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05/04/2016 08:30 AMWhile Overbrook School Principal Diane MacKinnon always thought about being a teacher, there weren’t many teaching jobs when it was time for her to go to college. Instead of studying education, she studied business management at Bentley University and spent years working at her family’s fourth-generation business, Young’s Printing.
She worked in the family business while raising her two sons, but she also spent time at their school as a volunteer in the classroom and president of the PTO. That time rekindled her passion for education and she pursued her teaching degree, teaching 1st- and 2nd grade in Durham’s District 13 for 10 years.
“After teaching for 10 years, I got the itch to see if I could help lead a school,” says Diane, who completed her administrative internship in Durham at District 13. “One of the schools I worked at was an inner-city school in Middletown with a high rate of free and reduced lunch, as well as absenteeism. I was so impressed with the students’ behavior because I had been there as a sub years before and that was not the case.”
Diane approached the principal about the change she had observed and he explained that the school had implemented Positive Behavioral Intervention & Supports (PBIS). That experience inspired Diane to study PBIS as her administrative project in graduate school. She completed the yearlong project and implemented PBIS at Brewster School where she was working.
After obtaining her degree, Diane interviewed with Overbrook School in East Haven and was “thrilled” to learn the district was participating in PBIS training. The training had just begun when Diane was hired as principal four years ago.
The training is a three-year process and the first step was to put together a team, which included a paraprofessional, two teachers, a special education teacher, and Diane. The team attended monthly training sessions and the two teacher-coaches attended additional trainings and then brought the information back to the rest of the staff.
“We worked together and followed a prescribed model to implement the framework at our school,” says Diane. “I came in with the notion of what this could do because I’d seen it in action. The principal really has to be involved for it to succeed, but this could not have happened without my team who did the training and brought it back and created buy-in from staff.”
Everyone at Overbrook School—from Diane to the teachers, the support staff to the custodians, and even the bus drivers—has “Frog Tickets” (the frog is Overbrook’s mascot) and students receive a ticket for displaying positive behaviors and following the school motto of “Be responsible, be respectful, and be safe.” Students can then turn tickets in for rewards, such as bringing a stuffed animal to school or using a special pen to bigger rewards like lunch with the principal or being king or queen for the day.
“We recognize each student individually with our framework for implementing positive behavioral interventions,” says Diane. “I really have to give credit to the team for going above and beyond, dedicating time to making sure this was implemented successfully. The teachers have bought into it and are committed to giving the ‘Frog Tickets.’ It really has been a team effort.”
Diane compares the system to academic tiered support, noting that all students are taught the universal concepts of accepted behavior and the key goals for what it looks like to be responsible in the various areas of the school, such as how to act in the hallway. The staff demonstrates those behaviors for the students and the students practice the proper behavior several times a year.
The concepts are reinforced in the classroom as one of the small-group centers can be based around a theme like responsibility, being a good friend, or not tattling. The school psychologist has also joined the PBIS team and will often work with a group in the classroom or sit with students in the cafeteria to model behavior.
“We have integrated our social and emotional learning into our literacy block to target students who might have difficulty in the setting they need the most help,” says Diane. “If you have constant interruptions due to behavior, you’re not going to get to academics, so first we need to first build in strategies to have children prepared to learn and creating opportunities for life lessons that will help them throughout schooling and their lives.”
PBIS has proven to be so successful at Overbrook School that it was recently recognized by the State Education Resource Center as a Model Demonstration School. The school received a banner to acknowledge the recognition and now school districts implementing PBIS visit Overbrook School to see it in action.
The recognition as a Model Demonstration School was somewhat bittersweet for Diane, though, as she and the staff she has built the program with will be dispersed with East Haven Public Schools’ planned redistricting next year. The plan is for Diane to move to Momauguin School, which will shift from grades 3 to 5 to a K to 5 school (Overbrook will serve pre-K students).
“I hope to bring what we’ve done with us—that we can take the work we’ve done and make East Haven a Model Demonstration for other towns and districts,” says Diane, who enjoys cooking, yoga, and hiking. “I love my job. I love coming to work every day.”