A $20,000 approach to student discipline has resulted in improved morale among staff and a drop in student suspensions, Middletown City Schools officials said.

Middletown City Schools and Franklin City Schools are among 114 school districts across the U.S. using Positive Behavior Supports, a program that teaches proper behavioral expectations in the same way a teacher would teach a class subject. By acknowledging and recognizing good behavior, it is believed that the good behavior will more than likely be repeated, say the program’s developers, Safe & Civil Schools, which is based in Eugene, Ore.

“Any more, there’s a greater diversity of kids that enter our school districts,” said Brian McFee, Franklin High School’s assistant principal. “It’s good to make sure that they all know what the basic rules are and what the proper procedures are. Then they know right from the very start what their expectations are.”

Middletown spokeswoman Gracie Gregory said the district spent $20,000 of district funds on PBS supplies and instructional materials. She said that worked out to roughly $3 per student. Franklin Schools did not provide cost figures.

“The biggest thing for us is it got us in a different mindset of how we used to do discipline. It got us more in the framework of continuing to teach,” Middletown High assistant principal Derrick Richardson said. “A lot of times, we made the assumptions that our kids knew what to do in each particular setting, and what that behavior should look like, but that’s not necessarily the case.”

“Instead of making assumptions and wanting to suspend kids or kick them out, we’re working to try and figure out the best way to change their behavior,” Richardson said. “Before it was ‘Okay, you did this? You’re out of here.’ But that doesn’t help the child to realize what they’ve done wrong or to understand how they should have done something differently. That’s what PBS has allowed us to do.”

The number of suspensions within the Middletown district has dropped from 1,078 during the 2010-11 school year to 742 last school year, the first year of the PBS initiative.

Middletown Schools surveyed staff to gauge the effectiveness of its PBS program. The same survey was given to staff members in January 2011 and January 2012.

Among the highlights, were a positive increase in staff morale and their view of building administrators and the school’s positive culture.

According to Safe & Civil Schools, it takes three years to fully implement the PBS program using a three-tiered approach — a basic introduction districtwide, then two tiers geared more to students who already have behavioral problems.

Middletown, which is in its second year of using the program, has just begun Tier Two. Franklin is using PBS for the first time this school year.

At the kindergarten level, students might be instructed on proper behavior in the classroom.

At Middletown High, for example, five behavior zones were established — classrooms, hallways, the school parking lot, computer labs and the cafeteria — and all students were taught how they were expected to behave in those particular environments.

“Teachers may have their own rules for how things operate once the student is inside the classroom, but as far as the overall classroom function, every student has the expectation when they go into the classroom,” said Middletown High English teacher Susan Willoughby-Crawford.

“The same goes for when they’re in the hallways or the parking lots, or when they use the computers or when they’re in the cafeteria. So they all know the expectations when they’re in those areas,” she said.

McFee said he saw the PBS system have an affect on students while he was a teacher in the Mount Healthy school district.

“We implemented ‘Start on Time’ at Mount Healthy, where our emphasis was getting students into class on time,” he said. “We were able to drop the amount of tardiness by 90 percent.”

“If an event occurred where a student is late to class, the kids were brought to a central location where they faced a disciplinary consequence or a verbal warning. We as faculty took them back to class. That way, if there were three kids in my class who were tardy, it only required one class interruption instead of three.”

According to the Hamilton County Educational Service Center, which helped to implement the Franklin and Middletown programs, the PBS system is being used in some Cincinnati, Springfield and Dayton area schools as well.

Middletown and Franklin are building their discipline programs around their own district goals. Middletown refers to its as a PRIDE initiative (Performance, Respect, Integrity, Determination, Effort), while Franklin calls it “Cattitude” with the focus being on the three A’s: Academics, Attendance and Attitude.