South Valley Middle School

South Valley Middle School, which is in Missouri’s Liberty Public Schools, combined two popular behavior matrices when building their behavior rubric: location as well as respect, responsibility, and safety.

South Valley’s behavior rubric sorts their categories by location:

CafeteriaClassroomGymHallwayLibraryEach location category then has rubric items for “respect,” “responsibility,” and “safety.”

A Focus on School Culture

Beyond these above categories and items, South Valley also has two additional rubric categories that further celebrate and develop their school culture: Target Skills and Exemplary Eagle.

‍Target Skills: Target Skills contain behaviors like acts of kindness, volunteering, respecting subs, and extra-curricular activities. These are additional opportunities to reflect South Valley’s values and culture.‍Exemplary Eagle: Exemplary Eagle contains two rubric items under the same name – one for three points and one for five points. Recipients go above and beyond to demonstrate their school value.

Teacher Buy-In

The PBIS team developed the rubric's first draft. The team is made up of staff from across the school who understand the student body and the school's values. Once the draft was completed, they took the time to get teacher feedback in order to refine the final behavior rubric and ensure all teachers were bought into the process.

And they are bought in! During the first five months of the 2022-2023 school year, teachers gave a total of 673,000 points to students. WOW.

Positive Only

These 673,000 are all positive points as well. South Valley opted to make their rubric positive points only, meaning students can’t lose points for behavior. This is a common approach, especially when schools are focused on community building, the camaraderie between students and teachers, and celebrating students.