How Fort Smith Elementary Stopped Subtracting Points and Started Changing Behavior

The Green-Red Separation

Fort Smith’s counselor reached out to the LiveSchool team to brainstorm. The idea they landed on was deceptively simple: keep green points and red points, but never let one subtract from the other.

A student with 100 green points who earns five red points still has 100 green points. The red points still exist – parents can see them, teachers can reference them in conversations – but they don’t destroy what the student has built. The green points represent effort and growth. The red points represent moments to reflect on.

“The kids don’t want the red points,” Wilhelm says. “They don’t want those messages going to the parents. But they also still feel successful because they’re not watching their green points disappear.”

The shift also changed how teachers thought about point distribution. Instead of giving a red point when a student forgot their Tuesday folder, teachers started giving green points to students who remembered theirs. The framing flipped from penalty to incentive. Students who forgot their folder saw classmates getting rewarded – and that was reminder enough, without anyone feeling punished for circumstances that might be outside their control.

“It could be that they were running late that morning,” Wilhelm reflects. “Maybe Mom worked third shift. They’re not being penalized for something we don’t know the reason for.”

Rewards That Actually Work

Fort Smith’s teachers discovered early that the most popular rewards weren’t necessarily the most expensive ones. The hit items were experiences: eating lunch with a teacher, eating lunch with a friend of your choice, free time in the classroom, wearing a hat for the day.

The teachers who got the most mileage out of the system were the ones who simply asked their students what they wanted. One teacher discovered her class was obsessed with Pokémon cards – not the little ones, the oversized collector cards. She bought a set, priced them high in points, and watched motivation skyrocket.

“The teachers that have the greatest bang for their buck really have prizes that the kids want,” Wilhelm says. “They’re not always what we think they want.”

Perhaps the most memorable example came from Wilhelm’s own son, who attends the school. He saved 100 points – the maximum price for any reward – to purchase a coupon to eat lunch with his mom, the principal. “I kind of treasured that moment,” she says.

Building the Plane While Flying It

If Wilhelm could go back in time, she’d change the rollout. In Year 1, the school jumped in without establishing schoolwide norms for how points should work. Each teacher developed their own system. One teacher gave a green point when a student provided a thoughtful, justified answer. Another gave a point any time a student raised their hand – which meant students were blurting out anything just to earn points.

“We were building the plane as we fly it,” Wilhelm says. “We were recreating our rubric midstream.”

The inconsistency extended to volume. Some teachers gave one point per day. Others gave fifty. Students noticed the disparity immediately. The staff needed to have direct conversations about what earning a green point should actually mean: Was it for effort? For quality? For simply participating?

Those conversations, while uncomfortable, turned out to be the most valuable part of the process. Teachers who had been siloed in their classrooms started talking about expectations, classroom management strategies, and what good behavior actually looked like at different grade levels.

“It really grew that conversation for teachers,” Wilhelm says. “This is supposed to help us grow, to get better. We’re not just handing it out.”

The Right Committee

Wilhelm’s biggest piece of advice for schools implementing LiveSchool: build a committee with the right mix of people. Include teachers with strong classroom management – and deliberately include one or two who are skeptical.

“You need that person who’s going to say, ‘Hey, what happens when this happens?’” she explains. “At first we always want to be kind of Pollyanna. But you also need that opposite side.”

Fort Smith’s committee includes the assistant principal, classroom teachers from both upper and lower grades, and – crucially – AMP teachers (art, music, media, and PE). Including specials teachers ensures the system works in every setting, not just traditional classrooms.

The committee meets after each nine-week period to review green and red point data, look at trends, and adjust the rubric. Because the school also uses Capturing Kids’ Hearts – a program built on social contracts and monthly character words like empathy – the committee is working to integrate those themes into the LiveSchool rubric, creating one unified system instead of two parallel ones.

This year brought a wave of new teachers, which meant restarting some conversations from scratch. But Wilhelm sees that as an opportunity: “New teachers bring something to the plate that we haven’t thought of.”

Relationships First

When asked what message she’d put on a billboard for every principal in the country, Wilhelm answers without hesitation: Relationships.

“You can’t implement this until you really have those relationships,” she says. “When those kids participate in LiveSchool and they know you care, the red isn’t going to upset them as much. They know it’s a reflective piece to grow.”

The parent connection reinforces this. Fort Smith sends home access codes so parents can track their child’s points in real time. Parents appreciate seeing comments attached to each point – not just a number, but the reason behind it. That transparency builds trust between school and home.

Wilhelm checks the data from the principal’s dashboard, even for her own son’s account. “It doesn’t look like I ever look at his,” she laughs, “but I really do.”

After four years, the system at Fort Smith Elementary is still evolving. The rubric gets tweaked every nine weeks. New teachers bring fresh perspectives. The committee keeps meeting. But the foundation hasn’t changed: know your students, build real relationships, and make the system work with kids, not just on them.