How PS/IS 119 Made Every Adult a Point-Giver and Raised Student Belonging 14%
When Principal Asia Robinson Atkins arrived at PSIS 119 in Queens during the pandemic, she found a K–8 school of nearly 1,300 students where third graders didn’t know seventh graders existed. She built a four-house system, recruited four teacher-coordinators, and gave every adult in the building – from kitchen staff to school safety agents – the power to award points. In year two, student belonging rose 14% and the school recorded 218,000 positive behavior points.
“It’s not just about the teachers. It’s about our kitchen staff, our school safety agents, our custodial team – because we are one community.”
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Fuzzy Moccasins and a One-Person Show
Asia Robinson Atkins started as principal of PSIS 119 approximately two years and three months before the webinar where her team told this story. She arrived during the pandemic, stepping into a building of nearly 1,300 students spread across two connected structures – kindergarten through eighth grade.
Her first three months were spent doing nothing but listening. She met with every staff member and as many parents as she could reach, asking the same questions: what was working, what needed help, and what the school felt like from the inside. What she noticed was that far too many children existed in silos. A third grader had no idea who the seventh graders were. The building was large and the connections were thin.
Robinson Atkins is a self-professed Harry Potter fan, and the house system idea came naturally. She drew inspiration from a principal in Georgia who had implemented something similar, and she wanted students to be able to track their points in real time rather than waiting for delayed updates. That search led her to LiveSchool.
In year one, she ran the program largely by herself. She would change out of her heels into fuzzy Ugg moccasins and sprint around the building preparing house parties solo. The faculty engagement was inconsistent – some teachers used LiveSchool enthusiastically, others were skeptical, and many fell somewhere in between. Robinson Atkins knew the effort was unsustainable without a team. For the program to survive her stepping back, it needed more leaders.
Four Houses, Four Coordinators
Year two brought the structural change that made everything else possible. Robinson Atkins recruited four staff members as house coordinators: Kelly Cunningham for the House of Perseverance, Shannon Ditta for the House of Innovators, Jean Hagelstein for the House of Integrity, and ErinKelli Kilbane for the House of Believers. Each house carried its own colors – gray, yellow, silver, and green – along with its own motto and identity.
The coordinators met once or twice a month to run the program, answer teacher questions, troubleshoot problems, and plan ahead. Each house also had an administrator assigned as its head, responsible for leading the house party if that house won the quarterly competition. The distributed leadership meant no single person carried the weight.
Student assignment was initially by whole class – all of room 703 in one house, for example. By year two, Robinson Atkins shifted to individual randomization so that students within the same class belonged to different houses. The one exception was kindergarten: those students stayed together as a class because they were not yet developmentally ready to pivot between groups during house meetings. New students entering the school were placed into whichever house had the fewest members, keeping the numbers balanced.
Once a month on Fridays, the schedule carved out time for house meetings. Students left their regular classrooms and gathered with their house – kindergartners through eighth graders together, led by their house coordinator and a house teacher. This was where the cross-grade connections Robinson Atkins had been missing finally started to form.
Winning Over the Adults First
The coordinators understood that without staff buy-in, the house system would remain a principal’s pet project. Their strategy was direct: train the staff, give them a voice, and then reward them for participating.
Training came through professional development sessions where the coordinators demonstrated the basics – how to award points, how to access the data, how to customize the rubric. But the real shift happened when they flipped the process around and asked the teachers what they wanted. What student behaviors should earn points? What rewards would actually motivate their students? Teachers who helped design the system were far more likely to use it.
Then the coordinators applied the same logic to staff that they were applying to students: recognition works. They turned point-giving into a competition among teachers. The top LiveSchool point-givers each month earned gift cards, extra prep periods, and a spot on a dedicated bulletin board in the hallway. When the school safety agent won the top point-giver award one month, it sent a signal through the building that the coordinators had not anticipated.
As Hagelstein described it, teachers saw that even the safety staff – people who were not in classrooms – were participating and being recognized. The reaction was immediate: if they can do it, I should be doing it too. Robinson Atkins had insisted from the start that every adult in the building have a LiveSchool account – not just teachers, but kitchen staff, custodians, and school safety agents. That decision paid off when the non-teaching staff became some of the program’s most visible champions.
218,000 Points and a Question About Trust
By year two, the numbers told a clear story. The school recorded 19,000 positive behaviors and students earned more than 218,000 points. Positive behavior tracking increased 23% over the previous year. Three house parties had been held, 15 students had been recognized as house winners, and 12 teachers had been celebrated as top point-givers.
But the number that mattered most to the coordinators came from a Google Form survey given to students in grades three through eight. The question was simple: do you feel like you have an adult you can go to if you need help?
In September, 62% of students said yes. By January, that number had risen to 76% – a 14-percentage-point increase in four months. The coordinators connected this directly to the house system’s design. House meetings put students in rooms with adults they might never otherwise interact with. A fifth grader could form a bond with an eighth-grade house leader. A second grader could be recognized by a teacher from a completely different wing of the building.
Points were never taken away. Kilbane was firm on this principle: if a child earned something in a moment, they deserved to keep it. The system was reinforcement only, and that philosophy extended to how the coordinators talked about the program with teachers who were still hesitant. No one was shamed for low participation. The trajectory was what mattered, and the trajectory was pointing up.
Logos, Bulletin Boards, and Building Blocks
The coordinators understood that a house system lives or dies on whether students feel ownership of it. One of their most effective moves was a schoolwide logo contest. Students from any grade could submit designs for their house’s logo. Teachers introduced the contest rules and helped students understand what makes a logo effective. After a two-part selection process – coordinators narrowed the field to three finalists per house, then students voted during a schoolwide house meeting – the winning designs were digitized and became the official house logos.
Kilbane, who handled the digitization, noted that most submissions were hand-drawn. The finished logos were cleaned up and unified in style, but the core designs were entirely student-created. Students could be found in the hallways staring at the bulletin boards, looking for their own work.
Each house maintained its own bulletin board that changed quarterly. One activity asked students to write on building blocks what makes a school community strong. Another had students write wishes for the new year on paper stars. The work was completed in homerooms, then sorted by house color and displayed together – a visual reminder that students across different classes and grade levels belonged to the same house.
Extended Monday morning meetings – 30 minutes instead of the usual 15 – gave teachers time to lead social-emotional activities connected to the house system. Coordinators provided slides and discussion prompts so teachers could facilitate conversations about goals, community, and belonging without having to build lessons from scratch.
One Family Across Two Buildings
The coordinators arrived at the webinar wearing their house colors. Robinson Atkins, who had stepped out of her office due to construction, was layered in beads – green, gold, and silver around her neck, with a red button pinned to her shirt because she could not find her red beads in time. The display was deliberate: although PSIS 119 has four houses, they are one family.
The house parties reinforced that message in practice. When the winning house celebrated, kindergartners and eighth graders shared the same space – playing board games, eating ice cream, listening to music while the school mascot made an appearance. The coordinators described watching a five-year-old and a thirteen-year-old celebrate together as one of the most rewarding moments of the program.
Looking ahead, the team had plans to deepen the system further. They wanted to use LiveSchool points as currency for events – students paying points to play in a basketball tournament or to watch it during the school day. They envisioned a mural project where students would paint their house values on walls throughout the building, giving them a permanent, visible mark on their school. And Robinson Atkins had recently purchased iPads so teachers could carry LiveSchool with them throughout the day, awarding points in hallways and common areas without returning to a computer.
The program was not perfect. Not every adult in the building had joined the effort. Robinson Atkins acknowledged as much: there were still people who had not yet joined the dance. But the direction was clear, and the data backed it up. More students felt they had a trusted adult. More positive behaviors were being recognized. And a K–8 school of nearly 1,300 students, spread across two buildings in Queens, was starting to feel like the connected community its principal had envisioned while lacing up her moccasins and running those first house parties alone.
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