How Von Tobel Middle School Built a Student-Run Rewards Delivery System
After a failed rollout the previous year, Von Tobel Middle School teacher Elizabeth Holt reimagined the LiveSchool rewards program as a student-run operation. A 13-member student council now processes orders, packs rewards, and delivers them classroom to classroom, turning what was once an abandoned initiative into visible proof that positive behavior pays off.
“I thought, why aren't the students delivering these rewards? I would love to see a student in a classroom handing out a reward so the others would have buy-in to it.”
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A Program That Failed and a Teacher Who Listened
Von Tobel Middle School had tried LiveSchool before. The previous year started strong, but the staff member assigned to manage the program became overwhelmed amid administrator shortages, and the initiative collapsed. Students who had been promised rewards never received them. Sixth graders in Elizabeth Holt's ELA classes kept asking when they would get what they had earned.
Holt, who teaches sixth-grade English Language Arts all day, saw the failure as a design problem rather than an effort problem. The old model required adults to manage every step: tracking points, stocking the store, processing orders, and distributing rewards. When the responsible adult got buried, the entire system stopped. Holt's insight was that students should be the ones delivering rewards into classrooms so that their peers could see the program working in real time.
She pitched the idea to administration, expecting to run a simple delivery operation. Instead, they handed her the entire program. The school gave her a 30-minute intervention period four days a week and an eight-thousand-dollar budget. What emerged was a fully student-run rewards operation built from scratch.
The TIGERS Point System
Von Tobel's point categories spell out their mascot: Teamwork, Integrity, Goals, Effort, Responsibility, and Success. Teachers award LiveSchool points when students demonstrate these qualities. Working collaboratively earns Teamwork points. Submitting work on time earns Goals points. Digital citizenship falls under Integrity. Showing growth mindset, performing better than expected, earns Success points.
Students check their point balance through the LiveSchool app, accessible via Clever, the school district's single sign-on platform. When they are ready to spend, they submit an order through a Google Form posted on Canvas, the school's learning management system. The form collects the student's name, their intervention teacher's name and room number, their current point balance, and which item they want.
By placing the order form on Canvas, the school removed teachers from the ordering process entirely. Students access the form on their own time, 24 hours a day, and teachers no longer have to process individual reward requests during class. This single change eliminated one of the biggest friction points that contributed to the previous year's failure.
Four Stations, Thirty Minutes
The Live School Council operates out of a dedicated classroom with four duty stations. At the processing station, two to three students work on Chromebooks reviewing incoming Google Form orders. They write each order on a card: the student's name, the intervention teacher's name and room number, and the item ordered. At the packing station, other students match items from inventory to the order cards and assemble deliveries.
The delivery station maintains a sorting system organized by classroom number. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, designated council members carry the packages to intervention classrooms across campus. They knock, wait patiently, and ask the teacher whether they would like to hand out the rewards or have the council member do it. If a student is absent, the delivery is held until the next cycle.
The fourth station handles inventory and reordering. These students monitor stock levels, identify items running low, and add Amazon links to a shared order form that goes to the assistant principal for approval before purchase. The council also collects student suggestions for new store items through a dedicated field on the order form.
What Students Actually Want
The reward inventory is entirely student-generated. Council members research, propose, and debate which items to stock. Holt's role is to remind them that the store serves all grade levels, not just their own. When the council initially selected items they personally thought were cool, she redirected them to include items for sixth graders too, adding Hello Kitty merchandise alongside the Stranger Things combos and tech accessories.
The current store includes items ranging from 15 points for mechanical pencils to 75 points for a wireless mouse, with fidget toy keychains, lip gloss, Hot Wheels, wired earbuds, reusable water bottles, and temporary tattoos in between. Pricing follows a rough ratio to actual cost. A one-dollar keychain costs about 30 points. A six-dollar mouse costs 75 points. When lip gloss started selling out immediately, the council raised its price to slow demand.
The store operates strictly with non-food items. The school's existing student store handles food during lunch periods, and administration wanted to keep food out of classrooms. This clean separation also means rewards can be delivered during intervention time without creating cafeteria messes or maintenance complaints.
Delivery as Culture Building
The decision to deliver rewards into classrooms rather than operating a pickup window was the core insight that made the program work. When a council member walks into a seventh-grade classroom and hands a student their reward in front of peers, every other student in that room sees that the program is real and active. For seventh and eighth graders who had watched the previous year's program fail, seeing deliveries happen consistently rebuilt trust.
The deliveries also developed unexpected skills in the council members themselves. One student, initially too shy to enter a classroom, was encouraged by Holt to make a single delivery to a nearby portable building. She came back saying it was okay. Since then, she has become the council's top delivery agent. The council designed their own t-shirts to wear during deliveries so they would be recognized throughout the school.
Holt discovered that the delivery model also reduced hallway traffic compared to a traditional store model. Instead of dozens of students leaving class to visit a store, a few trusted council members handle all distribution during a structured time block. The approach addressed administration concerns about hall passes and potential class-skipping.
Building the Plane While Flying It
Two months into the program, the council maintains a wall of Post-it notes tracking what is working and what is not. Students identified that they love making deliveries and seeing the reactions from their peers. They flagged that one member was not contributing equally, leading to a direct conversation about team accountability. They also declared that their classroom needs LED lights and better decoration, which Holt has tabled for now.
Early operational challenges included students submitting orders with missing last names, wrong room numbers, or outdated intervention teacher assignments. The council initially tried emailing each student to correct errors, but the volume made that unsustainable. Holt changed the Google Form policy: incomplete orders are deleted. Students learned quickly that if they did not fill out the form correctly, they would not receive their reward.
For the Halloween season, the council created a special Pumpkin to a Pal order form allowing students to send a small pumpkin to a friend or teacher. The promotion was popular but created a backlog of 143 orders that temporarily paused regular deliveries. Next year, Holt plans to script the delivery greeting, pre-assign students to stations based on their strengths, and build in seasonal promotions without disrupting the regular delivery schedule.
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