How Wirt County High Let Students Write the Rules – Referrals Dropped 48%

The Student Council Writes the Rubric

The previous student council sponsor had retired, and Callie saw an opening. She restructured the entire organization. Five representatives from each grade were elected, but the job description had changed. Before anyone campaigned, every applicant sat down with the PBIS team and learned the new expectations: student council would draft the behavior rubric, plan all rewards, and run the LiveSchool store.

The rubric that emerged reflected how teenagers think about the world. Where younger schools might reward lining up quietly, Wirt’s students organized their expectations around three categories they believed mattered for life after high school: citizenship, leadership, and self-management.

Under citizenship, students could earn points for acts of service, helping others, outstanding kindness, and positive conflict resolution. Callie called conflict resolution her favorite category. She would watch two students disagree over a project, and if they resolved it without adult intervention, both earned a point with a comment explaining exactly what happened.

Under leadership, the rubric tracked accepting criticism – a skill the teachers had been struggling to develop – along with teamwork and taking initiative in class. Under self-management, students earned points for asking for help, being on task without being told, notifying teachers of upcoming absences, and overcoming challenges they did not think they could handle.

Callie estimated that 85% of the final rubric came directly from what students suggested. The PBIS team refined the language and organized the categories, but the substance belonged to the students. Because 70 to 80% of Wirt’s graduates enroll in some form of post-secondary training – military, trade school, two-year or four-year college – the rubric was framed around one message the school repeated constantly: these are the skills you need in the workplace, regardless of what job you have.

Coffee, Passes, and a Four-Hour Reward

The student council did not just design the rubric. They also planned the rewards, and what they chose revealed what actually motivates teenagers in a small rural community. The bi-weekly store – run entirely by student council members with an iPad during lunch, no staff member required – offered passes at low point costs: leave five minutes early for lunch, free entry to a sporting event, skip developmental guidance for an hour-long lunch on Thursdays.

The most popular item, to nobody’s surprise, was the missing assignment pass. For 15 points, a student could purchase permission to zero out one assignment – with teacher approval. The most expensive item was a detention pass at 20 points. The point values were deliberately low because the school set a threshold: earn at least 25 points during the nine-week grading period and you qualify for the big semester reward.

That first reward was a four-hour block of choice. Students could watch one of two movies, compete in an Esports tournament with Super Mario Kart and Smash Brothers, paint and make shirts with Cricut machines in a library Makerspace, or play in open gym. The local coffee shop set up a free coffee bar – because, as Callie put it, free coffee is the status symbol of Wirt County.

Every option was free or nearly free. The coffee bar was the only expense, running about three dollars per student. Students voted on the movies. The Esports equipment and Makerspace materials already existed. And because students only needed to meet the 25-point threshold – they could still spend all their points and qualify – roughly 80 to 85% of the student body earned their way in.

Conflict Resolution Without a Script

Among all the categories on the rubric, conflict resolution took on a life that Callie had not anticipated. Students began resolving disagreements on their own – not because they were told to, but because they discovered teachers were watching for it. A student would come back to class the next day and announce that they had earned a point for handling a conflict. The comment feature in LiveSchool became the vehicle: teachers wrote specific notes about what the student did, turning a single point into a moment of recognition.

Callie believed the change was largely unconscious. Students were not strategically resolving conflicts to earn points. They were simply learning, through repeated reinforcement, that adults noticed when they handled problems on their own. The message the school kept reinforcing was direct: we are basically your next step before the workplace, and your boss is not going to be your parent.

The developmental guidance structure amplified the effect. At Wirt, students are assigned the same DG teacher in ninth grade and stay with that teacher for 25 minutes every day through senior year. Callie’s team charged student council with planning a monthly competition or community service project for these groups – a pumpkin drop design contest where containers were tested from the roof, a stocking stuffer drive, a canned food drive, a Thanksgiving door-decorating contest. The activities gave students something to look forward to in a class period that had previously felt purposeless, and they reinforced the teamwork and communication skills the rubric was designed to develop.

Keeping It Positive

Wirt made a deliberate choice to track only positive behaviors in LiveSchool. After ten weeks, the staff feedback was clear: they wanted LiveSchool to remain the place where parents and students could see what a child was doing well. A separate detention and referral system handled negative behaviors. The division kept LiveSchool associated with recognition rather than punishment.

The teacher fidelity report became Callie’s weekly management tool. She sent it to the administrators, who could see which teachers were awarding fewer points than expected and which were awarding far too many. The school asked teachers to give a minimum of 40 points per week, and the administration worked with outliers on both ends to find a consistent range of 40 to 100 points per teacher per week.

Simplicity was the operating principle. Teachers had asked for something they could use with a single tap during a 45-minute class period – and that is what they got. As more students mentioned the comment feature, more teachers started writing notes with their points, but nobody was required to do more than tap and move on.

The Numbers After One Semester

Wirt County High School started using LiveSchool around October 10th. In September – before the system launched – the school logged 59 detention referrals for small infractions: unprepared for class, foul language, repeated tardiness. In October, with LiveSchool running for roughly three weeks of the month, referrals dropped to 38. November, a shortened month with only 11 school days, saw 28. December was tracking around 32.

Attendance also moved. The previous year, Wirt had hovered around an 85% attendance rate. In the first semester with LiveSchool and PBIS, that number climbed to 89%. The school tied attendance into the point system at the end of the first nine weeks – the grade with the highest weekly attendance earned a bonus point – and Callie observed that students showed up for the events and activities even when they might have stayed home otherwise.

The culture shift went beyond what numbers could capture. Students who had never spoken to a teacher about earning points were now approaching staff to ask what they could do that day. The store ran without a single problem all semester. Student council members picked up an iPad, retrieved the tickets, and managed their peers during lunch with no adult intervention needed.

Callie and her team recognized they were still in year one. The rubric would evolve. The rewards would change. The attendance incentives were only nine weeks old. But the foundation was set: students had written the expectations, students were planning the rewards, and students were running the store. The adults provided the structure. The students provided the buy-in.