How Heritage Middle School Turned Behavior Data into Videos, Scavenger Hunts, and a Nacho Bar
At Heritage Middle School in Liberty, Missouri, a 10-person PBIS committee meets monthly to dig into discipline data – then spends no more than seven minutes looking at it before shifting to action. They pick one behavior at a time, involve students in creating the solutions, and reward the results with zero-cost experiences like three-on-three tournaments and scavenger hunts designed by eighth graders. Principal Reagan Allegri trusts the committee to run the program and the students to own the culture.
“To change the behavior of someone, that person must be involved in the process. A child is way more likely to implement a solution that they helped create.”
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Where I Belong
Heritage Middle School sits in Liberty Public Schools, a district of about 11,000 students just east of North Kansas City. The school serves approximately 800 students in grades six through eight. When Reagan Allegri arrived as principal, she spent her introductory meetings asking staff what mattered most to them. PBIS came up repeatedly – the staff wanted to keep it, but parts of it had gone stale and other parts needed to be let go entirely.
Allegri’s instinct was to focus rather than expand. She created eight committees tied to the school’s biggest priorities and asked every staff member to join one. The priorities ranged from belonging and welcoming environment to intervention support. One of those committees was PBIS tier one.
The PBIS committee wrote its own purpose statement: they are a collective group of educators who believe that relationships are the cornerstone of everything. Their work is anchored in partnerships with students and families, with a strong focus on trust. As Allegri put it, if kids trust the adults in the building, everyone can go deeper and move faster than if the relationship feels forced.
This year’s schoolwide theme became hashtag Where I Belong – drawn from student survey data showing that many students felt fine but not connected. Allegri wanted every student to come to school knowing they were seen, heard, and part of something bigger. PBIS was one of the primary vehicles for making that real.
Ten Roles and a Seven-Minute Rule
The PBIS committee at Heritage has about 10 members, each with a specific role. A facilitator and co-facilitator run the meetings. A secretary keeps minutes and shares them schoolwide. A data coordinator pulls discipline data monthly from Educators Handbook, the district’s tracking system, and presents it to the group with all student names removed.
A LiveSchool coordinator monitors point-giving patterns – which teachers are using it most, what times of day see the heaviest activity, and whether points are being oversaturated to the point of losing value. An Eagles Express coordinator manages the student store, where students fill orders from a Google Form and a special education class delivers them to classrooms. An advisory lesson coordinator packages the committee’s decisions into materials teachers can use during homeroom. A publication coordinator creates videos and slides. And an incentive coordinator plans reward events.
Allegri allows teachers to move between committees each year, which keeps the work fresh but requires veteran members to train newcomers. The BLT liaison – a teacher named Gina Lang who Allegri credits as the data expert she is not – provides continuity across years.
The committee’s most important norm is a time limit on data analysis. They spend no more than five to seven minutes looking at the numbers before shifting to action planning. The reason is practical: behavior data can send a team down a negative spiral. Someone recognizes a write-up, starts reliving the incident, and suddenly the meeting becomes a venting session. Heritage calls this being a problem describer rather than a problem solver, and the committee treats the distinction as a hard boundary.
Pick a Lane
Each month, the data coordinator presents a snapshot: how many major referrals per school day, what categories they fall into, which day of the week is worst, which location, which grade level. At Heritage, Thursdays are consistently the hardest day. The commons – the school’s most unstructured and least supervised space – is the most common location. Eighth graders push boundaries more than sixth or seventh graders.
The committee’s second rule, after the time limit, is to pick a lane. They cannot create a lesson for every problem that shows up in the data. They cannot track every category at once. The staff will lose faith if the committee keeps sending new directives. So they choose one behavior and commit to it.
Earlier this year, the data showed a spike in horseplay – knocking off hats, smacking backs, tripping attempts. Not physical aggression, but students who could not keep their hands and feet to themselves. The committee talked to students directly: why does this keep happening? The answers were honest. Students said they just did it. Nobody was really telling them to stop. They were being immature and they knew it.
With that feedback, the committee built a lesson. Heritage’s broadcasting class filmed it and the theater kids acted it out – showing what the school wanted to see rather than lecturing about what it didn’t. The video played during advisory, followed by guided discussion: where have you experienced these actions? Have you ever stood up for someone being mistreated? What are ways we can all make Heritage a safe place?
Allegri is candid that this process is still new and imperfect. The school has done three data-driven lessons this year. Some of them made no measurable difference. But the committee tried, and that is what she asks of her staff and her students.
Breaking Out of the Middle
Heritage uses Panorama surveys to measure school culture and climate from both adult and student perspectives. When the staff unpacked the latest results during a professional development session, one pattern stood out: students were clustering their responses at three on a five-point scale. On questions like whether they felt safe at school or whether other students’ behavior hurt their learning, hundreds of students chose the middle option – neither helps nor hurts.
In Panorama’s scoring system, a three counts as negative. That made Heritage’s numbers look worse than the staff believed them to be. Allegri modeled for the adults first: she was not asking anyone to avoid picking three, but she wanted them to understand that middle responses produced data too vague to act on. If behavior in the building genuinely did not bother a student, they should say so clearly. If it did, the adults needed to know.
Teachers then ran the same exercise with students. They showed the data, asked follow-up questions – what behavior keeps classmates from learning? What could you personally improve? – and let the conversations unfold. Students started naming specifics: shouting out, not listening, getting out of seats, not being prepared. The honesty gave the PBIS committee new direction for future lessons, drawn directly from what students were willing to say when someone asked.
The activity, which the school called Breaking Out of the Middle, produced something Allegri valued more than the data itself: rich conversations between teachers and students about why feedback matters and how it shapes the adults’ decisions. Several teachers gave up an entire advisory period just to talk.
Experiences Over Things
Heritage runs a student store called Eagles Express where students spend LiveSchool points on food, snacks, trinkets, and intangible rewards like being principal for an hour or eating lunch with a friend in the commons. But the PBIS committee pushed this year to move beyond the store and offer experiences that cost the school nothing.
Once a quarter, the committee identifies the top 75 LiveSchool point earners – 25 per grade – and offers them a choice of activities. Before winter break, students could choose between King of the Court dodgeball in the gym or a scavenger hunt. The scavenger hunt was designed and run entirely by WEB leaders – eighth-grade ambassadors from the Where Everybody Belongs program. Allegri forgot it was happening until students started poking into her office to take her picture. She was part of the hunt and nobody had warned her.
The top 200 point earners got movie tickets to an afternoon screening in the auditorium. Students scanned a QR code and voted on the film. Three-on-three basketball and volleyball tournaments cost 50 points to play and 25 to attend as a spectator. Student council partnered with the PBIS committee to run the brackets – elimination rounds Monday through Thursday, championship on Friday.
When point-giving among teachers hit a lull, a committee member named Doug proposed a staff incentive: track teacher LiveSchool usage for three weeks, and if it went up, Allegri would provide a nacho bar. She bought chips and cheese; teachers brought the rest. The nacho party happened the week before the webinar, and it was, by all accounts, a success.
Cut Yourself Some Slack
Allegri paused midway through her presentation to say something she felt was important. She knows what it is like to attend a webinar or a conference and leave feeling like she is doing nothing right – like every other school has it figured out and hers is behind. That is not what she wanted anyone to take from Heritage’s story.
The school has done three behavior lessons all year. They do not run a lesson every week or even every month. Some of what they tried made no difference. The committee picks what is manageable and builds on it the following year. Allegri would rather do a few things well than attempt everything and burn out.
She also wants the PBIS work to come from the committee, not from her office. When the incentive coordinator sends a schoolwide communication about an upcoming event, it does not carry the principal’s name. If teachers have feedback – the schedule was already modified that day, or there were too many substitutes to pull it off – Allegri handles the logistics on the leadership side. But the vision and the execution belong to the team.
Four different student leadership groups – student council, Eagles Express, WEB, and the Unite Council focused on inclusion – give students multiple ways to shape their school’s culture. The PBIS committee is already considering how to fold student feedback into its regular meetings, creating a direct pipeline from what students see in the hallways to what the committee targets next.
Heritage’s approach is not flashy. It is a monthly data dig, a seven-minute time limit, one behavior at a time, and a willingness to try things that might not work. As Allegri told the audience: PBIS is not what we do. It is who we are. And if that is true, then the work never stops – it just gets a little better each year.
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