How Bonlee School Built a Schoolwide Reward System From Scratch in Year One
In their first year with LiveSchool, Bonlee School created a unified positive behavior currency across K-8, rolled out creative rewards like a gaming truck and principal Uber rides, and began planning a house competition to tackle their toughest challenge: cafeteria behavior.
“What motivates you is when people recognize the things that you're doing well.”
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The Need for a Common Currency
Bonlee School is a K-8 campus in Chatham County, North Carolina, which makes it an unusual building by design. Elementary and middle school students share hallways, cafeterias, and common spaces. When Principal Nikki Merkus arrived for her second year, the school had established guidelines for success but lacked a systematic way to reinforce those behaviors consistently across all settings.
A student might earn recognition from their homeroom teacher using one approach, receive something different from the music teacher, and encounter an entirely separate system in the lunchroom. There was no shared currency, no unified data, and no way to track whether positive reinforcement was actually happening schoolwide.
The school leadership team, which included representatives from each grade span, classified staff, and specialist teachers, evaluated several platforms before selecting LiveSchool. Their goal was straightforward: give every adult in the building the same tool to reward and track behavior, whether they were in a second-grade classroom or on cafeteria duty.
A Gaming Truck and a Principal on Wheels
Bonlee's first big schoolwide reward was a gaming truck. A local vendor pulled a trailer behind his truck equipped with screens inside and out, game controllers, a giant Connect Four set, and a bean bag toss. Students who had earned a certain point threshold got a 45-minute block to play. Most students earned enough to participate, which was intentional: the first reward needed to be accessible enough to build early buy-in.
For weekly rewards, the most popular option by far was the principal Uber. Two or three times a day, Merkus would grab her office chair, roll it to a student's classroom, and push them to their next destination, whether that was lunch, specials, or recess. The lower grades loved it especially, and the buzz it generated in the hallways created demand from students who had not previously been focused on earning points.
The school also planned a pep rally as their next big incentive and was looking ahead to house competitions for the spring. Merkus leaned on the LiveSchool ideas bank and student suggestions to keep the menu fresh. One creative addition came directly from students: earning the privilege of staying on campus during the hour between school dismissal and after-school sports, supervised, by spending LiveSchool points.
Calibrating Demerits Across a K-8 Building
Bonlee's initial approach to demerits was deliberately cautious. During the first nine weeks, demerits appeared on the weekly report that went home to families, but they did not affect whether a student could participate in the big reward. The goal was to establish the positive system first and let students get comfortable with the currency before adding stakes to the negative side.
Teachers quickly identified a problem with that approach. Students noticed that demerits carried no real consequence. The feedback was direct: when a teacher issued a demerit, students would shrug it off. Something needed to change to make accountability meaningful without undermining the positive foundation.
The solution was a ratio-based system. For the December incentive, each grade level established a target ratio of positive to negative points, roughly five positives to every one negative. Students whose ratio fell below the threshold could still spend their points in the regular store, but they would not qualify for the big reward event. The school was still calibrating the specific ratios across grade levels, adjusting for the reality that point-giving patterns varied widely between K-2 and middle school classrooms.
Rewarding Test-Taking Strategies
One of the more creative applications of LiveSchool at Bonlee connected behavior reinforcement to academic strategy. During the first round of nine-week check-in assessments, teachers kept tally sheets to track whether students were using the test-taking strategies they had been taught: folding their paper to isolate answer choices, reading questions before passages, and other specific techniques.
The data was useful but the tracking was manual and disconnected from the behavior system. Working with their LiveSchool support contact, the school realized they could add test-taking strategies directly into their guidelines for success within the platform. Instead of simply monitoring whether students used the strategies, teachers would award LiveSchool points in real time for each strategy observed.
The setup was straightforward. Each strategy became a behavior that could be recognized during assessments. For the next round of check-ins in February, students would earn points not just for correct answers but for demonstrating the process their teachers had taught them. The approach reinforced that effort and strategy mattered, not just results.
Leading From the Front of the Chair
Merkus was deliberate about her own visibility within the system. She believed that if she expected teachers to use LiveSchool and wanted students to buy in, they needed to see the school leader actively participating. Pushing students in office chairs down the hallway was fun, but it also served a strategic purpose: it demonstrated that the principal valued the system enough to carve time out of her schedule for it.
The approach extended to social media. Merkus shared photos and updates from reward events on Twitter and Facebook, which served double duty as community engagement. The school's weekly digital newsletter, called the S'more, consistently received around 500 views despite a student body of roughly 300, suggesting strong parent and community readership. LiveSchool events gave the newsletter compelling content and gave families a window into the positive things happening at school.
Getting teacher buy-in followed a similar philosophy. Leadership team representatives acted as ambassadors, bringing ideas back to their grade spans and relaying feedback to the committee. The system was positioned not as a replacement for what teachers already did in their classrooms, but as a schoolwide layer that sat on top of individual classroom management approaches.
Building the House System Next
Bonlee's biggest ongoing challenge was cafeteria behavior. The space was small, sound bounced off every wall, and previous attempts to manage noise levels, including playing music, had only made things louder. Merkus and her team decided that a house competition would be the right framework to address cafeteria expectations specifically.
The plan was to assign students to houses and use LiveSchool to track how well each house followed the school's guidelines for success during lunch. Houses that met expectations would earn recognition and rewards. The rollout had been delayed by school closings and scheduling disruptions, and Merkus was insistent on not introducing it to students before staff had been fully briefed on how it would work.
The broader trajectory was clear. In year one, Bonlee had established a common currency, built student and teacher buy-in, and begun calibrating the balance between positive reinforcement and meaningful accountability. Merkus described the work as bringing systematicity to the school. The pieces were in place, and the team was focused on using the data and feedback from their first year to refine how well they used the system going forward.
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