How Antioch Middle School Turned Four Bears into a Family – and Processed 3,000 Student Rewards

The GROWL Rubric

Points at Antioch are earned through a behavior rubric the team calls GROWL. Each letter maps to a category: Good to Go means students are prepared for class and showing kindness. Respect covers speech and actions toward peers and staff. On Time tracks punctuality to class and timely submission of work. Working Hard rewards participation, peer assistance, and completing assignments. Listening rounds out the framework.

Every teacher and staff member has access to the LiveSchool app and can award points throughout the day, during every transition, in every setting. Thomas also layers in surprise categories – one week, students earned points for returning signed progress reports on time. The unpredictability keeps students attentive. They never know what might earn them house points next.

Each student can earn roughly 25 points per teacher if they meet all the GROWL criteria. Thomas and her team monitor the numbers to ensure teachers are actively awarding points, and they adjust when the data shows gaps. The system operates at four levels: individual, classroom, grade, and schoolwide. A student saving for a field trip and a house competing for weekly bragging rights are both working from the same point pool.

Paw Mart Opens for Business

The centerpiece of Antioch’s reward economy is Paw Mart, the student-run store positioned in the front hallway of the school. It opens three mornings a week at 8:35, and students have twenty minutes to shop before the 8:55 bell. The store is not run by administrators. It is run entirely by students.

At the beginning of the year, students apply for positions. They interview. They hope to get hired. The jobs are real: account verifier, cashier, item distribution, stocker, and security or line manager. Each position has defined responsibilities. The account verifier checks a student’s point balance on a teacher’s computer before they shop. The cashier processes order forms. The stocker keeps inventory organized and restocked – Takis, Thomas notes, always run out first. The line manager keeps the hallway from becoming a bottleneck during the morning rush.

Schedules are posted on Schoology so workers know which days they are on shift. Students are paid 150 house points per week for their labor. If their grades slip or they receive behavior referrals, they can be placed on probation – and students have worked their way back to regain their positions. The restorative practices assistant supervises the operation and deducts purchased points from student accounts at the end of each day.

Inventory includes chips, cookies, honey buns, flavored water, and trinkets donated through the school’s community partners. The top seller is cell phone passes – printed labels and ink – which cost 550 points and allow students to use their phone during lunch for one week. Thomas estimates she spends about two hundred dollars every other month on restocking, supplemented by donations.

Holding Adults Accountable

When the school was closed on Monday one week, students immediately asked whether Paw Mart would open an extra day to make up for it. Thomas and her team opened it on an additional morning. That kind of pressure – students holding the adults accountable for delivering on a promise – is exactly what Thomas wanted. It means the points carry real value.

Teacher buy-in followed a similar path. Thomas did not lead with mandates. She led with induction. Once every adult in the building belonged to a house, competition took care of the rest. Faculty meetings became house competitions. Clubs were organized so members shared a house with their sponsor. The more opportunities staff had to mix and mingle within their house identity, the more naturally they adopted the point system in their classrooms.

The time commitment for teachers is minimal. Awarding points in LiveSchool takes roughly two minutes – highlight the students, select the behavior, apply. Batch mode lets teachers award an entire class at once. Thomas trained new staff during back-to-school in-service days, and mentors provide ongoing support throughout the year. Individual teachers also run their own classroom stores with rewards like no-homework passes or pajama day, all flowing through the same LiveSchool point system.

Layers of Celebration

The incentive structure at Antioch operates on multiple levels by design. At the individual level, students shop at Paw Mart or save for bigger purchases. At the classroom level, teachers offer their own rewards. At the grade level, each team plans quarterly events – the sixth graders held a carnival, the seventh graders went to Urban Air, the eighth graders went ice skating for 150 house points each. Schoolwide, Thomas runs events like ice cream parties for any student who crosses a thousand points.

House games happen every quarter. Tug of war, faculty-versus-student basketball, STEM competitions – students wear their house shirts, and the scoreboard drives real intensity. Thomas noticed that the adults are actually more competitive than the kids during these events, but students love watching their teachers invest that much energy.

A cultural leadership team of staff members meets once a month to coordinate all the moving parts. Through that team, Thomas knows what every grade level is planning and can ensure the layers of celebration do not overlap or conflict. A school dance the following week, for example, doubled as a fundraiser – students paid real money, and all proceeds circled back into student incentives and field trips.

What the Data Reflects

Thomas reports that referrals have decreased dramatically since the house system launched. She manages discipline for the entire seventh grade and can count her frequent visitors on two hands – roughly ten students who cycle through her office consistently. The rest are engaged, present, and motivated by the economy they participate in every day.

Attendance tells the same story. Students are showing up. Thomas attributes that partly to the rhythm of anticipation the system creates – there is always something coming, always a reason to be at school, always a milestone within reach. The layered incentive structure means a student who misses Monday might miss a Paw Mart shopping day, a house competition, or the chance to earn points toward a field trip.

Community partners supply donations for everything from dance decorations to store inventory. Thomas encourages other schools to build those relationships deliberately – tell your story, tweet about your story, invite partners into the building. Mentorship opportunities, donation drives, and sponsorships all flow from the same principle: when people see what a school is doing for its students, they want to be part of it.

The system is not static. Thomas and her team are piloting a Paw Mart 2.0 during lunchtime to serve students whose late buses prevent them from shopping in the morning. Students raised the issue themselves, and the team is responding. That feedback loop – students identifying a problem, adults adjusting – is what keeps the culture at Antioch feeling like something built together rather than imposed from above.