BIST Success at Meadow Lane Elementary

Meadow Lane Elementary is succeeding with BIST — and the numbers prove it.

There are 450 students and 70 faculty members at Meadow Lane, which is one of the three Title I elementaries in the Lee’s Summit, Mo., school district. By using analytics, a commitment to solving challenges, and a positive attitude, Meadow Lane excels at managing behavioral challenges and building relationships. In the last year alone, Meadow Lane staff reduced the number of student absences because of disciplinary issues by 65 percent.

“We don’t ever use the fact that we’re Title I or have so many students on free and reduced lunch as a barrier or way to limit our beliefs in them,” said Principal Christine Johnson. “Our kids can learn at high levels, can behave at high levels and experience productive, safe peer and adult relationships at the same level as anybody else. We go into it thinking that our kids deserve the best of us.”

Christine’s first experience with BIST was as Principal at an elementary school in Warrenburg, Mo. The school’s results were so impressive she decided to implement BIST at Meadow Lane right away. Over the past five years, the school has become a leader at collecting and analyzing behavioral data and building plans to reduce incidents.

BIST’s approach can be tailored to address any issues that arise when analyzing the data. For example, the BIST team studied what time of the school day the most behavior challenges occur. The group strategizes and allocates resources when they see a higher rate of incidents that don’t align with the rest of the building. For instance, faculty was seeing a higher number of behavioral issues around lunch time. Teachers don’t manage the transfer to the cafeteria and recess; that is done by part-time resource team members. The faculty identified several possible causes, including which classes passed each other in the hallway and how they were greeted coming into the cafeteria.

“Our BIST group asked ourselves ‘What can we do?’” Christine said. “We’re smart, we’re creative. We have how many degrees in this room and years of experience?” The team decided to provide BIST instruction to the resource workers who covered the lunch shift. By doing so, they ensured there would be consistency in processes and the way student challenges are addressed in the classroom. Every Friday the team shared information, conducted a little role play, and walked through a few common scenarios. Over time, the number of behavioral issues in the cafeteria subsided.

The team found another challenging part of the day occurred during recess when students from all grades were on the playground. To address this, they decided to incorporate sportsmanship into some of the recess activities. Given that the teachers aren’t present at the playground over lunchtime, volunteers were asked to play games with the students to model regulated behavior during and after games.

To resolve the challenges they were able to pinpoint, the BIST team consulted the book BIST Director Marty Huitt’s wrote, called Cultivating Behavioral Change in K-12 Students. They especially relied on the chapter “’Our Kid’s’ Community,” which highlights how every adult can be a child’s behavior specialist.

Christine calls Meadow Lane “a calm school, and you can tell the kids are happy and the staff wants to be there.”

That’s not just her opinion. It’s in the data.