How Caddo Hills Gave Students the Keys – and Cut Referrals 56%

Finding the Right Fit

Squires started searching for a behavior management system. The first platform he found required students to wear badges and teachers to carry scanners – too much hardware for a staff already overwhelmed by change. He went back to Google. What appeared next was LiveSchool, and when Squires showed it to his wife, to the sitting principal, and to Justin Neal – then a classroom teacher, later the school’s fifth principal – the reaction was unanimous. It looked like the right thing.

Two qualities sealed the decision. First, it had to be easy for teachers to pick up. Squires knew there would be pushback, and he did not want difficulty of use to become the excuse for not using it. Second, it needed to track what students were doing positively, not just negatively. For too long, the school’s entire behavioral apparatus had been tuned to catching kids doing things wrong. Good students were invisible.

The charter conversion also brought structural freedom. A $1.25 million grant funded CNC equipment, a news broadcast station, a culinary arts kitchen, a screen-printing shop, and even a student-run bank. Neal, who had moved from the business classroom to the principal’s office, was writing the charter grant and knew the academic investments would fail without solving the behavior problem first. An education consulting group that reviewed the charter told them bluntly: fix communication and fix behavior, or the charter will never succeed.

The Quicksand Year

Year one was rough. Squires expected students to resist – he did not expect some of them to outright hate it. Several dismissed it as a bigger version of ClassDojo that had no business in a high school. Others felt tracked, comparing it to a prison monitoring system. But the hardest struggle was teacher buy-in. Squires had fallen for LiveSchool immediately and assumed everyone else would too. They did not.

The team also discovered that their behavior rubric was working against them. They had tried to catalog every possible student behavior to make the system easier for teachers. The effect was the opposite – staff were overwhelmed scrolling through options, and the data was skewed by categories nobody used. Worse, students pointed out that it was far easier to lose points than to earn them.

Squires compares that period to quicksand. The harder they pushed forward, the deeper they sank. By the following summer, Neal called him in for a conversation about LiveSchool, and Squires arrived ready to quit the initiative entirely. He was not frustrated with the platform. He was frustrated with the gap between what it could do and how few teachers were using it consistently.

The turning point came when the leadership team stopped pushing and started listening. They brought in the student leadership team – a group that had grown out of the school’s Leader in Me program and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Teens curriculum – and said: here is the rubric, tell us what is wrong with it.

Students Take the Rubric Apart

The students did not hold back. They picked apart the rubric line by line, identifying categories that made no sense and gaps where positive behaviors went unrecognized. Squires admits it stung – he and his colleagues had spent real time building it – but the result was a streamlined rubric that students could actually navigate. When they ran scenarios through it that afternoon, the students found a place for every situation.

Then came the pivotal move: the leadership team brought those same students into a staff meeting and let them present the revised rubric to the teachers. Students walked the staff through hypothetical situations, showing how the new system handled each one. For teachers who had doubted whether students cared about LiveSchool at all, watching their own students advocate for the system changed the conversation.

The student leadership team itself became something students wanted to join. Members were involved in decisions across the campus – handbook policies, discipline procedures, beautification projects. In their most recent brainstorming session, students identified that some classmates coming from homeless or transitional housing situations needed laundry services, and they took it on as a project for the following year.

Neal credited Squires for keeping the initiative alive through the difficult stretch. “He kept the students at the focus, and I think that’s what’s helped us receive some of the success that we’ve had,” Neal said. “We had all the right elements. It was just putting them in the right positions.”

The Hallway High-Five

With the rubric rebuilt, the team layered in two LiveSchool behaviors that alert the principal in real time. The first is the SOS – when a teacher logs it, Neal gets an immediate notification that a classroom situation is escalating, letting him intervene before it reaches a crisis. The student leadership team agreed the SOS was one of the most helpful additions to the system.

The second is the Hallway High-Five, designed for the opposite purpose. When a teacher sees a student going above and beyond – engaging deeply in a class conversation, going out of their way to be kind – they log it, and Neal gets the same instant alert. He can then find the student in the hallway during class changes and recognize them personally.

Neal described what that shift felt like from the principal’s chair. Before, his phone only buzzed for bad news. Now he could walk the halls saying things like, “Hey, I heard you passed that CNC test – congratulations.” He folded these positive interactions into the school’s teacher evaluation system, reinforcing the practice from the top. The culture change did not just reach students – teachers reported being happier, too, because they could see students progressing not only in their own classrooms but across the building.

The store was the final piece. Until points had a purpose, students saw them as abstract. Around Christmas of the first year, the team opened a LiveSchool store, and buy-in spiked. Raffles for a PlayStation 5 and an Oculus headset gave students a reason to accumulate points. Movie trips, arcade outings, and pizza parties followed. The twelfth-grade class, leading in house points, earned a group trip to see the new Avatar film – entry, popcorn, and a drink included.

From 174 Infractions to 76

The numbers told the story. At the same point in the previous school year, Caddo Hills had logged 174 infractions. This year, the total stood at 76 – a reduction of more than 56%. The positive-to-negative point ratio reached 65 to 1, a figure that reflected a fundamental shift in what adults on campus were looking for. Neal ordered iPads for every staff member so teachers could log points from anywhere in the building instead of walking to a computer mid-lesson.

The data also changed how the school handled individual discipline conversations. Squires recalled an incident in which a student accused him of targeting – an allegation that, before LiveSchool, would have come down to the teacher’s word against the student’s. The principal pulled up the student’s record and showed that the same behaviors were appearing in every classroom. It was not targeting. It was a pattern – and now both the student and the family could see it.

Weekly parent notifications extended the visibility beyond campus. Families received updates on their child’s progress, and Neal reported that parental communication and family engagement had increased substantially. A community donor contributed five thousand dollars to support the incentive programs. When the community sees the value, Neal said, the students see the value, and the teachers see the value.

Caddo Hills is not claiming to have it figured out. Squires still catches himself forgetting to log points on busy days, and usage dips toward the end of each week as responsibilities pile up. But the trajectory is unmistakable. A school that once cycled through leaders and lurched between philosophies has found a common language – one that 247 students, 24 staff members, and a growing list of community partners are all speaking together.