Transcript: Evidence-Based Behavior Systems and Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports in Alternative Settings
Rebeca Cerna:
Okay, so we are going to go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining our session on evidence-based behavior systems and positive behavior interventions and supports in alternative settings, a topic that can lead to more inclusive and effective education experiences for students. Hello, my name is Rebeca Cerna and I serve as a director of the Resilient Healthy Schools and Communities area at WestEd. And today’s session is being hosted in partnership with the California Department of Education. If you haven’t already done so, feel free to share in the chat where you’re joining us today. And today’s session, we have a couple of housekeeping items. Participants will remain muted with their video off. Participants are invited to engage in the chat, so thank you for those. If anyone shared where you’re joining us from in the chat. And we have two guest speakers, and as they’re sharing their content, feel free to submit their questions in the Q and Q feature at the bottom of your Zoom bar. This Zoom session, this webinar session, I should say, is being recorded and will be posted on the California Safe and Supportive Schools website. And if you’ve registered for this webinar, you will receive an email once it’s posted, along with the transcript. In the chat, we will also be sharing slides, a Google folder. And in the Google folder there’s a link that is called slides, and that’s the handout of the copy of the slides that we’ll be sharing today. The folder also includes a resources that are mentioned during today’s session.
So this session is hosted as part of the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center, and we provide technical assistance supports to Stronger Connection grantees and also to LEAs across the state. And we focus on areas related to safer and healthier learning environments, positive school climates, and mental health to name a few. Since we’ve launched, we have gathered feedback on potential topics of interest for the field. And one of the topics that was identified was behavioral supports and alternative education settings. And today be focusing on understanding the principles of PBIS and its role in alternative ed settings. What are some possible strategies that we can implement and can be tailored for students of diverse needs? And, what are some lessons that we can learn from the field? And we’re happy to have our two guest speakers today. First, we have Dr. Brenda Scheuermann. She’s a distinguished professor of special education at Texas State University.
Her research focuses on positive behavior interventions and supports PBIS with youth in alternative settings, particularly in juvenile justice settings, residential treatment and alternative education programs. She is also a partner with the national PBIS Technical Assistance Center and provides training and guidance for state and county alternative programs in over 15 states. And we also have with us today Lindsey Tompkins, who is a Behavior Intervention Services manager for the San Luis Obispo County Office of Education. Lindsey trains and coaches, local school sites and districts in implementation of Multi-tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) including PBIS. Lindsey has provided implementation training, support and coaching and technical assistance to the San Luis Obispo Juvenile Hall for their facility-wide implementation of the PBIS framework since 2018. And with that, I will pass it to Dr. Scheuermann, Brenda.
Dr. Brenda Scheuermann:
Thank you. So today we’re going to talk about the implementation of PBIS in alternative settings and the outcomes that you can expect by implementing PBIS in those settings. Okay, Lindsey, you want to? There we go. Before we get started, I’d like to talk about make clear what kinds of alternative programs we’re talking about. Basically, it’s any program that provides educational or residential services to children and youth outside of traditional ec through secondary school settings. We are working and have worked in all types of alternative settings from disciplinary alternative day schools that are part of public school systems to youth programs in adult correctional systems. And you’ll hear about experiences and outcomes in some of these programs. So before we really get started, I’d like to hear about your experiences in alternative programs. So Regina is going to launch a poll for us that asks about your experiences. Have you visited alternative programs? Have you worked with students who have attended alternative programs? So choose all that apply. Give you a minute to weigh in.
Okay, Regina, shall we look at results? Okay, so we have a lot of representatives of alternative programs here that’s great and lots of experiences. If you weren’t able to answer to the affirmative for any of those, I encourage you to go visit an alternative program associated with your county or the programs, the children that you work with and get to know a little bit about those programs. So today I’ll be giving you a brief overview of concepts and components of PBIS, and then my colleague Lindsey will show you what those concepts and components look like in implementation.
The goals of PBIS, PBIS is a framework designed to achieve certain goals. The goals that we’re focused on achieving with PBIS is first and foremost to teach and support and strengthen and expand positive behavior in youth. And by positive behavior, I mean all the behaviors that youth need to exhibit in order to be successful. A second goal is to decrease the development of new problems. And finally, when problems do develop, a third goal is to present those problems from becoming worse or more established or more intense. And by the way, when I’m talking about problems, I’m talking about any developmental or biological or environmental condition that creates obstacles for youth to be successful. So we’re focused largely on creating environments that teach and support positive behavior, prevent development of new challenging behaviors, and that mitigate the effects of challenging behaviors for youth. PBIS is a, I said it’s a framework that means it consists of integrated data systems and practices.
Data is all the information that we use to make decisions about what we’re doing and whether we’re achieving or making progress towards the goals that we’ve set. Systems are those administrative structures that support implementation of PPIS and that support staff in their implementation and their use of PBIS and practices are those day-to-day tools that staff use in their interactions with youth. Data systems and practices are organized around tiers of support tiers of increasing levels of support and intensities of support. Tier one focuses on tier one is what we do for all youth in the program regardless of the type of program or the level of needs of youth served in that program. Tier two are the supports that we put into place for youth who need a little more help, who need a little more support to be successful. And tier three supports are what we put into place for youth who have greater needs, who need longer term supports or more intensive and comprehensive supports. And again, those tiers of support align with goals of prevention, early intervention, and long-term comprehensive intervention.
PBIS is not new. It is been in place for many, many years. The PBIS that we talk about today is the result of integration of multiple lines of discipline and multiple areas of behavior science. We’ve had decades of research to support the use of PBIS concepts and practices. You might be interested in knowing that one of the first studies that looked at PBIS practices was done was published in 1968, and it evaluated the use of a token reinforcement system for at-risk boys who were in a group home kind of setting. And the positive effects of that system led to other lines of research with the use of PBIS practices in alternative settings. So we’ve been looking at PBIS and the effects of PBIS for a very long time. Since those early days, we have seen PBIS being refined and better integrated across disciplines like implementation science and mental health and trauma-informed practices. We have seen PBIS embedded in laws and policies from the state level to local levels in typical school for typical schools and alternative programs. We’ve seen research documenting the positive outcomes of PBIS being implemented in alternative programs and we’ve seen PBIS being extended to other types of educational environments and programs such as applied to implementation of school resource officer programs. And then I’ll show you a couple of model demonstration reports that are our most recent documentation of positive effects of PBIS.
And before I get to those model demonstration projects, I wanted to you to get a picture for the scope of where PBIS is being implemented. It really is implemented worldwide. There’s PBIS being implemented in countries all over the world, but in the US we see PBIS implemented with fidelity in over 25,000 typical schools, alternative programs, residential programs across states, multiple states. These are just a few of the states that I know of. There are, I’m sure others that I’m not aware of that I don’t come into contact through my work with the PBIS center. So what outcomes can you expect when you implement PBIS?
First, I want to say that when I talk about PBIS in alternative programs, staff and administrators say You don’t understand all of the youth we serve need tier three supports to that. I say, yes, that is true, especially compared with the general population of youth. However, we know that offering multiple tiers of support to one, tier two and tier three is an evidence-based practice in all types of alternative programs. So youth and staff can benefit from having tiers of support in place in alternative programs. In 2023, we published a model demonstration project from a residential juvenile justice setting in Nevada. We documented first of all that we can implement tiers one, two, and three with fidelity in this secure juvenile justice setting that we documented positive impacts in terms of reductions in disciplinary infractions, in terms of reductions in disciplinary actions, in terms of increases in positive behaviors. Staff reported liking PBIS because it gives them tools to be more effective in their interactions with youth. And we documented sustainability over multiple years, which is important. And that’s because it is once you get PBIS established, it’s relatively self-sustaining and it becomes there’s strong buy-in across administrator, staff and youth. And so because of that buy-in, they’re motivated to continue use over time.
We also published a model demonstration report documenting the feasibility of PBIS in a residential group home. And one interesting outcome of this project was that the residential home had been largely focused on tier three supports, individualized supports for youth, and they recognize the efficacy, the efficiency of establishing tier one supports in their program. Some of the outcomes that we’ve seen in our work with PBIS and alternative programs is reductions in major and minor rule violations, increases in positive behaviors such as time in program and academic and vocational and other post-secondary outcomes and faster returns from disciplinary removals.
So in alternative programs, PBIS looks much like it does when implemented in typical programs, typical school settings. So I’ll show you the components of PBIS as implemented in any program and then Lindsay will give you very examples of each of these components. PBIS is led by a team, a representative team that follows systematic procedures and maintains an ongoing action plan to focus decision-making on what is needed most. We use data to drive decisions. We use a variety of data to monitor our progress, our impact on youth behavior to monitor how we’re implementing PBIS. Lindsey will give you lots of examples of database decision.
One of the first practices that we put into place is that the program establishes facility wide, program wide expectations for positive behavior, what youth need to do to be successful. And these become sort of the behavioral curriculum, the behaviors that we teach and recognize and support in youth. We put into place systems for recognizing youth for engaging in positive behavior, but we don’t overlook challenging behaviors when youth exhibit misbehaviors. We have a hierarchy of systems in place designed by the program and used by all staff within the program that gives staff efficient and effective tools for responding to youth misbehavior.
We also implement tiers of support and that looks a little different across all programs because one of the benefits or one of the advantages of PBIS is that it is designed locally every program designs their own components to reflect local needs and goals and culture and values and resources. We also emphasize implementing PBIS with fidelity, which means directly as designed. And finally, another advantage of PBIS is that we always start where you are, what your resources allow you to take on. So for example, we set long-term goals for what you want to implement in terms of PBIS and then we start where you are, what you’re able to easily adopt given your capacity for change. So Lindsey will tell you what all of these principles and practices look like implemented in her alternative program.
Lindsey Tompkins:
Hello everyone and thank you for being here. I’m really excited to be able to share what our people do day in and day out in our programs here in San Luis Obispo County. I feel weird being here by myself. I normally have some partners in crime that are actually doing the work day in and day out boots on the ground. So you’re going to hear me talk a lot about we, and that is because we do this. This is not a Lindsey thing, I just get to be the talking head today. So again, I’m really excited to share the work of the people that are doing it day in and day out. So I’m going to share three of our programs and I’m really excited because thank you all who submitted questions ahead of time. I’m hoping that many of your questions around implementation in different types of settings will be answered today.
And really I’m going to talk mainly about tier one. We do have tiered supports in our programs or are establishing those, but really thinking and emphasizing on that proactive piece of tier one because we can intervene all day, but as my boss says, we can’t intervene our way out of it. So we need to make sure that we’re being proactive so that when we have to be reactive, we can support our youth. So I’m going to first go over our three programs that I’m going to be highlighting today and the different types of implementation we have. So to orient you to our sites, the first is our juvenile hall. Again, that’s here in San Luis Obispo. It is a full spectrum supporting program for incarcerated youth. So we have a detention program, youth come in and out that can be as short as a day or maybe hours to longer term based on the need of that youth and the support.
We also have Coastal Valley Academy, which is our camp program that is replacing our group homes here in our county. So youth stay in the facility, but you can see there’s a dormitory more like picture down in the bottom of this slide here. And that’s actually where the youth live. So again, it’s a little bit less of a kind of what you would picture as a detention facility and more of that group home feeling. And then now because legislation passed, we now have our secure youth track facility or SYTF youth. So those youth used to maybe go to the Department of Juvenile Justice, which was a state run facility. They now stay with us and they can actually be with us to up to the age of 25. So those of you asking questions around adults, definitely we are utilizing this with adults within our facility.
So we have grade seven through 12. Now that we have that SYTF program, we also are offering college programs and not only just to our graduates but also to, we have dual enrollment in our program. The next site that I’ll be talking about is Loma Vista Community School. So this is grade seven through 12. Our youth are referred to us through expulsion and or truancy court. We have three classrooms. Our teachers are dually credentialed, so special education and general education we transitioned. And part of this is due to our implementation of PBIS from just instructional assistance to behavior intervention services specialists. So having a background in understanding and basic behavioral science. And then we also have mental health therapists on our campus again, to provide that well-rounded support. So not only just that behavioral support, but that social emotional support as well. Lastly, I’ll be talking about Chris Jespersen, which is an intensive therapeutic learning program.
This is a IEP team decision placement. We do not have a lot of non-public agencies in our county to provide additional support, nor are there a lot of facilities in the state of California that can support youth. And so then the option is to send them out of state, which we don’t want to do. So this is a placement within our county that the students can come to during the day. And again, it’s based on their IEP team decision. We have two classrooms, a primary and a secondary. Again, we have those behavioral positions and we have mental health therapists onsite full-time to support the therapeutic needs of this program. So now that you have an overview of the three programs I’m going to talk about, I’m going to give you examples of how we implement PBIS in each of those sites. But before we do that, I want to just give you a moment to really stop and think about yourself for a moment, which I know as educators or people that are caring for other people, we don’t do a lot.
So I just want you to take a moment and I want you to think about a work environment, a place a time that you really thrived. So, finish the sentence of I thrive in a work environment when. And what I’m going to ask you to do is once you have that thought, for me, I have strong relationships. I thrive in a work environment when I have strong relationships. I’m going to give you a moment to type it in the chat, but if you can wait to push enter, we’re going to just do a waterfall and see all of the things that help us thrive in environment. If you can’t think of something, think of what would have made you thrive in that environment. So I’ll give you just a moment to type that into the chat and then I’m going to wait to push enter. And when we push enter, we’ll see everyone’s the ways in which they thrive.
So, about 10 more seconds to type that into the chat. Alright, and go ahead and push enter. Let’s see how you thrive. Oh, I see those coming in. Awesome. Alignment, positive relationships, great sense of community. I love it. Yeah, relationships are a priority, definitely. Well, thank you all. I think it’s good to take a moment and think about ourselves because what I want you to think about is that our youth, our students, our kids, our families, our staff, they all thrive in those things too. And so PBIS, that framework really allows us to say what are those values that we hold and how do we implement those? So now that we can think about that, Brenda did a nice overview of those kind of key components. And so today I’m going to take you through what these kind of four main components of PBIS Tier one look like at each of our sites.
So again, these are going to be basic examples and we do have an office hour next week. So, if you have specific questions, first of all, type them into the Q and A. Or hold onto them and come to our office hour next week because again, this is going to be a very high level, quick overview of each of these things. So the first I’m going to take you through juvenile hall. So we have those expectations clearly posted throughout our facility, but we teach these to youth all day, every day. And we also have specific times within the classroom every morning that they have, they go over PBIS expectations. So we pick one expectation, one area, one location, and what does that look like? So as you can see, this first picture is from intake. So the moment our youth walk into the facility, we’re clearly explaining to them what we want to see and if it’s the first time they’ve come to the facility, or the 10th time they come in the facility. We expect that they don’t know the expectations and so we explicitly teach those. These are taught by our officers because again, we are facility wide. This isn’t something that’s happening just in a silo of the classroom or just in the facility. We implement this facility wide. So again, you can see here we have it across different locations, even including in our courtroom through visiting our classrooms. This is on their unit. So what does their room need to look like? What does our movement procedures look like? You can actually see there’s an older picture here that says distance learning matrix. So again, when we were in COVID, that’s an older picture, but we created a distance learning matrix because who knew officers were going to have to be teachers? So again, we have this throughout our facility to help it be very clear on what those expectations are and we’re explicitly teaching them. So oftentimes we hear PBIS doesn’t work because we have our posters on the wall.
Well, we need to explicitly teach those expectations to our youth. We can create them on the fly. So here’s for our career and technical education. And then we also not only have expectations for youth, we have them for our staff. I will say in this program specifically, the youth do not see the officer and staff expectations. This is up in our training room and in our upstairs area where youth do not go. However, we do have these expectations for officers. All of our new officers are oriented to PBIS to ensure that they know how to teach the youth what is expected. So this looks similar but different at Loma Vista, our community school. So again, you can see here we have different versions of the posters because we want them to be engaging and eye-catching. We do have the same expectations across all of our three programs to be safe, responsible, and considerate.
So you’ll see that as a common theme throughout when we adopted PBIS, we all did it together. And so that was something that we just agreed upon to have the same and consistent expectations. Also, those of you working in alternative programs know that sometimes our youth go for us down the street to juvenile hall and then come back to our alternative programs. So again, that helps with that consistency. We hope that’s not the case, but we do know that that is oftentimes what we see. So again, you’ll see we have this in different places, different locations in our classrooms. In the back of our classrooms, we have it on the restrooms. And then you could see in the picture on the right, excuse me, that that is our staff matrix. So in this program that actually the youth do see what the staff expectations are.
So what does it look like for staff to be safe, responsible, and considerate at school? So this was something that we actually grappled with and initially it was like, heck no. We’re not putting our staff expectations. You are going to use that against us. But again, the staff really agree that actually we want them to know that we also hold ourselves to expectations. The last program I’m going to talk about is our intensive therapeutic learning program. So Chris Jespersen, again, this is going to be one of our classroom or actually both of our classrooms here. So you can see that we have our cozy corner and above our cozy corner are our expectations. The other one is our front facing right behind where the teacher teaches, we have our expectations. Now you might be saying, well, that’s a lot of expectations. Those are our overall expectations that we have in the classroom.
So youth know we’re all of those expectations are. However, we do break them down and teach them in specific areas. So again, we have what does it look like to be safe, responsible, consider in the restroom, in our kitchen outside areas. So again, we really want to make sure that the youth know what is expected. As I said earlier, not only are we saying here’s this pretty poster, yay, it’s on the wall. We’re actually explicitly teaching it. So you can see here, this is just two examples. The first one is from juvenile hall. This is a lesson plan that’s created around what are we going to do Monday, what are we going to do Tuesday, Thursday, and what are we going to do Wednesday, Friday? We also have it in our schedules. This is at our community school. This is in Stacy Bird’s classroom, and you can see here it says Bird slash PBIS.
So that’s saying that her homeroom is going to be doing PBIS and that’s on the schedule every day. So they do some type of lesson. Now, it’s not always on expectations. Sometimes it’s around some other social emotional skill. As Brenda said, when we say positive behaviors or expected behaviors, these are skills that are going to help youth in the future. They shouldn’t be arbitrary. So we really want to make sure that as you see, it’s not cookie cutter across all our programs. Yes, our expectations are, but what it looks like to be in the restroom at the facility looks very different than what it looks like to be in Chris Jespersen, our therapeutic learning program.
Along that line of teaching those social emotional skills to our youth, we have adopted DBT in as our social emotional curriculum. So this is actually pictures in our facility. You can see here that they have the skills. So dear man is one of the skills that they teach the youth, and this is in the classroom to remind them. We also have the four ways to solve a problem. As we know, conflict is oftentimes one of the reasons that our youth are maybe expelled and or in our facility. So we want to make sure that we’re really giving them the skills, even if we have them just for a day, we’re providing them with some type of skills. So this is also a daily lesson in the facility as well, along with our PBIS expectations.
The next phase that I’m going to jump us into is that we also want to make sure that we just don’t expect youth to do it and have them do it. We want to acknowledge when they are engaging in those behaviors that are expected, those behaviors that are going to help them outside of school, outside of our facility, and also inside of our school at our facility. So this is an example of our reinforcement system at Juvenile Hall and at Loma Vista we use the same system, which is PBIS rewards. It is a paid subscription. What I will say is back in the day when I first started, we were using little scanner device and barcodes and it was taking a lot of time. And so yes, this costs some money. However, when we actually looked at the cost analysis of how much time our staff and how much frustration they were having entering these scans and making sure they were right, and then the fact that the youth would then say, wait, I had this many scans and now I don’t.
And the computer system was glitching. This investment in this program has actually probably saved us money over time. There was that question around how do you make PBIS less expensive or free? You can do it very cheaply or pretty close to free. So money, it shouldn’t be the barrier, unnecessarily. There is some cost associated, but when we actually do that cost analysis for us, it was beneficial to purchase this program. Another benefit was that youth can go in at any time and see how many scans they have. They can see comments from officers and or educational staff. So again, it was really beneficial, but it’s not just about the token. It’s not just about the ticket. It’s not just about the store. It’s about that relationship, and that relationship is built before this. But it’s also built through this by acknowledging specifically what youth are doing correctly.
So again, it’s not just give them a scan. This is something we always are continuously working on. Those of you who are in our programs, I saw a lot of you have experience. I’m sure this is something that you run into. It’s really easy to just give that teen the click it and be like, say nothing. We want to make sure that we’re being intentional and giving them that specific feedback really where the magic happens. So being mindful of that. So along with that, we have commissary. So this is the example of our county juvenile hall commissary. We do have two different commissaries because educational staff felt like it was too disconnected, since our probation staff were just the ones doing commissary. So we do have a school commissary now. So they do both on Wednesdays and Saturdays. One on Saturdays is probation run and the one on Wednesdays is education run. But they’re all under the same umbrella of the scans go back and forth.
They could just buy stuff from the school store if they wanted to on Wednesdays and not and save on Saturdays. So even though they are separate, they are coming from the same bank account. And again, officers are providing scans. Same with educational staff and other staff throughout the facilities. Here’s our example of our community school store. So you can see different things. Concierge service is very popular, which means they’ll come pick you up in our car versus you having to take the bus, which if you know San Luis Obispo County, and if you don’t, we are very large, and our youth will be on the bus for over an hour oftentimes traffic being nice to them. And so again, it’s something that that’s a benefit for them to get some scans. We also have a different kind of setup at our Chris Jespersen, or CJ, as we call it.
So we have different reinforcement systems for the age levels. So again, we can differentiate PBIS on what age level developmental level that we have, cultural things that we have going in on our programs. We can really identify what it is and how we want to reinforce our youth. So you can see here, here’s two examples. Our younger kids actually have a board, they call it the boardwalk because we’re ocean themed. And then our older students have stay focused coupons that they can use again for the store, multiple different items. Something that I think is also important is this is not our only reinforcement system. As Brenda said, when you get to tier three students, students who are requiring tier three support, and, then they come into these alternative programs, they do need tier three support. So what we do is we drop our tier three supports down to tier one.
So we have a very robust tier one. Oftentimes we have the conversation, what else could we do? We have so much for them. Our tier three plan is really weak because we have so much at tier one. Doesn’t mean we don’t have that continuum of support. However, we definitely want to have a more robust support at that tier one. For example, at juvenile hall, all of our youth get work cards and academic cards, meaning that if they complete their work and academics and they have the behavioral expectations and they can earn some type of reinforcer for the day, music’s super reinforcing. So they get extra time on Spotify at the end of the day during independent work. And then if they do that for the full week, they get a bag of talkies and a movie on Friday at Chris Jespersen, we have school-wide reinforcement systems.
If we meet certain goals or we have class-wide reinforcement systems, for example, for testing, the primary class got to pie the teacher in the face with a whipped cream pie. So again, that was something we identified as a challenge that our kids weren’t completing state testing. And so we then moved forward into that. I talked a lot about kids. What I want you to think about is yourself, and we’re going to actually launch a poll really quickly to get some feedback. So I want you to think when was the last time that you received specific, not just good job, but specific positive feedback from your supervisor or your coworker. So again, pick one of those and then we’ll give you another maybe 10 seconds and we’ll go ahead and close that out.
Alright, let’s see those results. When was the last time this group? Okay, that’s great. Within the last week, 51%. Fantastic. So great, for those of you who are like, I can’t remember, hold onto to that. Because again, I think oftentimes we say, well, why do kids need these things? All this, but it feels good to be acknowledged and recognize for what you’re doing. And so hold onto that as we speak through the next little part. So why I shifted to that adult piece is because something I don’t think we’ve said yet, but PBIS isn’t actually really about kid behavior. It’s actually about us adults and it’s really a framework to support us and supporting youth. Now, not to say that there’s not components of youth having autonomy and youth needing to do what they need to do and having their own goals. Of course that is completely embedded within all of our store items, our acknowledgement systems, our expectations youth have provided input on.
So this isn’t just an adult program coming down to kids, and we also need to reinforce our adults because they’re doing the hard work day in and day out. So I’m going to give you some examples of what that looks like. So at juvenile hall, we have our staff to staff shout out, this is actually a little bit older picture. They now made it much more beautiful. I mean it’s already pretty colorful and great, but this is upstairs. And so staff could give a shout out to a staff. So it could be an educational staff to an officer, a mental health clinician to an educational staff. But again, we really look at acknowledging those behaviors and ensuring that it’s also kind of public and private in our student services program, student programs and services. Here at the county office, we do a digital because we are spread out across our county.
We have itinerant staff, we have program staff, and so we have our staff shout out. So they fill out a Google form and then each month we have a winner. So again, you can see here’s our April shoutouts and who people are giving shout outs to. So this is our assistant. The first one is our assistant superintendent over student services. So she’s giving a shout out to staff. We have classroom teachers, we have our physical therapist on there, all giving shout outs because again, we’re so far away, it’s really hard to give that now. We should be giving it to them in person as well. But then they also get acknowledged and they can win an Amazon gift card, which who doesn’t love an Amazon gift card? This is really special. I love this part about juvenile hall. So youth can actually acknowledge staff at our facility and I think this is wonderful.
So I pulled the two little snippets. The first one says, I think every kid needs a Nunley in their life. Nunley is one of our JSO three, so supervising kind of on the floor officer. And so I just think it’s really wonderful. The next one, it says, I wish I had a dad like Garcia because he’s so chill and understanding. I also feel like I can trust him with no matter what. So again, I think these are just really powerful statements from youth in youth handwriting. And again, these are posted upstairs next to the staff, shout out so you can really see the youth. And this says back, so there’s more on the back, but again, I think these are just some really nice snippets. Brenda spoke to our continuum of responses, and so these are little screenshots from everywhere. So again, not going to super in detail into what this looks like, but you can see it looks different In all of our sites.
There is still an agreement upon what that looks like. And we’re actually working right now at juvenile hall to align who do officers write our incident reports for and does that line up with what we’re doing across the facility? So one thing I love about PBIS, it’s continuous improvement. So in no way, shape or form and am I saying we are perfect, we are continuously improving. We’re probably our hardest critics and we’re learning every day. So you can see here though, the different programs. And what I love about Loma is that they created examples and non-examples because hello, if you’ve worked at an alternative program, disrespect looks a little different in our program than it does in kindergarten. Again, PBIS framework allows us to be aware of all of these pieces.
So the next part is great tier one, fantastic. But what happens when a youth has a challenging behavior? And again, as Brenda said, I loved her definition around problem behavior. We really see that our youth have what I say, perfected their problem behavior in other settings. And so it doesn’t mean that it’s just going to go away. However, we do see that oftentimes when we provide that higher level of support, they actually are getting their needs met and we see a reduction in behavior. However, that’s not always the case. So we need to document it. And our documentation includes where, when, who and why. And so that allows us to determine when behaviors are occurring. So you’ll see here this is data from Swiss, a schoolwide information system. It’s a paid program again, but we find man and woman power aside. This is actually more effective and beneficial.
So again, you can see that we review the data and analyze the data. This is from juvenile hall. This is actually from our last PBIS meeting in April. And then we define a problem with precision. So we noted that the problem was we have a lot of irs, which is incident reports. And so what we were going to do is we created lessons for the classroom. We’re going to have the teachers teach those lessons. We’re going to increase reinforcement for youth following those directions. And then we actually one upped ourselves and our supervisor actually sent out an email about a week after this and was like, after consideration, we’re going to teach it weekly on what following directions looks like and how do we support youth with that because we are seeing it be such a challenge. So we’re going to come back to this actually on Friday and see how we did.
So I think another piece of data that we want to talk about is perception data and climate data. So here’s what our youth are saying. They like that our staff are having conversations. They like the stuff that we get scans and stuff. Again, they’re teenagers make sense. But again, we also measure climate data and we do that twice a year. We do that not only for our students and youth, but also for our staff. We also look at our outcome data around incident reports or referrals. This is from Loma Vista. So this is when we did a reboot back in 2018. We really went back to changing our staffing, really implementing additional reinforcement systems. And so again, we have seen an increase in students responding to tier one. It’s not perfect, but we’re really proud of what this looks like. And this is for all referrals.
So this would be for minors and majors. Oftentimes when we’re looking at this, we are just looking at majors, but we’re really proud of this. Again, we’re continuing to target and make sure our youth have the supports that they need so that they’re not engaging in those behaviors. We also look at fidelity data. And so I think it’s really important that we do that as well and looking at that over time. So I’m going to wrap us up really quickly here. Just looking at our facility-wide implementation. I think it’s really important that we do do facility-wide implementation. So here’s some of our overarching strengths. One of the questions was how do you do this when probation has taken over? What I would say is leverage your relationships. It is so important that it’s not a you or us or them. It’s all of us together.
We are doing this and what we say at the facility is if we need something who can help us? So if it’s the county office has funding or probation has funding or they have staff or we have staff, we really want to make sure that we’re doing that. And again, looking at that continuous improvement lens for sustainability, we’ve embedded changes. So it’s again, throughout our facility. Our handbook for youth talks about PBIS, our hiring practices talks about relationships. We look at our staff evaluations, policies and procedures around training and hiring. So we have some pretty cool outcome data. So we started implementing in 2016, and this is looking at use of force pepper spray and the use of wrap, which is a mechanical type restraint. And so you can see that the X’s are average daily population, and over time we’ve seen that really decrease.
So we’re really proud of that, that we’re seeing those outcomes. We couldn’t do without our partners, like I said, it’s really important that we have them. This is us at our PBIS meeting. We do have a little bit of fun there, but again, this actually changed to now it’s actually happening in our classroom so that we have youth. So this is an older photo, but we do have our youth voice in our meetings. So some tips for successful implementation. We can chat about this in the office hour when we have that time. But again, making sure that you are really working with your partners, that it’s coming from the top down. Now, not meaning in a bad way, but you need your support from your people. So really glad that we have that and we’re continuing to work on it. Again, nothing’s perfect. If you have great ideas, share them. We would love to hear them. So I’m just going to launch one last poll before I send it back to Brenda. Any thoughts around barriers that you may anticipate? We’re going to launch this poll. Alright, we can go ahead and end that poll. See our answers here. Great. Yeah, those are definitely things that we see across the board and continue to see. So thank you for your input. Brenda, I’ll throw it back to ya.
Dr. Brenda Scheuermann:
Okay, thank you. Okay, I want to point you to a few resources. This is a newly revised PBIS implementation blueprint. This is the document that guides implementation for typical schools. It is not designed uniquely for alternative programs. However, it’s an excellent document and I think you can see yourself in this document. If you wish to explore PBIS for your program, for your alternative program. The center on PBIS has a juvenile justice section. The center on PBIS website has a juvenile justice section that where you can find links to presentations, to videos to printed reports and other supportive materials. When you go to the PBIS website under that PBIS menu, you pull that down. The bottom link on that menu is a link to the supportive or to the comprehensive interactive database that describes the efficacy research for PBIS. It’s quite a nice little database, large database. This is the tool that we use to evaluate implementation of PBIS. It’s called the facility wide tiered fidelity inventory. And we use this for action planning as well as to identify areas where we’re implementing well and areas that need improvement.
Because not all schools have access to the Swiss program that Lindsey was talking about. We developed scoring tools to use with the tiered fidelity inventory. And these are links to those scoring tools that will give you raft results that you can track over time for tiers one, tier one and tier two. And then finally through the center we offer a monthly community of practice. We meet the third Tuesday of every month from two o’clock to three o’clock central time. This is very informal. Sometimes we have guest speakers, sometimes we just talk about issues and concerns or share successes. We have folks representing alternative programs from all over the country and in all types of roles. So if you would like to join our community of practice, just send me an email and I will put you in touch with the person who organizes that there is no registration needed. We’ll send you the link and you can sign in anytime. And I think that is it for us.
Rebeca Cerna:
Thank you Brenda and Lindsey. That was very, very informative from the resources that you shared. But really hearing about your insights about research studies at the national level, locally, what it looks like in different settings. Lindsey, the connection to adults and how we also need to reinforce adults, and then even also sharing the impact that you’ve seen locally. So that was some very great insights that we heard. I think we have maybe about two minutes for our question. I know we’re going to have an office hour that we’re going to share. But I wanted to just, you mentioned something about leveraging relationships and someone had asked a question about being able to track positive behaviors across settings like probation and classroom settings. And I know Brenda, you added some response also to that particular question. Lindsey, I was wondering if you could share a little bit more about how you’ve developed some data sharing agreements or information sharing agreements across partners in about a minute or so?
Lindsey Tompkins:
Yeah, so we just started doing this. We used to have probation data and school data. We did this about, I want to say about two years ago. So how we enter it into Swiss, we actually just assign the youth a random code and then our staff have a spreadsheet that has what the code is. So Lindsey Tompkins is youth D one. So anytime youth D one gets some type of consequence from probation, they just enter it in under D one. We’re working on trying to actually be able to use youth names. We just need to make sure again with confidentiality, but that’s a way that we’ve done a workaround and they actually send their data report to me weekly and then at the end of the month as well, like the final report and then I share that out with my staff.
Rebeca Cerna:
Great, thank you. And Brenda, if you could share just in 30 seconds, one key takeaway that you want folks to leave with today, what would that be?
Dr. Brenda Scheuermann:
PBIS is feasible. You can do it and it’s worth whatever effort you put into it. The outcomes are sustainable. The programs that implement PBIS, like PBIS and become like Lindsey and become real, they take it and make it their own and share their positive experiences. So I think it’s worth exploring. It’s a low cost effective, efficient way to improve program climate and youth outcomes.
Rebeca Cerna:
Great, thank you. Well again, I want to thank you both. I know that we didn’t have a lot of time for Q and A, but that was a little bit by design because we are going to have a office hour next week for those who attended. And we’re going to share some information about that right now. But first we want to do a quick, oh, okay. Thanks Laura. So anyone who attended today’s session, you’re going to be invited. You’re going to receive a Zoom invite for next Thursday from 10 to 11. And Lindsey and Brenda have both graciously are both going to be in attendance. So it might be a smaller group, but we might be able to ask more in depth questions. And we’re just going to be focusing more on questions that you might have individually. So you’re welcome to join in that session.
The topic for today came as part of need sensing that we gathered from the field. And so we’re going to launch a quick poll on topics because we are going to be planning some future webinars. So we’d love to get your quick feedback on what your top two choices are, on these possible topics that we might be hosting next school year. So if you could please take a quick 5, 10, 15 seconds,15 seconds to answer this poll that would be appreciated. And one more poll that we’re going to have. This is funded through the California Department of Education. So we’re going to launch one additional poll to get your feedback on this session. It’s three quick questions on this particular session. So if you could answer these questions, that would be appreciated. So we’ll just take about 20 seconds for these.
So we are keeping the chat. We saw that some people were interested in the community of practice. We’ll be sure to send that information to Brenda. And we also want to share Brenda’s email if you have any additional questions. Oh yeah, sorry, I’m going out of order Laura. So if you would like more information about PBIS and alternative programs, this is Brenda’s email and we do want to share some upcoming events. So we have our upcoming events up next school year as part of the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center. We will be continuing a series of webinars. We will also be hosting mini wellness virtual sessions, that kind of goes in line to what you were saying, Lindsey, in thinking about the adults who are serving students. So we are thinking about the adults. And so we are going to be hosting a series of eight, mini wellness virtual sessions.
So we are going to be sending communication out about that as well. We are going to be hosting a peer network for school districts around data use practices and participatory approaches to that. And we are going to have a peer network for county offices of education on school safety. So some of these might be of interest to you or some of your colleagues. And so communication will be coming on that. And we have our final slide that has where you find more information about the Stronger Connections. We have a website, scg.wested.org. It’s a site co-hosted with the California Department of Education. We have a newsletter that you can join and here’s the QR code for the newsletter. And you can also reach us. You can also reach the West Ed Stronger Connections team at [email protected]. So we will be recording this webinar and we will be posting it to the website. This exact workshop maybe might not be exactly hosted, but we can communicate with you later on that. And again, I want to thank both of our speakers and I want to be mindful of our time as you carry on with the rest of your day. Thank you everyone for joining.
Lindsey Tompkins:
Thank you for coming.
Dr. Brenda Scheuermann:
Thank you.
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