Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the School Discipline topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Elementary leaders end reset room, move to distributed supports and quarterly discipline reports
Summary
PAES administrators discontinued a centralized reset room this year and replaced it with classroom-level guidelines and distributed support staff; the school will begin regular quarterly discipline reports to the board and can filter office referrals by grade and teacher.
Leaders at the Punxsutawney Area Elementary School (PAES) said the building discontinued a centralized “reset room” for the 2024–25 year and instead embedded support staff into classroom schedules to respond more quickly to behavioral incidents.
Miss Nichols, PAES principal, told the board the reset room pilot in 2023–24 had pros and cons. For 2024–25, the school’s master schedule was revised so reading and math specialists, IST (intervention support team) staff and other support personnel are available throughout the day. That change, Nichols said, allowed staff to remove a student from class and offer a brief sensory walk, a visit to a sensory room, a drink or a short regrouping activity without calling to check if a centrally located reset-room staff member was available.
“We put reading specialists and support staff and really filter them out throughout the day,” Nichols said. “The classroom that was having a child that needed to be removed for a reset, there was an adult available to go and do that. This proved to work better, more efficient, faster to remove that child than to call down to an office.”
Nichols also said the school will provide quarterly discipline reports to the board — including year-to-date and end-of-year reports — and that office referrals can be filtered by grade level and teacher to identify patterns. She described a system of consistent classroom-level guidelines (Leader in Me language and think sheets) intended to reduce office referrals and to document interventions before office-level discipline such as in-school suspension (ISS) is used. The school’s ISS room serves grades K–6, and Nichols said staff use multiple interventions before resorting to ISS.
Board members asked administrators to provide the year-to-date discipline data and an end-of-year report; administrators said the district already can filter office referrals by teacher and grade and will deliver the requested reports after the quarter ends.
