Park Elementary School, which received its notice just last month as a silver award winner in the implementation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program, uses the Praxis Institute’s PAX Good Behavior Game as part of the school’s PBIS practice.
Park Students Earn Party
Park Elementary School, which received its notice just last month as a silver award winner in the implementation of the U.S. Department of Education’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports program, uses the Praxis Institute’s PAX Good Behavior Game as part of the school’s PBIS practice.
PAX is a universal preventive intervention designed to encourage self-regulation, self-management and self-control in students. According to Praxis Institute, the strategies employed by PAX create a nurturing environment, positively affecting the electrical, neurochemical, neural connectivity and epigenetic makeup in youngsters.
“I use table points and class stars within my classroom to tie into our reward system,” said second-grade teacher Jennifer Kreuz. “My students can earn five points as a table to get a star and can also earn a class star as a whole class for a group effort like traveling quietly in the hallway.”
At Park, positive behaviors are identified as Park Behaviors, and students demonstrating this behavior are referred to as Park Leaders. Among other strategies, the school’s implementation of the PAX system includes holding up two fingers to form the peace sign.
“We use that sign throughout the school for students to take a deep breath and prepare to listen,” said Kreuz.
Once Kreuz’ class earns 20 stars, the students vote on which type of party they want to have, and she ensures that the party is implemented as soon as possible. Recently, students had accumulated enough positive behavior stars to earn a party of their choice.
“My class chose to have stuffed buddies for a day,” said Kreuz. “Their other choices included a board game, pizza or pajama party. I provided popcorn and juice because what is a party without snacks.”
Book Loaning Generosity
When Timothy Velotta, now in his third year as principal of Chardon Middle School, began planning the school’s 2019-20 One School One Book program, he reached out over the miles for assistance from a familiar school in hopes of saving costs for CMS’ PTO.
To ensure success of OSOB, a nationwide program that is intended to boost literacy and promote a sense of community, a school will typically need to secure its own funding to provide each student and staff member with their own personal copies of the book plus related materials for group use.
Mr. Velotta’s previous experience as assistant principal at Brecksville-Broadview Heights Middle School had included development and implementation of a OSOB program centered on the book “Rules” by Cynthia Lord. With plans for “Rules” to serve as CMS’ OSOB book for the current school year, Mr. Velotta contacted BBHMS in hopes of borrowing books and Team Day materials.
And, BBHMS certainly delivered.
“We borrowed everything from them – over 900 books plus materials for team day,” said Mr. Velotta. “We just had to tweak it to make sense for our grades four through seven population and gather Team Day materials for one more grade level since we had enough for three grade levels at BBHMS.”
The county-to-county sharing was such a success that Mr. Velotta said he is now reaching out to other middle school principals to see if they could all work together to create a rotation of OSOB supplies and regularly share amongst each other to save costs on the initiative for all.
“Without BBHMS’ support, we would have had to ask the CMS PTO to spend $4,000 on books plus an additional $600 on materials for Team Day,” said Mr. Velotta. “Thank you to our colleagues and friends at BBHMS for lending us over 900 books and lots of supplies for CMS’ successful OSOB program.”
