MIDLAND, Texas — For the past school year, eight MISD schools took place in a pilot program to become trained on implementing a behavioral intervention and support action plan.
The goal is to help MISD schools meet the behavioral, social and mental health needs of their students.
"They’ve created a behavior curriculum that they will explicitly teach what is expected on the campus," said Taylor Harris, Mental Health Coordinator at MISD.
Harris says this program has shown the district that improving a students behavior can also improve their academic success.
"When we see less office referrals we have students staying in the classroom more and they are building those relationships with their teachers and they’re wanting to come to school," Harris said.
Each MISD campus will have a plan that is specifically catered to them and their staff.
"They will go through the same process where right now they’re working on creating a team and then that team will start looking at data and formulating plans for the next year," Harris said, "With that data, they are creating behavior lesson plans, or behavior matrix which shows what does it look like sound like to be in the cafeteria or the hallway."
"We’re focusing more on prevention with behavior rather than punishment we’re explicitly teaching them how it looks like to act in a classroom rather than expecting they know," Harris said.
She says they want to make sure students and staff know they have those necessary resources to help them with what they may be going through.
"There’s such a stigma around mental health and if we are bringing it up and talking about it with our students they’re more likely to reach out and ask for help. We work really closely with our community agencies to be able to provide support to students and if we’re letting them know how they can get those support then we think they’ll eventually communicate with us they need that help," Harris said. "Allowing these teachers the opportunity to build those authentic relationships and teach the students how to behave in the classroom is going to help their academic growth."