Teaching students discipline is not just about punishing bad behavior, it’s about rewarding good behavior, according to Oakland Mills High School Principal Frank Eastham.

With that in mind, Eastham has launched an initiative to encourage responsible student behavior with area merchants.

The initiative, pushed by a cluster of school principals in Oakland Mills, is part of the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support Program, a national program used in 50 county schools and adopted by Oakland Mills High School this school year.

The added wrinkle at Oakland Mills High involves about 15 merchants in the villages of Oakland Mills and Owen Brown, including the Giant supermarket, local restaurants and a barber shop and hair salon.

School officials have distributed coupons, or “merits,” to the merchants, who give them to high school students who behave appropriately in their stores. The students can then redeem their coupons at the school for special privileges, such as lunch with the principal or a reserved parking place, Eastham said.

While merits are already given out for positive behavior, behaving well with a merchant earns more points than school behavior, Eastham said.

The idea, Eastham said, is to keep students on their best behavior not when they are in school or at home but when they are in the community — “out where they’re not being supervised by parents and teachers.”

Eastham said the program works by reinforcing behavior that the school expects of its students in the public arena.

“It’s basically teaching the kids and staff members what our expectations are,” he said. “We don’t take time to teach kids what we expect.”

PBIS has been used in the other Oakland Mills schools for about five years, Eastham said, and he wanted to bring it to the high school to provide continuity with the elementary and middle schools. “We really have a community focus among our schools,” he said.

Expanding the program adds to a continuum of support where “students begin in pre-K ... learning what respect and responsibility is,” Eastham said.

The school has printed posters to advertise the program in the school and the community, Eastham added.

Pamela Wubishet, 54, owner of The Village Barber and Hair Salon in the Oakland Mills Village Center, said the program has been working well.
 
“Some (students) come in, they’re really good and they address me, ‘Hi, Ms. Wubishet’ and they’re nice,”  she said. “I just walk up to them and say, ‘Here’s a coupon for you.’ ”

Not all of the students who visit her salon get coupons, she added.

“I get a few ... they’ll snicker and do little things, and you might have to say to them that they have to respect the shop,” she said. “There’s a few that come in that’s kind of out of order and you have to put them in place.”

Merchants who wish to participate in the program are encouraged to go to www.oaklandmills.org.

---

user comments (1)

user belovedcartoonmouse says...

I wish someone would reward me for acting how I am supposed to act. And merchants, if you don't like kids, stop taking their money.

Posted 8:31 AM, 01.30.10 | Permalink