year to begin implementation of Tier 2 and Tier 3 programs to  meet the needs of our more "frequent flyers". Her belief in PBS guides us to continually review data and modify our plan to truly embed PBS into our curriculum and the culture of our school.  Another reason we work so well is because we all truly believe in the PBS philosophy and serve as positive role models for our students and staff. For example, we all use the same PBS "terminology", which is used by the entire staff and consequently, taught to all students.  "ROAR" expectations (Respect, Obey safety rules, Act Responsibly, Ready to Learn) in the classrooms and in various locations throughout the school are taught beginning the first day of school and are reinforced the entire year.

How does your team use data to make decisions on campus? Part of every core team meeting involves analyzing the data with our PBS coach. During these meetings, we look for trends or spikes in behavior and problem solve how to alleviate those occurrences. For example, we are aware that the spikes usually occur in December and during FCAT testing.  In order to keep students focused on instruction and our ROAR expectations, we have a holiday raffle and a testing raffle.  Students can purchase raffle tickets with their wildcat cash to win items such as class pizza parties, class free recess time, class ice cream parties, bikes and a Play Station. These raffles have been quite successful, as it keeps our students focused on making positive choices!  Our team is also aware that the end of the year behavior problems almost always cause a spike in behavior, but we have alleviated the number of these incidents for the past four years by hosting an annual PBS carnival, in which students pay for events with their wildcat cash. Students and staff, alike, look forward to this event each year, as it makes the end of the year less challenging and stressful for all!  Staff surveys are conducted confidentially twice a year as well, to help us determine areas we need to improve upon.  We also use the data to identify the frequent flyers and determine if there is a pattern of behaviors in a particular grade we need to target. For example, in January it was noted that there was a higher frequency of referrals with our fourth and fifth graders.  With the assistance of our guidance counselor, an anger reduction training program was initiated to meet the needs of these students.  By reviewing data for the past four years, we have observed a continual below average rate in referrals and an improvement in student achievement.   

How do you share information with the rest of your faculty (e.g., emails, newsletters, meetings, etc.)?  How often do you share this information? One of our goals this year was to improve the frequency of communication with staff in regards to PBS decision making and data sharing.  Our facilitator or acting principal emails monthly data results to all staff members to reinforce how their continual support for PBS is making such a difference with our students.  We have outstanding results this year and feel it is important for staff to be aware that what they do on a daily basis is really working!   We also post the data results as a visual reminder in the teachers' mailbox room and in the two faculty lounges. Twice a month, PBS meeting minutes are emailed to all staff members, as well, as detailed memos regarding school wide events.  Data is also discussed at faculty meetings to share our success and determine areas to improve upon; staff is always encouraged to voice their ideas and/or opinions.  Current PBS events are also highlighted at faculty meetings to clarify any questions.  Our ROAR expectations are reviewed every day during the morning announcements and our ROAR posters are in every classroom, the cafeteria and the hallways as another visual to keep students and staff focused on positive expectations.  In addition, we have had three staff orientations this year; one at the beginning of the year specifically for new staff members; a back to school review for all staff and another mid-year orientation for new staff members which was also opened to any staff members who wanted to attend. 

What do you see as the overall strengths of your team?  Please provide details.  Our team truly believes in the PBS philosophy; our focus is always on improving student achievement here at Windmill Point.  We understand that in order to do so, we need to address the expectations and behavior of our students simultaneously.  We focus our energy on positive ways to provide the most beneficial learning environment for our students and staff.  As a result, for the past two years we have achieved a school-wide grade "A".  Our team has excellent communication skills and we value each person's opinion and ideas.  The leadership under our acting principal and facilitator keeps our team motivated and enthusiastic, always focused on our goals and problem solving in a positive format.  This year we also wanted to educate parents more about PBS, so in every parent letter that goes home, we include information about PBS and how we use it in our school.As a team, we are always striving to reach the next level and address all the needs of our students.  This year one of our goals was to focus more on the needs of our tier 2 and 3 students.  We have worked together to review programs and brainstorm ways to make them work with our limited resources and available staff.  Our Tier 2 programs include group interventions (such as anger management), Second Step and Skillstreaming programs.  Student consideration is based on student referral data, teacher recommendation and student study recommendation. Our Tier 1 interventions include a daily “check in and check out” plan and a student/staff mentoring program.  We are in the process of expanding these programs for next year and generating accountability tools to show the success of each program.

In what areas of PBS does your team excel (e.g., rewarding students/staff, teaching expectations, data-based decision-making, etc.)?  Please provide details below.  Our core team does an excellent job educating staff about our PBS plan.  Before school begins, we have a new staff orientation in which we provide a more in depth explanation and training; we also have a staff refresher at the beginning of the year.  Due to our increasing numbers and staff turnover mid-year, we also felt the need to educate staff that did not have any training and held a mid-year training as well.  We currently have 110 staff members employed at our school and an overwhelming majority "buys into" the plan, which is one of the main reasons it works so well!  According to our mid-year staff survey over 95% of  the staff reported they were glad to be working in a PBS school and noted significant changes in student behavior, as well as increasing focus on instruction.  Our plan is totally inclusive of any district employee who works with our students. For example, bus drivers use our wildcat cash on their buses to reward students for adhering to “BUS” expectations and maintenance staff use it to reward classrooms for maintaining cleanliness in their classroom.  Our support staff, such as psychologist, social worker, occupational or physical therapists also utilize our system as well. Another area we feel we excel at is utilizing the data reports to drive our decision making that will best benefit student academic progress.  As mentioned above, we were aware last year that we needed to begin addressing the needs of our more "frequent flyers" and this year we have begun to implement programs to educate our Tier 2 and Tier 3 students on coping skills, anger management and prosocial skills.  This is our second year utilizing the PBS Store Catalog, in which students "shop" through a catalog and use order forms to place their orders from the store.  The orders are then sent to the store where volunteers fill the orders.  This tool has proven to be a support for life skill that students are learning as well from managing money, determining if they have enough for the selected items to filling out forms.  Our core team also excels in respected open communication with it's member's and the entire staff.  We understand that our staff needs the reinforcement and encouragement, as well and we provide this with our "gold cards" in which staff acknowledges other staff members for positive things.  The cards are then drawn weekly and the winners choose a prize from our staff store!  We have observed that just the simple acknowledgement makes such a difference in a person's attitude!

Discuss the changes you have seen on campus since PBS implementation (e.g., data, climate, morale, etc.).  As we end our fourth year with PBS, we have observed through student behavior and data results that our referral rates continue to be way below the average number of referrals for a school this size.  At this point in the year (May 08), we average .7% for Tier 2 students!  We pride ourselves in this accomplishment and can attribute that to some of the new programs we have implemented this year.  One new addition to our students' schedules is that our guidance counselors are going into classes as part of the resource rotation.  These classes focus totally on positive behavior and choice making regarding respect, responsibility, honesty, cooperation and perseverance.  This has led to students' increased pride in their work and decrease in referral rates.  This was evident in our first "Evening of the Arts" program, where student work was displayed throughout the school. Many students and their parents appeared the night of the event and were extremely proud of their artwork.  Instilling confidence and pride has been a wonderful outcome of this program.  As mentioned, all the staff speaks the same PBS terminology, therefore keeping the same language for our students so they clearly understand the expectations. This has helped to keep the referral rate down in our school.  Utilizing our data and being aware of spikes during certain times of the year has also helped us reduce the number of potential referrals because we implement programs that help students remain focused on positive behavior choices. We have just begun the process of implementing Tier 2 and Tier 3 programs and hope to have data to support a positive change in our selected students behavior.  We were very pleased with our mid-year staff survey, as that confirms for the core team that we are meeting the needs of our students and staff members. One outcome that we are pleased about concerns the types of rewards that are provided to our students, particularly our intermediate students. We have observed through our raffles and teachers' observations, that our older students are more motivated by the "social" rewards they can earn for their classes (ie, ice coream/pizza parties, recess time).   These student have moved away from the "I" want phase of development to the "we" want phase of development, thinking what's best for the whole group and not just for themselves.

What are some obstacles that your team has had to overcome?  Please explain the process for overcoming these hurdles below. Due to the demographics of our school, we not only have an increasing number of students this year, but we have a very tranisient population as well.  This has led to the challenge of educating many students throughout the year about PBS.  Therefore, we have a "student ambassador" in each classroom that teaches these new students about our PBS plan, expectations, activities, store, rewards, etc.  This has taken the continual burden off the teacher and rewards those students who are always following the expectations!  We have also had to hire new teachers throughout the year that did not receive the initial PBS trainings.  Because PBS is such an integral part of our school environment, we felt it was of utmost importance that these new teachers receive the same training. Therefore we conducted a mid-year training that was quite helpful and clarified some questions they had as well.  Another obstacle we have faced this year is trying to implement our Tier 2 and Tier 3 programs with limited resources and availability of staff.  We are very aware of how important it is to meet the needs of these students in particular and have spent many hours brainstorming different ways to begin this next level of support.  Not having available resources and staff meant we had to modify some programs to meet our capability needs and we had to rely heavily on our guidance department to implement these programs, which was an extra responsibility for them.  One obstacle we are still facing is providing rewards in our school wide store for the intermediate grades.  While we are aware that the focus should shift from the monetary rewards to social rewards, we are limited in what we can provide due to the stringent instructional day.  In order to meet their needs somewhat this year, classroom teachers have tried to build in more social times, like extra drawing time or sit with a friend for the day and we have included more social rewards in our school wide raffles, such as pizza parties, free recess or ice cream parties.  Due to budget cuts and an increasing student population, we had to face the challenge of funding our PBS program more this year.  As a result, we had three fundraisers that were able to support our school store and our end of the year carnival.