Cocoa High School first year of implementation

Cocoa High is in its first year of implementing PBIS

 and so far we are LOVING it!

Cocoa High is located just inland of Cocoa Beach, FL and is a combination school for grades 7-12. We are the only Title I high school in our district with almost 80% of our students receiving free and reduced lunch benefits. Last year Cocoa experienced a large upswing in discipline referrals and discipline incidents.   There were over 3600 discipline referrals and only had 1500 students, this resulted in more than 2 referrals per student! We decided we "had enough and wanted to take our school back".  After some research, we decided to implement School-Wide PBIS. 

Since teachers are often frustrated with all of the new initiatives that get started every year (and never followed through with), we knew we had to find a way to ensure that this was not something else being shoved at teachers and would soon be forgotten.  Rather, we wanted something that was long-term and meaningful, so we decided to make this a culture shift. We wanted to re-install Tiger PRIDE in all our students, faculty, staff, families, and community. This led to Tiger PRIDE becoming our acronym for our Tier I expectations; Perseverance, Respect, Integrity, Discipline, and Empathy.

 We launched our PBIS initiative during pre-planning by sharing last year’s discipline data, the district’s new discipline plan, followed by the PBIS team’s Tiger PRIDE culture shift. We have since followed this up with several trainings on ways to implement Tiger PRIDE in the classroom including how to teach each expectation.  This included setting up shared Google Folders with lesson plans, videos, and bell ringer ideas for each expectation.  We also had collaborative discussions dissecting the discipline data. We approached PBIS in this manner in the hopes of increasing teacher buy-in and encouraging a sustainable culture shift across all grade levels. We put together packets of information on the culture shift for everyone including our custodians and bus drives and gave them stacks of Tiger PRIDE tickets to give to students who exemplify the expectations.

The teachers were encouraged to develop their own reward system using Tiger PRIDE tickets in their classrooms and as a school we created several ways for students to redeem their tickets. We purchased a wheel that we can change (write on/wipe off) and weekly students can spin to win with two Tiger PRIDE tickets; recently we opened a school store offering school supplies and various donated items that can be purchased with Tiger PRIDE tickets. The team has put together four large events for students to “buy out” of class to attend: snow cone party, Winter Carnival, field day, and movie and popcorn afternoon. Our first event had only about 60 students attend and our Winter Carnival had almost 600 students attend!

We have seen a dramatic decrease in discipline referrals as a result. With an almost 80% decrease in referrals for classroom disruption/misconduct and a 40% decrease in the number of students assigned to In-School Suspension in the first few months of school (August through November). We are still experiencing discipline issues and our numbers may not be that amazing at the end of the school year but we know that the culture shift is taking hold and the students and teachers are noticing the difference that a little Tiger PRIDE can make.

Submitted by: Cathy Gahres

Tiger PRIDE – PBIS School Coordinator

Title I Coordinator

NHS Co-Sponsor

Middle School Athletic Director

High School Assistant Athletic Director