The Evergreen Park School District 124 Board of Education received an update on the Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) program.
Rebecca Tyrell, the district’s Student Support Services provider, presented the update during the board’s Jan 18 meeting, streamed on YouTube. She pointed out during the presentation that the district’s PBIS program is a foundation for developing social emotional health and behavioral habits to create a positive learning atmosphere.
“So we're adapting this framework, we've been meeting and we recruited our other community members,” Tyrell said during the session. “We're meeting monthly. We're really looking at our inventory of our current behavioral, social, emotional initiatives, our data collection. We've partnered with the Center for Self-Actualization. We have our clinicians in each building, but also adding them to our team so when we start looking and analyzing data, they're really integral parts of that.”
Tyrrell noted that District 124 has been a PBIS school for years, and every school in the district has a PBIS team that meets regularly to discuss the program and future plans. It focuses on supporting emotional and social health of students, teachers and staff, particularly in a post-pandemic educational environment.
Tyrell also noted that the teams will be revamped, and the district has been working with Midwest PBIS to develop a district and community leadership team. As part of this effort, building principals have held regular meetings to discuss the latest PBIS data, and they report back to Midwest PBIS and offer an assessment of their school’s implementation.
The leadership team has also restarted other aspects of the program, begining with Tier 1 and moving toward Tier 3.
Board members asked how the data would be gathered during the reboot and questioned how the program would operate even as it continues to collect data now.
“We are talking about looking at attendance data,” Tyrrell said. “There are so many components we don’t look at that go into the social and wellness, including nurse visits can be used to gather data.”
Board members also offered their support, noting that a lot of planning effort has gone into the program to date, but action has been minimal. Tyrell agreed with that assessment.
“It is a labor-intensive process,” she concluded. “It really gets you thinking about what you could be looking at.”