Arlington ISD parent Tiffany Manning considers her children to be generally well-behaved. If issues arise, she is quick to meet with their teachers.
However, teachers haven’t been quick to meet with Manning, she said. She’s been frustrated to find that her children’s behavior issues have often persisted for weeks before she hears about them.
“In my experience, teachers only think (about) and deal with the kid (when) something detrimental happens,” she said.
Manning, along with other Arlington ISD parents and even teachers, want the district to rethink its restoration-focused approach to student behavior as officials reexamine the decade-old policy.
In Arlington ISD’s most recent staff survey, teachers commonly expressed frustration with the district’s discipline practices, saying they lack the administration’s support amid a rise in student behavior issues.
The feedback echoes state and national studies that have seen teachers cite a rise in student behavior issues as a key stressor and central reason for leaving the profession.
In response, Arlington ISD officials are studying and restructuring its restoration-focused approach to student discipline called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, or PBIS, which it rolled out in 2014.
The district formed a student behavior task force in spring 2024 to study the “root causes” of the rise in student behavioral issues. After months of listening to staff’s student behavior woes, officials presented the task force’s findings to the school board on Nov. 7, underscoring their efforts to develop and better define “positive behavioral intervention.”
10 years of PBIS
Arlington ISD’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports strategy is founded on the belief that all children can behave appropriately with intervention, according to the district’s student code of conduct.
The approach breaks student behavior into four tiers of severity and encourages empathetic responses to misbehavior that reinforce better behaviors, according to the National Center on Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports, which estimates about 28,000 schools nationwide follow the strategy.
After 10 years of Arlington ISD buckling down on positive behavioral intervention, uncertainty still hangs over campus administrators and teachers about how to practically implement the strategy in misbehaving classrooms, according to the district’s behavior task force.
How does Arlington ISD rank behavioral issues?
Group I: Minor misbehaviors, with appropriate Group I corrective actions. About 80% of students never see escalations above this group, according to district officials.
Group II: More serious or persistent than Group I misbehaviors. About 10% to 15% of students see these issues and do not escalate beyond it.
Group III: Serious or persistent misbehaviors disrupting learning or endangering individuals’ health or safety or property damage.
Group IV: Misbehaviors constitute serious or persistent misbehaviors or illegal acts that justify a removal to an alternate education program.
To better define what positive behavior support looks like, the task force is designing districtwide discipline processes, standards, roles and resources, said Christi Buell, assistant superintendent of school leadership, at the task force’s Nov. 7 presentation.
“We kind of know what PBIS is, but what does it look like when we really implement it in a way that it’s having a positive impact on our campus?” Buell said.
Falling through the cracks
Recently retired teacher Stephanie Phillips remembers when Arlington ISD first rolled out its student discipline approach in 2014. She left the district in summer 2024 after teaching elementary school students for 14 years.
Teachers used to be excited about the new system, Phillips recalled. When the approach was new, schools hosted assemblies about it and classrooms devoted instructional time to establishing behavioral norms.
“We’d teach how to act when you go to the bathroom, how to properly enter the cafeteria, how to line up when you leave for the cafeteria, how to attend an assembly, what’s the proper etiquette,” Phillips said. “Everything was reinforced.”
Campuses also rolled out incentives for well-behaved students, which created a culture of better behavior, she said.
Over time, Phillips felt the positive behavior system “fell through the cracks” as state education officials and Arlington ISD put heavier expectations on teachers’ job descriptions, she said. Lesson plans got more complex, teachers’ workdays grew cramped with paperwork, and filing behavior referrals became more shrouded in bureaucratic headaches.
Teachers had less time to reinforce behavioral expectations, Phillips said. So after a few years of bearing fruit, the focus on positive behavior intervention became more of a burden than an aid.
“Long before I was on the board, we started implementing PBIS, and my hope would be that we were a lot further,” said trustee David Wilbanks, who was elected in 2019.
Teachers have often complained that correcting misbehavior and filing reports takes too much time, school board member Melody Fowler said. Some teachers often need to pause their teaching and go to the campus’s front office to document students.
As part of the behavior task force’s focus, officials have tried to retrain teachers in restorative discipline, Buell told trustees.
Over the fall, officials trained teachers on viewing class disruptions through a trauma-informed lens, encouraging them to empathize with a student and their background when they misbehave. The approach encourages them to react to the root causes of misbehaviors rather than the issues alone.
Fowler was weary of continuing to put training and responsibilities on teachers to deal with student behavior issues that stem from factors beyond their control. The sixth-year trustee would rather put resources toward programs that correct repeatedly misbehaved students, she said.
“We wonder why our scores decline, we wonder why kids are not passing. It’s because teachers don’t have time to teach,” Fowler said. “They’re too busy redirecting and having to send out referrals. I think it’s time we put some of this back on the students and back on the parents.”
Phillips said teachers’ workload stress was made worse after the COVID-19 pandemic as students returned to school with shorter attention spans and more confidence to misbehave.
Through TikTok, which rose in popularity during the pandemic, students filmed themselves doing viral challenges like vaping in school and stealing school equipment, Phillips said, referring to the COVID-era “devious licks” challenge to vandalize bathrooms and take property.
“You didn’t really have kids vaping in 2014, but now it’s a lot of what they see on social media, what they see with their peers,” she said. “Now it’s coming into the schools and trickling all the way down to elementary.”
Phillips wants Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports strategy revamped and restructured.
“I’m not saying it’s a horrible program,” she said. “It had great intentions, but it doesn’t match the same child from 2014 to 2024. It just does not.”
Hopes for the future
As Manning, a parent of four, watches Arlington ISD revisit the positive behavior system, she hopes to see the district emphasize parent-teacher communication. She wants teachers to communicate with parents as a first response to students misbehaving and contact them when issues first arise, rather than after reports have been filed.
She also wants the district to clearly define what teachers are allowed to do in classes, so students and parents know when a teacher is overstepping their power.
Phillips, as a longtime educator, said she understands Manning’s concerns, and she advises younger teachers to use careful discretion before filing a behavioral referral. Phillips feels most behavioral issues can be resolved by calling a parent, and teachers don’t always need to create a paper trail for minor offenses.
Whenever a behavior issue justifies documentation, teachers should contact parents as they’re filing the paperwork — not weeks after the fact, Phillips said.
Phillips wants to see the district’s discipline policies remade to suit today’s times, she said. She believes positive behavior support can be effective, but it needs to meet students where they are in 2024 — addressing their TikTok challenges, vaping rings and increased restlessness — not where they were in 2014.
The behavior task force’s efforts so far have seen some success, with about 72% of campuses showing a year-to-date decrease in behavior referrals, according to numbers presented at the Nov. 7 board meeting.
“We know from our own surveys that this is the biggest issue that our teachers have brought forward to us,” Wilbanks said. “We know from surveys across the nation that all teachers point to this as one of the biggest problems they face in doing their jobs.”
Drew Shaw is a reporting fellow for the Arlington Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org or @shawlings601.
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