How Bate Middle School Cut Referrals by 81% by Leading with Positivity
When JD Smith became assistant principal at Bate Middle School, he and new principal Michelle Carver made a bet on culture. Two years later, referrals dropped from 687 to 131, out-of-school suspensions fell from 152 to 18, and an anonymous state survey showed a 46-percentage-point increase in teachers' confidence managing student behavior.
“I just want to say that LiveSchool may be the best behavior system that I've ever seen.”
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From Google Forms to a Culture Shift
Before LiveSchool, Bate Middle School ran behavior tracking through a Google Form that Smith himself had built and maintained as a classroom teacher. The system worked like restaurant suggestion cards – teachers used it most when they were frustrated. Tracking positive behavior was an afterthought, and the form took significant time to manage.
Smith had quietly piloted LiveSchool with a handful of willing teachers during his last year as a computer science teacher. When Michelle Carver was promoted from assistant principal to head principal and approached Smith about taking the AP role, he brought the idea with him. By the time he addressed the full staff for the first time as assistant principal, LiveSchool was the centerpiece of his presentation.
The year before LiveSchool, the school felt rough. Teacher turnover was chronic – Smith had watched seven principals come and go in his 16 years. Staff frustration was eroding morale, and traditional discipline methods weren’t moving the needle. Smith and Carver agreed that until the climate changed, nothing else would improve.
Go As Positive As You Can
When teachers asked the inevitable question – how many positive points should I give? – Smith had an unconventional answer. He told them there was no number. Just go as positive as you can, and if you get too positive, he would let them know.
The approach worked almost too well. In the first month, enthusiasm was through the roof and the school store was burning through inventory at an unsustainable pace. Rather than pull back on positivity, the team adjusted their store prices. The message to teachers stayed the same: keep recognizing students.
By the second year, the system became more systematic. Teachers found their natural rhythm with point-giving, and the ratios told the story. Even the teacher who gave the most demerits – which Bate calls strikes – had a 55-to-1 positive-to-negative ratio. Others ranged from 65-to-1 to over 300-to-1. Every single teacher exceeded the 6-to-1 target the school had set as a baseline. Some teachers gave almost no strikes at all because the positive environment in their classrooms had made disruptive behavior rare enough to handle with a quick conversation.
A Student-Run Store and Surprise Movie Trips
The rewards at Bate run on two tracks: a weekly store and periodic surprise experiences. The store is housed in a converted bookstore inside the building, staffed by five or six student workers who manage inventory, sell drinks and candy, and process transactions on iPads logged into the LiveSchool system. Every Friday during grade-level breaks, students line up to spend their points – the demand is so high that Smith challenged the student workers to serve the entire line in under ten minutes, offering LiveSchool points as incentive.
The store has moved over a thousand drinks and nearly 700 full-size candy bars. Students can also spend points on Chromebook rental fees instead of receiving strikes for forgetting their device, and high-value items like Kindles sit at the top of the price list for year-long savers. Two students saved enough to purchase Kindles by the end of last year.
The surprise experiences created the biggest buzz. One morning, Smith called a group of high-earning students down to the cafeteria during first period. Most of them assumed they were in trouble. Instead, he told them the buses were waiting outside – they were going to the movies, all expenses paid. The students went nuts. The surprise factor and the stories students brought back to their friends generated exactly the kind of motivation Smith was hoping for: kids who had missed out wanted to know how to earn their way in next time.
The Numbers That Changed Everything
The quantitative impact at Bate has been striking. Overall referrals dropped from 687 in the year before LiveSchool to 484 in the first year and 131 midway through the second year. The number of students with referrals fell from 169 to 146 to 73. In-school suspension days went from 350 to 336 in the transitional first year, then plummeted to 94. Out-of-school suspensions dropped from 152 to 65 to just 18.
Kentucky’s statewide impact survey, administered anonymously every two years, provided external validation. The survey taken the year before LiveSchool became the baseline. Two years later, teachers reported a 46-percentage-point increase in confidence around managing student behavior, reaching 74% favorable. School climate scores rose 45 percentage points. Emotional wellbeing and belonging climbed 33 points. Staff leadership relationships improved by 42 points.
These weren’t self-reported numbers from enthusiastic administrators – they were anonymous responses from teachers who had every opportunity to air grievances. The data confirmed what the hallways already showed: Bate had become a place where people wanted to be.
Teachers Choosing to Stay
The culture shift reached beyond student behavior. In Smith’s first year as assistant principal, only two teachers turned over – the lowest in his entire 16-year tenure at the school. A veteran teacher with 23 years in the building confirmed it was the lowest he could remember as well.
By the second year, the school’s letters of intent showed that every teacher who wasn’t retiring planned to return. Former teachers who had left were asking to come back. Another school in the district began exploring LiveSchool after watching Bate’s transformation, and the school’s former instructional coach – now an assistant principal at that school – was leading the effort.
Smith credits the retention numbers to a deliberate focus on recognizing teachers alongside students. Staff received small rewards like their favorite candy when they led the building in points given. The team joked about starting a teacher store. The recognition wasn’t elaborate, but it signaled that the positive culture applied to adults too. As Smith puts it, many students don’t get positivity elsewhere – and the same can be true for teachers in a struggling school.
Data-Driven Conversations with Students and Parents
LiveSchool changed the nature of disciplinary conversations at Bate. When a student accumulates three strikes in a week, they earn a lunch detention. Four triggers a morning detention. Five means a phone call home. The structure is clear, students know the thresholds, and teachers write detailed comments on every strike that Smith reads personally.
When students come to his office, Smith pulls up their timeline. The visual tells the story: a screen full of green positive points with a handful of red strikes sprinkled in. That ratio makes it nearly impossible for anyone – student or parent – to claim the school only focuses on the negative. Parents who once arrived at meetings frustrated now see concrete data showing their child’s progress. Several parents have called Smith after reading a strike notification on the app, asking him to talk with their child – a level of home-school partnership the old Google Form system never produced.
The transparency has also reduced negative parent meetings. When families come in, Smith walks them through the data and frames every conversation around helping the student succeed rather than punishment. As he puts it, when a student’s timeline is overwhelmingly positive, it becomes much harder for anyone to say the school isn’t focused on the right things.
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