It appears the pandemic may have had an unexpected impact on behavior in the classroom, something that has become a talking point within Fountain Hills Unified School District in recent months.

This is not a problem specific to Fountain Hills. Around the country, students were told to stay at home to avoid contact with staff and other students. When students are online, there is little a teacher can do to discipline or ensure they are attentive. If a teacher required students to show their face on camera, for example, students could still open tabs to the side and browse the internet or position their phone in such a way that looking at it makes it appear like the student is paying attention to their teacher.

Students don’t just learn curriculum in the classroom, they also learn social skills. Zoom class and online assignments might have kept a student up to date with the teacher’s lesson plan, but socially, students were starved. The result of this is that many educators are dealing with an uptick in daily disciplinary issues.

“The constant battling with students about phone behavior, re-teaching expectations, giving several warnings, then writing infractions, calling parents, making log entries, etc. is a daily grind.”

This quote was taken from a resignation letter submitted by a certified staff member before the Jan. 13 School Board meeting. Out of eight resignation letters since last November, this was the only one to specifically call out student behavior as the reason for resigning. The letter continued and the faculty member said, “I am met by students with extreme resistance for trying to implement PBIS. I have never worked in a school with so much defiance against authority and a lack of interest.”

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) has been in the district for two years, starting first at the middle school. This year is the first time PBIS was implemented at the high school, and there have been some speedbumps with the program’s implementation.

For instance, according to Fountain Hills Education Association President Elect TJ Buckley, teachers were supposed to receive four to eight hours of PBIS training before the school year, but staff only received one hour of PBIS training.

“Student behaviors have been one of the main issues we’ve seen,” Buckley said at the Jan. 26 FHUSD Governing Board work study session. “We’ve had poor behavior with the substitutes. Substitutes have not had the training in PBIS and some of the other positive behavior management we’ve had.

“We have a lot of issues with being able to keep new subs throughout the building, just because we don’t feel that they’ve been adequately prepared. The bathrooms have been vandalized consistently throughout the year. We also have students wandering around the halls, wandering around the campus when they should be in class.”

Board members asked if vandalism and wandering were specific to one campus, and Buckley said he believes the teachers’ feedback refers to multiple campuses. Buckley also told the Board some teachers are concerned with the effectiveness of PBIS, and the Board took that seriously. Board member Jill Reed asked Jeff Markle, the principal at Fountain Hills Middle School who’s overseen two years of PBIS implementation, if he thought that PBIS was effective.

“I feel like when we started this year, because we had all our kids on campus, we kind of saw PBIS as a magic pill, so to speak,” Markle said. “We’re going to roll this out and all the kids are going to be excited about Falcon Feathers and drawings.

“It felt like there was a spike of behaviors because we were documenting everything. Since we’ve returned in January, we’ve seen a sort of decrease in behaviors and the amount of referrals that are being written. We were having that conversation of, is it that everyone matured over winter break, or is it that we’re averaging 75-80 kids out a day for various reasons? I think it takes time.

“The effectiveness of eventually beginning to build relationships with kids and exemplify what we want you to do and what we expect you to do is gaining traction, but I think it took a little bit of time for our staff to figure out it’s not a magic pill.”

The author of the resignation letter which cited behavior issues worked at both the middle and high school, but stated they only experienced behavior issues at the high school.

One of the key issues regarding disciplinary action at the schools is the misunderstanding of PBIS around the district. Interim Superintendent Dr. Patrick Sweeney said there was not a common understanding of PBIS or Beyond Textbooks among the staff in his first two weeks speaking with them, and part of that is because PBIS policies changed after Buckley wrote them.

When Buckley wrote the PBIS procedures, teachers were supposed to warn a student on their first minor offense and move on. The second minor infraction resulted in a written report and the third minor infraction, or first major infraction, led to a call home to parents. The PBIS procedures changed when the Arizona Department of Education provided grant money to FHUSD and suggested changes to the PBIS procedures be made.

Now teachers are expected to write a report and call home after each minor offense, which requires a lot more of their time than Buckley’s initial procedures. There are stacks of paperwork for minor infractions, and the pile-up has discouraged teachers from writing up more infractions.

Buckley also shared an anecdote of a minor infraction write-up being returned to a teacher after an administrator decided it wasn’t an infraction, minor or major. Buckley added that the disciplinary decisions need to be made by the teachers, and any administrator overstep could impact a teacher’s credibility and communication with the students’ parents.

PBIS is supposed to provide consequence and reward to students as appropriate. Educators are trying their best to help students return to the normal classroom environment, but the past two years have been tough on school systems. The goal of PBIS is to create a positive culture and infuse respect and responsibility into everything that happens on campus, but it’s important to remember Rome wasn’t built in one day.

“I think with any program that you’re rolling out for the first time, there are growing pains,” Fountain Hills High School Dean of Students Evelyn Wynn said. “I do think PBIS has been successful. Do we have areas of improvement? Sure, but we’re working through it as we go. We’re figuring out what works best at the high school level. Some of the things at the middle school for PBIS aren’t necessarily appropriate at the high school.”