How Creekside Middle School Discovered 83% of Its Students Were Doing Everything Right
Principal Kari Franchini knew the paper discipline system at Creekside Middle School was broken – students signing binders, teachers hand-counting slips during planning periods. When she switched to LiveSchool and ran the first year-end report, the data revealed something the staff had never seen: 83% of their 1,200 students had zero demerits all year.
“83% of our kids are doing exactly what they are supposed to. Every. Single. Day.”
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The Paper Binder Problem
Franchini had taught seventh and eighth grade math at Creekside before moving into administration. She knew the discipline system intimately – because she’d used it herself. Every classroom had a binder. When a student misbehaved, they walked to the front of the room and signed the discipline log. Teachers met weekly to compare: this kid signed in my room and your room, and if they hit five signatures, there was a consequence.
The positive side ran on paper too. Teachers handed out slips and signed student agendas. After collecting enough, students could trade them for a prize. The whole system depended on teachers hand-counting paper during planning periods – a tedious process that was ripe for inconsistencies and useless in real time.
Then came the discipline log arguments. Ask a middle schooler to walk to the front of the room and sign a binder, and sometimes that request becomes a bigger disruption than the original behavior. Now you’re dealing with two problems instead of one.
Franchini had briefly tested LiveSchool at a high school academy before returning to Creekside. Even with just four teachers, she’d seen what digital tracking could do for students who needed frequent reinforcement. When the district redistricted and Creekside became a new 6–8 building with a new principal and sixth graders arriving for the first time, she saw her window.
Building the Expectations Together
Franchini didn’t hand down expectations from the principal’s office. She called a summer meeting: anyone interested in building-wide expectations and PBIS was invited. But she was strategic about who needed to be in the room.
“It can’t be all of your early adopters,” she explains. “You want some people in the room that are going to be a little harder to persuade – those really experienced teachers that have a lot of respect within your staff. If you can get them on board, it will go much, much smoother.”
That group created three building-wide expectations: Be Kind. Be Positive. Be Responsible. They’ve never changed. The simplicity was intentional – “Be Kind covers a lot of things,” Franchini notes – and the team mapped what each expectation looked like in every area of the building: hallways, classrooms, the office, the cafeteria.
Next came the harder conversation. The committee ran a building-wide survey asking every teacher: could you support issuing this consequence for this infraction? The result was a shared agreement on what constituted a demerit versus an office referral versus an in-class detention. Teachers who might have silently disagreed with a top-down policy now had ownership of the system they’d helped build.
The Slow Rollout
With everything else changing – new building configuration, sixth graders arriving, different teams and electives – Franchini made a deliberate choice: LiveSchool was not going to be forced at the start of the year.
The first real training came on a November half-day during election week professional development. Franchini ran differentiated choice sessions: one track for early adopters ready to go full-blown, another for teachers who hadn’t even logged in yet. The sessions covered everything from how to give a demerit to how to set up the reward store to how to get parents connected.
The approach respected where teachers actually were instead of pretending everyone was at the same starting line. And it worked. “After that first year, it is what we do,” Franchini says. “If we tried to take it away right now, I’m not sure what we would do.”
The behavior matrix became a living document. When a teacher wanted to reward students for meeting their MAP growth goal – done, added in minutes. When gum became a problem in science classrooms – added. The system flexed as new needs emerged rather than requiring a committee to reconvene.
The Five-Demerit Rule
Creekside’s consequence structure is deliberately forgiving. Students can receive up to four demerits in a week with no formal consequence – the demerit itself serves as the signal. On the fifth, the student’s team issues an after-school detention. The count resets each quarter.
If a student hits five demerits three times in a single quarter, it escalates to an office referral. At that point, Franchini’s team steps in – not to punish, but to investigate. Is it always tardiness? Lack of preparation? Is there something simple that could help, like an organizational system in their locker?
The data makes those conversations specific rather than emotional. When a parent says a teacher is “always out to get my kid,” Franchini can pull up the record: points from multiple teachers, across multiple classes, with clear patterns. “It just gives us really great data for those tier-two conversations,” she says.
For the school’s ED unit students, the system provides something equally important: constant positive reinforcement. A student might get a detention every week, but they’re also being recognized for every good moment throughout the day. The positives don’t erase the negatives – but they ensure the negatives don’t erase everything else.
The Chuck E. Cheese Model
Franchini’s advice on rewards: think like Chuck E. Cheese. Small prizes at the bottom, dream prizes at the top, and let students decide where to spend.
At 10 to 25 points, students can grab quick wins: Airheads, Gatorade, school supplies, a Twitter shout-out. At the top end – 500 points – they’re earning spots at the semester inflatable event or the end-of-year food truck rally, where taco trucks, mac-and-cheese trucks, and pizza trucks line up on campus. The school doesn’t pay for the food; the trucks come for the crowd.
The school has experimented with delivery and in-person formats. Brown paper bags delivered to classrooms work for efficiency. A lunchtime store – which before COVID was stocked and staffed by cognitively delayed students – created an inclusion opportunity that doubled as life-skills training: social interaction, a cash-register simulation, and responsibility.
“You would be shocked what middle schoolers will do for jalapeño-flavored Cheetos,” Franchini says.
The 83% Revelation
The moment that changed how Creekside’s staff thought about behavior came from a single report. At the end of the year, Franchini pulled the data: of the school’s 1,200 students, 83% had received zero demerits all year. When they expanded the filter to students with fewer than 10, the number climbed to 95%.
“We spent so much time on the other end,” Franchini reflects. “Five percent of our kids can be such a distraction, such a time suck – and we need to spend time on them. But also, this 95%? Let’s be proud of that. Let’s talk about that. Let’s reward those kids.”
That realization led to a new tradition: the Integrity Award, given to students who maintained minimal demerits throughout the year. The awards ceremony suddenly had far more honorees than any previous recognition event. For the first time, the school was publicly celebrating the majority of students who had been doing the right thing all along – quietly, without drama, without anyone noticing.
For Franchini, the lesson was about what data makes visible. Under the paper system, feelings and opinions dominated behavior discussions. Teachers focused on the students who caused the most disruption because those were the only ones they remembered. Digital tracking didn’t just make consequences easier to manage – it revealed that Creekside was already a much better place than its staff realized.
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