Components of EBS

Each EBS school designates a team of teachers, support personnel, and administrators to spearhead the program’s efforts. Working in collaboration with the entire staff, and building consensus at each step of the way, the team conducts an assessment of the school’s current needs and then develops the following components:

• Mission statement;
• Positively stated behavioral expectations or rules;
• Procedures for directly teaching these expectations to students;
• Continuum of strategies for encouraging these expectations;
• Continuum of strategies for discouraging rule violations; and
• Procedures for monitoring and record-keeping.

Once the plan is developed, all school staff are taught the procedures for teaching students appropriate behavior and rewarding students when they have been "caught being good." These common behavioral expectations and consequences for appropriate and inappropriate behavior provide a structured and predictable learning environment for students and staff alike. This structure makes it easy for all staff to share responsibility for the behavior of all students in classrooms and in special settings within the school (e.g., hallways, the playground, or the cafeteria).

The EBS team continues to collect data on student behavior and staff satisfaction with the program and use these data to help make alterations to the program as necessary. This process of continuing to collect data led one EBS school to discover that office referrals increased during the days prior to school holidays. To address this problem the EBS team developed and implemented a special rewards program to recognize appropriate behavior during these times.

Structured school-wide programs of this nature address the needs of most students in the school, however, there are some students whose behavior requires supports beyond what these programs provide. To address the needs of these students, EBS schools have Behavioral Teacher Assistant Teams that assist teachers in establishing individual action plans for "at-risk" students who have repeated behavior problems. These plans consist of functional suggestions that can be implemented immediately, or referrals to medical or academic teams for further evaluation. EBS schools also include an Action Team that conducts functional assessments of the chronic problem behavior and develops a plan of support based on the functional assessment.