Union Local Elementary Curriculum Director Matteson Roberts, left, and 1st grade teacher Sally McDiffitt celebrate the school winning the positive behavioral support system gold award from the Ohio Department of Education and Workforce.

MORRISTOWN — Union Local Elementary School recently received the positive behavioral support system gold award from the Ohio department of education and workforce.

According to its website, Ohio’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports’ recognition system provides an opportunity to celebrate schools and districts. Each year, the Department of Education and Workforce and the Ohio PBIS Network recognize schools and districts for their quality and fidelity of PBIS implementation.

Curriculum director Matteson Roberts said that she and first grade teacher Sally McDiffitt applied for the award because, when the school adopted the Success For All curriculum program, she realized that it needed to work on some of those structures.

The Success For All curriculum program is a standards-based curriculum model for teaching young children in preschool through fifth or sixth grade, especially those who are disadvantaged or attending underfunded schools. It develops reading proficiency through a variety of cooperative activities and individual attention, with the goal of all students achieving grade-level proficiency by the end of third grade.

“We spent last year working on it, and then realized that we were already hitting a lot of these targets that the state wanted,” Roberts said.

McDiffitt added that there are three awards schools can apply for — bronze, silver and gold.

“You start out with the bronze application, and it’s a lot of positivity. So we looked at the way our rules were structured. So for example, if you tell a child not to talk when a teacher’s talking or someone’s talking, well, does that mean they’re allowed to spin? Does that mean they’re allowed to tap a pencil? So you change the language so the children know exactly what you expect from them,” she said.

McDiffitt added that instead of implementing vague negative types of rules, she turned it into a positive as to what she wants the children to do.

“We talk about using active listening when a person’s talking, so they know that we’ve got to make eye contact. We have to sit quietly with our hands. We think about what the speaker’s saying,” McDiffitt said. “It’s really nice because it not only helps in the classroom, but also, if they learn that skill early, they learn that skill of conversation in a job interview, in job training, it’s a skill that follows them through life.”

Roberts added that, when implementing the program, she and McDiffitt had to look through the entire student handbook and reword a lot of the language to match up to the key points of the program.

“We went through the student handbook and made sure that all of that was saying what we want you to do instead of what we don’t want you to do,” Roberts said.

She added that when applying for the award you have to first apply for the bronze award and as she filled out the application she started looking at the silver award and realized that Union Local already implements what is required to win the silver award as well as the gold award so they then decided to “go for gold.”

Mcdiffitt added that a large part winning the gold award is related to school attendance.

“We’ve seen a lot of really good success, we have a 95% attendance rate,” she said.

Roberts added that the school focuses on rewarding the positive behaviors to try to squash some of those negative tendencies.

When a class has all of the students in attendance the teacher marks it down and the class with the highest attendance each week receives a reward such as a pajama party or an extra recess.

We’re very honored and excited to get this award because we do think that Union Local does a lot of great things,” Mcdiffitt said. “Our student body is just amazing. They’re really amazing students, and it’s just nice to have it out there to say ‘Look what these students are doing.'”