New discipline system coming to Bibb County schools

Thirteen schools across the Bibb County school system are rolling out a new program to try to curb the number of student disciplinary referrals and suspensions.

It’s called Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports. The school board heard about it at Tuesday’s meeting.

The new system is designed to use the schools’ discipline data to look at the big picture, then come up with solutions for preventing student suspensions where it can.

For example, if the data show a lot of students getting referrals during a transition period -- moving from class to class, say -- at a certain time or in a certain place, the teachers can figure out what needs to be done.

In some cases, it might be that certain areas showing a high percentage of discipline referrals lack teacher supervision and just need more coverage.

Michele Flowers, Bibb’s PBIS coordinator, said often a quick solution can be found, and it’s usually a logistical problem, not just a student’s fault.

One of the system’s goals is to first look at what environmental circumstances might be causing or contributing to the behavioral problem; then, if an environmental adjustment doesn’t work, focus on the individual student.

Overall, the number of in-school and out-of-school suspensions in Bibb County has decreased since the 2010-11 school year, according to information from the Georgia Department of Education. But “other discipline actions” -- such as before or after-school detention or sitting in the counselor’s office -- have increased by more than 200 percent (493 in 2010-11 and 1,526 in 2013-14).

PBIS “is hopefully a helpful framework that will reduce the number of any types of behavioral problems, which are directly correlated to our academic performance,” said Edward Judie, the system’s deputy superintendent for student affairs.

Another part of the PBIS program is having each school set up expectations for how students should behave, then acknowledging them with different rewards for following those expectations.

Funding for the program comes from Georgia Appleseed, a nonprofit group focused on fixing the root causes of social problems -- especially the kind of problems that lead juveniles to early trouble with the justice system. The group committed $22,000 for one year.

With help of Georgia Appleseed’s analyses of discipline data, the school district was able to identify 13 schools struggling with discipline issues and focus their efforts at those locations first. The schools are Appling, Miller, Bloomfield, Rutland, Weaver and Howard middle schools, Northeast, Central, Southwest, Rutland, Westside and Howard high schools, plus the Hutchings career academy.

“We’re very pleased and happy in partnership with Georgia Appleseed and the state Department of Education, who’ve really worked closely with us to help us identify these schools that need the assistance the most,” Judie said. The group is “galvanizing the community around what PBIS is about” and providing a data platform called School Wide Information System to allow school administrators to look up and keep discipline data for their school daily.

Before the new information system, indexing the data was a tedious process, which was possible but difficult to do for administrators. The new system will help the schools identify where the problems are so they can act before discipline problems get out of control.

“That (system) will tell us the number of students that we have that are getting a discipline referral, by name,” Flowers said. “It will tell us the location that they’re having the issue in, the time of the day, with who, where -- and it gives you everything.

“So when we sit down as a team, the principals sit down with their leadership teams and are trying to discuss where are the issues, they can pull that information,” she said. “It comes out as graphs, charts and they can visually see, ‘Oh, we’re having a problem with the ninth-graders on the fourth hall at 3’o’clock,’ and then they can make those decisions that are going to quickly, hopefully, change that situation so that we’re not suspending kids.”

In 2010-11, the school district had 265 permanent expulsions, an abnormally high number compared to the following years.

Judie said it’s “unacceptable to put that many kids out of school,” calling it a crime to the community.

Having held the same job in the state of Washington, he added, “If you came to my state and I saw permanent expulsion, I would not let you in my school system. You’re not acceptable going into any school system in the United States of America that I know of. Permanent, to me, has a very negative connotation on it that you’ve done something egregious.”

Flowers said PBIS is more than changing a school culture. It’s about changing a community and a lifestyle.

Added Judie, “As most educators have committed themselves to, we’re in the business of keeping kids in school -- and keeping kids in schools to learn and graduate and become productive citizens of our community. And that is what we would like to see for every kid in Bibb County.”

This story was originally published January 15, 2015 at 5:43 PM with the headline "New discipline system coming to Bibb County schools ."