by James C. Sherlock

The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report Pandemic Impact on Public K–12 Education 2022 collected and made available a lot of valuable information.

One issue escaped their analysis and recommendations — school discipline.

The authors reported student conduct as the number one concern of school teachers, and then failed to address it in any substantive way.

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), Virginia’s official school conduct support system component of Virginia Tiered System of Supports (VTSS), was mentioned only once, in a margin note.  Possible reasons include:

1. An in-depth discussion of the politically explosive topic was considered out-of-bounds for an apolitical organization serving the General Assembly;
2. They simply could not get a grip on it in the time and with the resources allocated; and
3. The organizations they interviewed were overwhelmingly system insiders, some of whom were the drivers behind PBIS in Virginia.

JLARC has excellent company in its reticence about analysis of student conduct.

JLARC indeed acknowledged that the Virginia VTSS escapes the grasp of most of Virginia schools that have tried to implement it, so it recommended more training.

The truth is that VTSS in general and PBIS in particular is far too complicated and time-consuming.  A reasonable return on investment seems unlikely at best.  And most people inside Virginia’s schools have figured that out.

As such it won’t ever work at scale.

PBIS has laudable goals, but the methods demanded have proven very difficult to execute.  JLARC acknowledged that in a backhanded way by calling for more training.

More training when one of the other problems acknowledged was abusive staff and teacher workloads.

VTSS/PBIS methods, their astonishing complexity, the training, data keeping and the massive general and specialized daily workloads required won’t ever be executed successfully across 132 school divisions and over 2,000 schools in Virginia.

Even if we were not facing an increasing staffing crisis. A staffing crisis to which VTSS/PBIS contribute directly.

Training.  JLARC recommended more VTSS training.

I refer to some of the training requirements listed in the Northam Board of Education’s “Model Guidance for Positive and Preventive Code of Student Conduct Policy and Alternatives to Suspension” and the VDOE presentation “Essential Components of a Preventative Student Code of Conduct Policy” to see what that training should entail.

Professional Learning for School Personnel

Effective training of administrators and other staff with responsibility for implementation of student conduct policy is critical. Professional learning should be designed to include, but not be limited to, the following:

• Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports
• Child development
• Social-emotional learning
• Cultural Competency
• Brain research
• Trauma
• Purpose and intent of student conduct policy
• Specific staff roles and responsibilities for implementing student conduct policy including the role of central office staff, hearing officers, and student services personnel
• Leveled systems of intervention and disciplinary responses
• Establishing behavioral expectations and supporting students to meet them
• Disciplinary processes and procedures including classroom managed and office managed behaviors
• Requirements and procedures for reporting offenses to local law enforcement authorities
• Bullying prevention required by the Code of Virginia at § 22.1-291.4
• Family engagement
• Restorative practices
• Relationship of student conduct policy to other policies and procedures
• Special considerations for disciplining students with disabilities
• Due process
• Behavior support plans
• Functional Behavior Assessments
• Health plans
• Threat assessments required by the Code of Virginia § 22.1-79.4.C

Teachers’ responsibilities:

• Develop positive relationships;
• Develop a safe, positive, and culturally responsive environment;
• Apply cultural competence to classroom management;
• Teach (and re-teach when necessary) behavioral expectations;
• Reinforce positive behavior;
• Provide instructional feedback on behaviors;
• Utilize the school’s tiered framework of interventions and supports for students who are not meeting behavioral expectations;
• Recognize personal stress, reactions that may escalate negative student behavior, and personal bias; and
• Use individual and classroom data to progress monitor student behavior and the teacher’s responses to behavior.

In addition, teachers should be provided training and follow up coaching that promotes positive relationships with other staff, parents, and families, and opportunities to develop partnerships that support students’ development.

That should help with the teacher shortage.

Operational Workloads. Reducing workloads to improve teacher retention and improving system performance to address student needs was assessed by JLARC to require more funding and staff as a solution to every ill. So how long will the funding be needed?

This funding could be provided at least until pandemic-related behavior problems improve.

I did not make that up.

That takes us to the way such improvements will be judged. Which takes us back to PBIS. And to increased workloads to measure improvements so that workloads can be decreased. Or something.

Student Behavior and Administrative Response (SBAR) data will be available annually, which will allow 2021–22 data to be compared to 2022–23 data. Answers to certain questions about student behavior on the Virginia School Survey of Climate and Working Conditions will also be available annually.

SBAR is perhaps the biggest workload generator I have seen in the education system in years.

For an explanation of SBAR, go here and click on SBAR Webinar Oct 2021 to download PowerPoint. And be prepared to be amazed. One example of an as-occurring report:

Seriously.  That report is required. Every day. In every school.

You can see other examples in the webinar linked above. Like this.

First, it stretches credulity that Mary and Jane would be suspended, even in-school like this, for a classroom fight unless one went to the hospital.

Second, someone actually got paid to design and build that system.

Finally, the executive branch and the GA are supposed to use the results to support funding decisions.

VDOE is also supposed to take data from the politically-revised and discredited Virginia School Survey of Climate and Working Conditions which “will also be available annually.”

Those combined data will then be used to judge improvement, or lack of same, in each school’s PBIS program. And continue or cut off “temporary” funding.

JLARC recommended those two data sources as a measuring stick.

Bottom line. It is impossible to look at what the left, with good intentions by their lights, tried to put in place and think it would work broadly across Virginia’s school system.

So we can take PBIS, a massive social experiment positioned as the student conduct system in our public schools, and treat it as a very intense virtue signal.

Generating data on children through SBAR that assuredly will be safe from hacking or inadvertent release. No word on when and if it gets scrubbed.

But the schools can’t. It is a direct threat to the schools that actually try to implement it.

The smartest principals have deferred action on PBIS.

So, apparently, did JLARC.