Elementary School Experiment with Positive Behavior Gets a Thumbs-Up

From the moment you walk into Shady Spring Elementary School, you can't miss them.
Here they are, hundreds of them, encircling the front office in blues and reds and greens and yellows. There they are, thousands more, forming a great rainbow snaking down a hallway. And here they are again - in paint this time - gracing a wall or partition, each with a student's name affixed.

In all, nearly 92,000 multi-hued paper cutouts of handprints have blossomed at Shady Springs since last fall, a project that represents far more than just fanciful artwork. Each paper hand, laboriously stuck to a surface at the school, represents a single student's act of positive behavior.
"Rewarding good behavior [based on the school's code of conduct] involves giving students a coupon in the shape of a hand," says Susie Swindell, a resource teacher in the BCPS Office of Special Education. The result at Shady Spring, she adds, "is really an amazing sight to behold!"

The project has proven itself as a handy and effective way not only to reduce disciplinary problems at the school but also to promote civility and good behavior. Since the program began, Ms. Swindell says, the school has experienced a 30 percent decrease in discipline referrals and a 30 percent decrease in out-of-school suspensions.
Those numbers don't come from the hands-on rewards system alone, however. The project is part of a larger initiative at the school called the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) program, which is sponsored by the Maryland State Department of Education. As a framework for developing and maintaining school-wide discipline, PBIS uses data to influence decision-making, develop systems to support staff behavior, and implement practices to support student behavior.

In May, the Maryland PBIS Leadership team conducted an evaluation to determine the number of seven PBIS critical features that are in place; Shady Spring scored a 97 percent on the evaluation.

Shady Springs Principal Marilyn Audlin sees other benefits as well. The PBIS program at the school has resulted in 58.3 hours of recovered instructional time this year, time that otherwise would have been spent dealing with disciplinary problems in the classroom.

"It's allowing teachers to teach and children to learn," Ms. Audlin says. "The response has been just phenomenal from our staff and from our students."
But the results at Shady Spring are no sleight of hand. Just around the corner from the front office, school guidance counselor Wendy Carver acts as head hand wrangler for the school. When teachers, bus drivers, instructional assistants, or administrators need additional hands to, um, hand out, she's the woman to see.

On a recent morning, she was assisting second-graders as they dipped their hands in paint and affix their personal hand-prints to an interior wall. "The response has been unbelievable," she says. "If a child is acting up, all a teacher has to do is hold up a paper hand and the behavior improves. Everyone has bought into this in a big way."
That's as clear as the back of one's hand. Since August, teachers at Shady Spring have been handing out an average of 15,000 hands a month - translating to 15,000 acts of kindness, courtesy, and good behavior. Even bus drivers request hands to give out to well-behaved riders.

"Shady Spring should be commended for its PBIS program," says Ms. Swindell. "They have really had an amazing year."

For Shady Springs, everybody - put your hands together!

Story and Photos by Charles Herndon Communications Officer