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PBIS Journey to Genius
Are you in the process of developing your PBIS Framework? Are you wondering where to start? You are in the right place. Join Dianne Ferrell and Diane Ruff as they share the ups and downs of creating and implementing a top-notch PBIS framework that has empowered their school to achieve Ohio recognition as a PBIS Gold School for 4 years. They will also share current issues in behavior management and how PBIS can help with those ongoing struggles. We would love to hear from you! Email us
@ pbisjourneytogenius@gmail.com
PBIS Journey to Genius
Episode 11 Positive Reinforcement Revolution: The PBIS Journey at Washington High with Renee Parr
Unlock the potential of positive reinforcement in education with Renee Parr, the passionate Assistant Principal of Washington High School, as she sheds light on the transformative effects of Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS). Through her lens, we explore an educational philosophy that emphasizes what students should do, not what they shouldn't, and how this has revolutionized the learning atmosphere at Washington High. Prepare to be inspired by Renee's heartwarming stories from her 32-year career that underscore the inherent goodness in students and the importance of celebrating their achievements, whether on the sports field or in career tech programs.
Venture behind the scenes of Washington High's journey from the initial adoption of PBIS to the establishment of a robust tier two team, marking their ascent from bronze to silver status in the PBIS framework. Renee opens up about the school's innovative strategies and unwavering commitment that have shaped a welcoming culture, where student engagement thrives. As we wrap up our conversation, we're not just left with a sense of admiration for the strides made at Washington High, but also with a blueprint for fostering positive changes in other schools. Join the discussion and share your thoughts on how PBIS can reshape the educational landscape, and stay tuned for more episodes that promise to challenge and change the way we think about schooling.
Welcome to PBIS. Journey to Genius. Are you in the process of implementing PBIS? Are you wondering where to start? You are in the right place. We are here to support you. Stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Welcome everyone. I'm Diane Farrell and I'm here with Diane Ruff and we are two educators from Minerva local school district and we have been working together for many, many years and we've been working for PBIS for about the past 14 years and we've done a lot of it in our school and it's gotten awards and recognition and we've started a podcast and with that podcast we hope to share current issues and behavior management today and how PBIS can help with those ongoing struggles. We are sharing this journey with you through this weekly podcast entitled PBIS Journey to Genius. So who we have in today?
Speaker 1:Diane, so today we are talking to Renee Parr, assistant principal at Washington High School, Maslin, Ohio. We are very excited to talk to a high school principal about PBIS.
Speaker 3:Okay, my name is Renee Parr and this is my 32nd year with Maslin City Schools. Born and raised in Maslin, left and went to Bowling Green and came right back and started teaching right after graduation, raised my son here in Maslin. He played football for the Maslin Tigers and I couldn't see myself being anywhere else. That's great, just a great area. I just can't believe 32 years have gone by so far.
Speaker 2:Well, diane and I can talk to you about that because we both have been in one school district. We talked about that earlier in our podcast one school district. Now I did not tell you this, but I retired last year after 35 years in Minerva local schools and Diane is approaching those numbers herself and we've been together all those years in one school district. So we've been friends and colleagues and all kinds of things. So we understand what it's like to come back to your home district and then love it so much that you stay there.
Speaker 1:Like we understand, and longevity. The fact that you've been there for all those years, I think, has probably benefited you in making some change for your school as the years have gone on.
Speaker 3:So you want to tell us just when your heart gets into it. Yeah, sure.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. You know, we have at the bottom of our guests. We ask them about an aha moment. So in all of your years, your 32 years in education, if you look back teaching, administration, whatever does some moment come to your mind that you go oh, this is why I teach, this is why I'm here. Do you have an aha moment you can think of?
Speaker 3:There's just many aha moments that keep reminding me why I have been doing this for 32 years and once you continue a few more until retirement, it's just when you talk to people and I'm sure you've heard this before too where they say, oh, I can never do that, I couldn't work with kids all day like that, and aren't they this and aren't they that? And they're all good. You know, there's so many aha moments that keeps reminding me that all kids are good. They just have bad days sometimes, like we all do, and you know the aha moments of seeing our kids succeed in.
Speaker 3:You know we just had the division two football champs. Our cheerleaders just took first place in a cheerleading competition. We have our career tech programs, where our kids they place at the state level and at the national level. Our speech and debate. We just started speech and debate back up and we already had someone that placed in the top three and a speech and debate tournament. So there's just so many things that just keep. When you come here every day, it's like, oh my gosh, they're achieving, they're wonderful, and yeah, we all have those days, but we've all had bad days. They're just all good kids that have bad days, and I think there's just so many aha moments that keep making me think about why I'm still in education and never got out of it.
Speaker 2:It's so great, renee, and to hear all those accomplishments at the high school level. Dinah spent our entire career at the elementary level, so not dipping our toes in that high school world. We just love it when kids learn to read okay, so that's exciting for us. But to hear what you've gone through, to see those older kids accomplished, I mean that is really special.
Speaker 1:That's really special to me. It really is, and I love the fact that you're a high school doing PBIS and that you have really implemented the tier one. So do you wanna talk a little bit about that, your tier one, and what you're proud of and just everything that you're working on?
Speaker 3:Yeah, our tier one. It became one of those things where other people were running PBIS and you heard about PBIS but you thought it was one more thing that you had to try to do and it's one more thing that the state wants us to do and you have to do it. And when you get past all of that and I finally I was the last person that wanted to do PBIS at a high school level, cause I at first also was one of those that thought, oh, this is more of an elementary thing and, by the way, we thank you for making them read or teaching them how to read, because when they get to us, we can do these other things with them.
Speaker 1:So we appreciate that. I love that you say that, because it's not an elementary thing, and I just think what you're doing at your high school is amazing, and it is for the high school level, it's for the middle school, so, yes, so keep on telling us more.
Speaker 3:And we actually, once we started to get into PBIS, as it not being another thing. This is the way we are going to do things. So you talk about behavior in schools every day. That's a topic every single day and, of course, discipline always comes up.
Speaker 3:But we just reversed it and, instead of talking about what you're not allowed to do here and what you shouldn't do here, we just started talking about things that you should do and the way you should be while you're here, just coming here and being a good person, being responsible for your schoolwork. You need to be responsible to have your Chromebook. You need to be respectful by putting your phone away while you're in the classroom. If you bump into somebody in the hallway, be kind and say excuse me or I'm sorry. If somebody falls, be kind and help them. We need you to have the AirPods out of your ears so you can hear your surroundings, so you can be safe.
Speaker 3:So it's a matter of just turning that mindset, of just turning everything around and saying this is how you should be and this is how you should do things, and then, hopefully, those other behaviors go away. I like that. So when we started thinking about it that way, it is a definite high school, because it's a lot of those soft skills that our high school kids need to start. A lot of them are going out and getting jobs, they're interviewing for scholarships, they're in the career tech field, so they're leaving graduation and going right into the workforce or when they're going to college, by learning how to be. Those are just life skills and the soft skills that you need when you have to work with other people. So it more or less became not another thing here, but this is how we should be doing things.
Speaker 2:I love that whole idea of changing your mindset. I really do like those words. Those are great words. What is your acknowledgement system whenever you are rewarding kids for making those great choices and doing the expectations you've put out?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was the hard part up here, because we do not have a budget. We have to do our own fundraising If there's anything tangible we want to purchase to be able to give to students. So that was a hard part. So we first started trying to think of ways we could acknowledge students that didn't cost money. So every month we have close to 95 staff members in our building and every month every staff member chooses a student of the month for following one of one or more of our expectations.
Speaker 3:Here at Washington High School, our expectations are be safe, be kind, be respectful, be responsible. So if you have a student in your classroom that has been exhibiting one or more of those expectations, they fill out a Google form and then we end up filling out. I wish I had one here just to show you off the top, but it says like right now, january, student of the month. It has a picture of the student, it has their name and it says why they were chosen Were they being respectful, were they being kind? And then we have plastic sleeves outside every classroom door. So we have 90 plus students then get acknowledged every month for following one of the expectations. That is so awesome.
Speaker 2:And it's so funny to see that the month it's just one. You know that's awesome.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we have them throughout the building and it's funny when kids come in high school kids, they walk around to their classes to see if they were chosen. And then you hear them talk and you're like I gotta see what I can do to be student of the month this month. I haven't gotten it yet and I want it. We have kids that have been chosen by two or three teachers for the same month and we say go for it If that student exhibited all of our expectations. You know. So it was noticed by three of their teachers. You know, go ahead and pick them. So we have students that get picked two or by two or three teachers each month and then when we look at the list we're really hitting a high number of students. So it's not based off of. You know, everyone has their honors program that are based off of academics and you have the sports and they get recognized for the sports or for our arts here with our being choir and our art programs. But this way any student can be recognized just by following one of those expectations in the classroom. So everyone has the opportunity for that.
Speaker 3:But we also, at the end of every marking period, we run a report of all students names that have not received, that were free from any infractions for that marking period. And then we draw about 40 names and we give out gift cards to those students. And then we acknowledge attendance is an issue and we do a Tiger 21. So every 21 days we'll pull about 10 students names that have had perfect attendance for those 21 days. And Bell stores were gracious enough, they gave us enough cards that we could do that every 21 days and we call it you, bell long here with the Bell stores.
Speaker 3:So every 21 days we run a report of students that have perfect attendance and we give out gift cards for that. You know we find that's what students up here at this level want. They want, you know, gift cards or gas cards or so we try to do what we can to meet that. And then our students turn around and they also pick a staff of the month every month. So we try to acknowledge our staff too. That, you know, chosen by our students only. There's nobody else in that one that just our students pick that.
Speaker 3:So we try to do as much acknowledgement as we can.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you know you are kids like high school. Kids care, they care about being acknowledged and you know their pictures on the wall getting the gas cards. That's huge. And because I've heard, like you know, pbis isn't for high school and kids don't care. Well, they certainly care and you, you are making that difference. I love it.
Speaker 2:They're going to say they don't care, but they do care. You know adults are going to say that too, they go, oh, I don't care. But we know, as adults, we like when we're recognized for doing good things, coming to work every day, turning in our stuff, you know being a good employee, so I think that's fabulous. I love the fact that you're acknowledging to those kids. And you know, don't think anything about trinkets and rewards with money, because Diane and I have talked about that in our previous podcasts. People tend to think, oh, I don't have enough money for PBIS because I can't buy all these things. But really we've even found elementary kids. It's not about the little trinket, it's about if they can do the joke of the day or if they can eat lunch with a friend or if they can be Facebook famous. You know those are like little things we have, but still it's all just acknowledgement, like you said, and it costs us no money, no money on the wall, you know outside.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's great, all right, so what are you up? Go ahead, what are you most proud of so far with your tier one, Renee.
Speaker 3:Probably the last two years receiving the bronze award from ODE, that we have done enough here to be recognized. It's not an easy process either. We never thought that we would get to that point of doing it and again, I love that. You said you know it doesn't take a lot of money. You know we do a couple of fundraisers here and there so we can get the gift cards and so forth. But you're exactly right, Kids just like to be told that they're doing a good job here and we appreciate them being here and we're glad that they're at school today. And you know we want you to be successful and really, too, it's just kind of having that system in place.
Speaker 3:I felt that our staff here they're great with building relationships with our students. Probably the hardest part is just you have to put it in a system. You have to have like an organized kind of like documentation of showing what that, what you're doing for the tier one. So probably the fact that we were able to get the majority of our staff here is involved with it. They're doing a lot of email and calls home to do more of the acknowledgement Because you know, like a high school kid, especially when you get close to a weekend if you get a call from a teacher saying how great they were in school, that helps if you want to stay out an extra hour later or get the car this weekend or be able to see your friends, sometimes just telling, calling home and letting their parent know. So it doesn't have to cost a lot of money.
Speaker 3:And the fact that we were able to do enough to submit an application and we've been bronze now two years in a row and this year we're we're forming our tier two team. So we're looking to go silver here pretty soon and put together a tier two where we can start to take a look at being a little more aligned with kind of drilling down to more where, where are those problems at, and kind of getting a different system in place to help those students out, kind of the repeated offenders. So now, what can we do to help the repeat offenders to, to figure it out so they're not missing school by getting they feel like they belong here and they are going to come to school every day. So probably the fact that we can go tier two now was pretty big for us.
Speaker 2:I like what you talked about about bringing the whole staff involved in that phone calls home. Our next talking point for you would be like if you had a tip that you would give to another school you've achieved bronze for two years now. Another school, especially a high school. What would be your tip to making it be a successful school-wide tier one initiative? What would be a tip you would give?
Speaker 3:Start small and slow, but stay consistent. Everybody's so busy. If you just say, okay, now, everybody, you start out your staff meeting in August, we're going to do PBIS this year. You got shut down right away. So we started out by talking about just more or less having conversation, asking the teachers what do you do now to acknowledge kids? If students in your class are doing good things, what are you doing? We just started talking that way about the acknowledgement. Then we shared hey, listen, there's something called positive behavior, intervention and supports, pbis, that we need to start taking a look at that. Many of you are already doing. So let's put a system now in place and put together what you're already doing and get it down on paper Then okay, well, let's take it a step further.
Speaker 3:We take those four expectations and we've made matrices and we've had students and staff help us. So when you're in our hallway, you'll see a matrices. And what does it look like when you're in the hallways? To be safe, to be kind, be respectful and be responsible. When you go into a restroom, what does that look like? To be safe, be kind, be respectful, responsible we had the secretaries help us. When students or parents or community members come into your office. What do you want your office to look like? How can you help your office to be kind, following all the expectations? Coach tutor in our weight room what's it look like? In there? We talked to the volleyball and basketball coaches and our PE teachers. What does it look like when you go into the main gym? What's it look like when you enter our building? So it's a matter of just that discussion piece.
Speaker 3:Then you start out the school year by just having some PD with the staff. Nothing in addition, but just kind of the let's look at things a little bit differently. So when you come up with classroom rules and procedures, let's put them all in a positive way. So you have to turn that don't speak when others are speaking. It's more or less let's be respectful while others are talking, kind of changing the whole idea when you just work slow into it.
Speaker 3:Then we added okay, we're going to do a student of the month. Every staff member is going to choose a student of the month and they just have to fill out a Google form. Then we ask okay, students, we want you to pick a staff of the month and just fill out this Google form. So you just got to take it slow, but you got to be consistent. I do morning announcements and every morning I say our expectations and I say what you can do as a student or a staff member to follow those expectations. We're always reminding them be responsible. Bring your charge Chromebook to school every day. We need you to be kind while you're walking in the hallways. You need to. So we just do a reminder every day and it just started to flow, but it takes time.
Speaker 2:That is a great advice. A great advice because, yes, if you start too fast, people will shut down on you. We've talked about that in previous podcasts too, so you have hit the points.
Speaker 1:You have Renee, I'm just curious. So you have been bronze for two years, so congratulations on that. When did you actually start this whole process? Was it two years, three years, four years ago when you first started talking about it?
Speaker 3:PBIS has really. It's been almost eight years. It's kind of been around that we really talked about it. And then, you know, changing your administration, you definitely have to have the backing from top down when you're doing a lot of this, and we definitely have that. So we probably really started hitting PBIS hard probably about five years ago. We're right before COVID and then, of course, and then the COVID hits, but that also gets a lot.
Speaker 3:We could come up with some more ideas of what we're going to do in the building when everyone comes back. So that did give us a little bit of time to do that. And then you know, just when everyone came back, okay, everybody, we need to be respectful of everyone's space. You'll be responsible if you're not feeling well, and you know, it just kind of rolled from there. And then we're, you know, with the help, of course, of our SST 9, you know Valpac and David Rogers and Debbie Bailey. They've been incredible with helping us to do that. And let us see, listen, you got this. You know, here are some things you can do differently and so forth. So we really, right before COVID, started hitting it hard and then we had a little setback and then we just kept going.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's yeah, that's, that's great. You know, we talked in an earlier podcast just about the longevity of having the same people keep people in place, and it sounds like a lot of your success, too, is the fact that you've been in this position for a while, so that you're that key person to keep the consistency going. And then you know, also the support of SST 9, we we have had a lot of support from SST 9 over the years and I really appreciate all they've done for us. So I just I think you have an amazing story. You know, I'm sure Diane and I are going to want to interview you again. I really hope you get silver. Are you applying this year for silver?
Speaker 3:We're hoping so. So we had a PD yesterday and we're putting some stuff in place, so we'll see, renee, actually was about your next steps for PBIS.
Speaker 2:but I would say you kind of answered that because you said you're looking for that tier two, three, tier three intervention, for you know those, those kiddos that are just not being able to control their behavior that much with with the tier one intervention. So would you say that your next step is trying to get that tier two, tier three going?
Speaker 3:Absolutely yeah, our tier one. We pretty much have under, you know, it's pretty much rolling, we feel, but we still have those repeat offenders. And so yeah, tier two, silver's our next endeavor.
Speaker 1:All right, renee, I think we're going to have to wrap this up. We're out of time, but it goes so fast. I hope that you know we want to certainly talk again, so we'll be in touch, because you've got a lot of good stuff going on at that high school and there's a lot of high schools that can definitely learn from you.
Speaker 2:So thank you, love the message from the high school. We love. We love it when high school joins, joins in. So thanks so much, renee, for being a guest and thank you, listeners, for taking the time to listen to our show.
Speaker 1:We would love to hear from you. Look for us on Facebook or Instagram, or email us at pbisjourney2genius at gmailcom.
Speaker 2:This is Diane Farrell, and I'm with.
Speaker 1:Diane Ruff and you've been listening to episode 11, episode 11, talking about tier one at the high school level on PBIS Journey to Genius.
