The Challenge
Problems with student discipline and behavior were becoming serious at Boones Mills Elementary School, in Boones Mills, VA. They were disrupting routine and hindering academic achievement. With a transient student population and a growing number of kids, teachers were spending so much of their time correcting minor infractions that they couldn’t effectively teach.
“I was handling lots of discipline for things that didn’t need to happen,” says principal Amy Shaver. “Students didn’t have the vocabulary or strategies to resolve their problems, and teachers didn’t have the resources to address it. There was inconsistency throughout the building and a great deal of instruction time being missed.”
With academic results suffering, principal Shaver and her leadership team recognized that strong action needed to be taken. The team took note of other schools in the district that had successfully implemented Success for All, with its proven cooperative learning strategies, and Getting Along
Together (GAT), SFA’s conflict resolution program. GAT’s social-emotional learning strategies helped students manage their behavior, decrease conflicts and increase receptivity to learning.
Boones Mills voted to implement GAT, in 2016, and also adopted another behavior management program, Positive Behavioral Interventions & Support.
The Results
Before the end of the first year of the Success for All GAT implementation, Boones Mills Elementary School started seeing remarkable results. Over the previous year, the school saw acts of disrespect decrease from 41 to two, physical altercations, from 25 to six, acts of vandalism, from eight to two, and threats made, from 21 to zero.
This amounted to a 95% decrease in disrespect referrals, a 76% decrease in physical altercations and a 75% decrease in vandalism.
Now there is a powerful new culture at Boones Mills. Students are able to resolve problems on their own, often walking the Peace Path without staff knowing there was ever an issue. Teachers have changed how they interact with students and appreciate the fact that they have more time to teach, and spend less time dealing with behavior and discipline issues. Many have reorganized their classrooms for the entire day, from rigid rows into groups, and have embraced more cooperative learning.
Even though the school still has a high number of transient students, their coming and going is not as
distracting as it once was. With the GAT system in place, new students quickly learn the expected skills
and behaviors.