How Bloomer Middle School Ditched Punch Cards and Built a Positive Culture

The Seventh-Grade Pilot

Seventh-grade teacher Ben Bailing had briefly used LiveSchool during student teaching and suggested it as an alternative. The school gave his grade level a free trial for the last trimester of the year.

Bailing’s team went through the entire student handbook, breaking down which behaviors would earn positive points and which would earn corrective ones. They built out the behavior rubric, started using it with students, and got parents on board before the year ended.

That head start proved critical. When the school rolled out LiveSchool to all grades the following fall, it wasn’t administrators presenting a new initiative – it was teachers who had already used it, solving real problems in real time. “The buy-in from staff came so quickly because other staff were giving it to them,” Herrick says. “It wasn’t some new idea from the principal sitting in her office.”

A six-person committee – Herrick, Bailing, Behavior Support Specialist Angie Raymond, plus one teacher from each grade level – met monthly to troubleshoot. They made changes early and often. “In schools, anytime you’re implementing anything, you’re building the plane while you’re flying it,” Herrick reflects. “We don’t get to shut down and start over.”

Grade-Level Stores

Instead of a single schoolwide reward system, Bloomer let each grade level build its own store tailored to its students’ age and interests. This meant rewards evolved as students moved up – and each new grade felt like an upgrade.

In seventh grade, the hit rewards were experiences: Teacher Uber (a teacher wheels you to your next class in a rolling chair), teacher’s choice lunch, hat passes. In other years, students gravitated toward snacks. The system flexed with changing tastes because teachers could update their store anytime.

The committee made one deliberate rule: each grade level owned certain exclusive rewards. The big-ticket items that kept seventh and eighth graders engaged weren’t available to younger students. As students aged up, they unlocked new options – preventing the disengagement that often plagues older middle schoolers.

The surprise hit? An eighth-grade teacher who bakes a specific brownie once a month. Students save their points all month to earn one. “Literally a homemade brownie pan brought in by this teacher,” Herrick marvels. “The enthusiasm is big among eighth-grade students who don’t get enthused about a lot.”

Connecting Families

One of Bloomer’s goals was getting parents into the system. At parent-teacher conferences, the school distributed flyers explaining LiveSchool and how to set up the app. They’re now at nearly 70% parent adoption.

The payoff has been unexpected. In meetings about challenging student behavior, staff discovered that parents often have incentives at home that are more powerful than anything the school can offer. Because parents can check LiveSchool on their phone, they see their child’s points in real time – connecting school choices to evening privileges without the school needing to send daily reports.

“We don’t need to reinvent the wheel and create a new behavior plan,” Herrick says. “We have this, and they can look at it in live time.”

The data also feeds into tiered support decisions. When a student loses 10 points in a single week, it triggers a major behavior referral with a detailed breakdown: is it always tardiness? Disrespect? Lack of preparation? The pattern becomes visible, and the conversation with parents is grounded in specifics rather than generalizations.

Eliminating Power Struggles

The shift from paper to digital eliminated an entire category of classroom conflict. No more lost cards, no more arguments about whether a student had their punch card, no more 10-minute disruptions. “I could just click a button – dude, we’re done, we move on,” Bailing says. “If you want to talk about it, fine. If not, you can look at the comment and away we go.”

Raymond, the behavior support specialist, noticed the consistency most. Under the punch card system, different teachers handled the same behaviors differently, and eighth graders had no system at all. With LiveSchool, every grade shares the same behavior categories, but how they’re applied can flex by age – disrespect looks different in fifth grade than eighth grade, but it’s tracked the same way.

“It’s really leveled out the playing field for all grades,” Raymond says. “I’m not getting one referral from one kid from one teacher all the time. It’s pretty consistent support.”

Reach All to Teach All

On the back of Herrick’s office door, a sign has hung for seven years: Reach all to teach all. It’s the staff’s mantra – the belief that with middle school kids, you have to connect with them before you can teach them anything.

When skeptics questioned whether students should need incentives to do the right thing, Raymond had a ready answer: “I asked them, would you be here if you didn’t get a paycheck? Nobody says yes. We all need incentives.”

The school’s three-to-five-year investment in restorative practices before LiveSchool had already softened that resistance. LiveSchool slotted in alongside restorative practices rather than replacing them – giving teachers a consistent, positive tool to complement the relationship-building work they were already doing.

Herrick frames the work with the long view that defines middle school education: “We’re just planting seeds. We’re never going to see leaps and bounds of changes necessarily. But we still have to set them up for success.”