How Del Valle Elementary Went from 276 to 63 Referrals – Then Kept Going

Five Barriers, One by One

Jay and his team identified five barriers standing between their existing PBIS framework and a system that actually worked. The first was roles. Some teachers believed the administration should handle all discipline. Others wanted full autonomy and saw admin involvement as interference. Neither approach was sustainable.

Del Valle created a behavior matrix that color-coded responsibilities. Green behaviors – the positive ones the school wanted to see – were everyone’s to reinforce. Yellow behaviors were minor infractions that teachers should redirect quickly in the classroom without breaking their instructional flow. Orange behaviors were partnership territory: a teacher could handle them independently or call for administrative support. Red behaviors – safety concerns, physical aggression – required an immediate admin response.

The matrix came with possible consequences rather than mandatory ones, preserving the flexibility teachers needed while giving the building a shared language for the first time. It was printed, posted, and reviewed in team meetings until every adult on campus knew who owned what.

The second barrier was expectations. Jay kept encountering the same scene: a student misbehaved, an administrator arrived, and the student insisted they had done nothing wrong. The disconnect was not defiance – it was a genuine gap between what the teacher expected and what the student understood. Del Valle adopted CHAMPS, a classroom management framework that makes expectations visible at all times. Each letter represents a dimension of behavior – Conversation, Help, Activity, Movement, and Participation – and teachers post the current expectations on a board that stays visible throughout the lesson.

The redirect became the most powerful part. Instead of counting how many times a student had been told to be quiet, a teacher could say three words: check CHAMPS, please. The language stayed neutral. The expectation stayed posted. And teachers reported leaving at the end of the day feeling less worn out because their redirects had not turned into confrontations.

Ten Thousand Times Better Than Paper

Del Valle’s paper Owl Bucks had been a well-intentioned disaster. Printing them was tedious. Cutting them was tedious. Students lost them, traded them, and occasionally counterfeited them. Teachers struggled to distribute them without interrupting instruction – Jay would sit in classrooms for 45 minutes and watch four or five bucks change hands in the entire period. The quiet girl in the back who followed every rule never got one. The student who struggled with behavior got recognized more often because teachers were watching for improvements to reinforce.

Cashing in the bucks was worse. Treasure box Fridays meant counting out 17 bucks for a pencil sharpener and 23 for a squiggly pencil topper while instruction time evaporated. Jay’s team tried ClassDojo and Hero, but neither fit. Then they found LiveSchool.

The rollout was deliberate. Fourth grade went first, and the pushback was immediate – one more thing to do, teachers said. Jay gave them two months. By the end of those two months, the fourth-grade team was asking to continue. Second grade was added next, then fifth, and within a year every grade level was on the platform. Even Pre-K, whose teachers initially argued their students needed tangible rewards, eventually joined after recognizing that three-year-olds who played Candy Crush understood virtual points perfectly well.

The threshold Jay set was 25 positive recognitions per student per day. That number sounds high until you see the math: CHAMPS has four components displayed in every classroom. If a teacher awards the class once per hour for following the posted expectations – a process that takes seconds in LiveSchool – a six-hour day produces 24 points. Add morning arrival, cafeteria, recess, hallway transitions, and the bonus points for Monday and Friday attendance, and 25 becomes a floor, not a ceiling.

The Thermometer of the School

For Jay, the data changed everything. With paper bucks, he had no idea whether a teacher was actually using the system. He could observe one classroom for 20 minutes and extrapolate, but that was guesswork. LiveSchool’s Insights dashboard gave him what he called the thermometer of the school – a real-time read on every grade level, every classroom, every student, broken down by behavior type, time of day, and teacher.

The implications rippled in every direction. If a student accumulated several negative marks before lunch, Jay could send a counselor to check in before the afternoon unraveled. If a teacher’s dashboard was flooded with red, the admin team knew that teacher was stuck at the bottom of Maslow’s hierarchy – consumed by safety concerns, unable to teach – and could send a mentor or offer a break. Jay could be off campus entirely and still see how the day was going.

The data also became a coaching tool. Jay sent weekly reports showing each teacher’s points-per-student-per-day average. When one third-grade teacher hit 23 and the teacher across the hall hit 40, a friendly competition emerged without any administrative mandate. Celebrating the teachers who were using the system well turned out to be more effective than correcting the ones who were not.

Del Valle also built an alert system into their LiveSchool rubric. An “Oh No” section for severe behaviors – pushing, hitting, biting – automatically emailed the administrative and behavior team whenever a teacher logged one. The email included every point the student had received that day, positive and negative, so the responding staff member arrived with context instead of walking in blind.

The Schedule on the Fridge

The fifth barrier – the home-school connection – turned out to be the one that surprised parents the most. Del Valle activated LiveSchool’s Recaps feature, which sends an automatic weekly email to every family showing every behavior logged for their child in the previous seven days. For a campus where many parents worked until five or six in the evening and students walked home alone, the transparency was transformative.

Jay coached parents to create two schedules at home: a fun schedule and a less-fun schedule. Students chose which one they earned based on their behavior at school that day. A parent on their way home from work could check the LiveSchool app, see three red points, and call their child: I looked at LiveSchool, and I saw what happened today. When you get home, follow the consequence schedule. Even coaches started checking the app before deciding whether a student could play in the weekend basketball game.

Teachers added notes to non-obvious negative behaviors so parents could follow up meaningfully. A mark for “achievement in the restroom” was not self-explanatory the way “talking out of turn” was, so the note gave parents the context they needed to have a real conversation instead of a guessing game.

Jay did not frame rewards around trinkets. He preferred experiences – sitting in the teacher’s chair, being the line leader, serving as recess guard. The goal was to build intrinsic motivation rather than a dependency on pencil toppers that would be lost on the walk home. The points themselves, he believed, were recognition enough to start building that cultural buy-in. By May, many students did not need the points at all. But the system that earned them had become the architecture of the school’s daily life.

From 276 to 63 Referrals

The numbers told a clear story. In Jay’s first year, Del Valle recorded 276 referrals and 88 exclusionary disciplines. The following year, after sharpening the behavior matrix and CHAMPS but before LiveSchool, referrals dropped to 241 and exclusionary disciplines to 82 – progress, but incremental. Then LiveSchool arrived. In the first full year with the platform, referrals fell to 63 and exclusionary disciplines to 41 – a 75% reduction in referrals in a single year.

The numbers kept improving in the years that followed, even as Jay excluded the pandemic data that would have skewed any comparison. But he measured success by something other than referral counts. Del Valle had never earned higher than a C rating from the state of Texas. After years of keeping students in classrooms, connected to teachers, and growing academically, the school earned its first B.

Jay did not claim magic. The work was methodical: define roles so teachers felt empowered rather than abandoned, make expectations visible so redirections stayed neutral, replace paper with a system that tracked behavior in real time, use data to intervene before small problems became big ones, and connect the school day to the home so parents could reinforce what was happening on campus.

What he was proudest of was not the percentages. It was what the percentages represented. Every referral that did not happen was a student who stayed in class. Every exclusionary discipline that was avoided was a child who remained part of the culture – connected to teachers, present for instruction, growing. That, Jay said, is what everybody wants. We’re not magic. We’re just connecting and identifying our people who need assistance and providing that assistance.