Behavior Briefs

Start the School Year Strong: Strengthen Common Area Supervision

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:57:46 GMT

Protect, Expect, Connect, Correct, and Reflect—five essential skills for creating safe, positive, and well-managed common areas.

The presence and management skills of supervising adults in common areas have a major impact on school climate. Whether it is teachers gently reminding students about expectations—“Please walk on the right side of the hallway”—or cafeteria supervisors making positive connections with students—“Gentlemen, it is great to see you today!”— friendly, confident adults in common areas can deter the majority of misbehavior.

A critical responsibility of administrators and members of a schoolwide climate and safety team is to ensure that all staff are equipped with the knowledge and skills to improve their supervision practices. School leadership should also communicate clear expectations for all supervisors about what their role should look and sound like for each location, such as cafeteria, hallway, playground, etc.

Consider the strengths and areas in need of improvement for supervision in each common area location. Analyze the following five skill sets—staff must be empowered to protect, expect, connect, correct, and reflect.

Protect— Do staff know the specific zones they are expected to supervise? Is the schedule set up to prevent gaps in supervision? Do supervisors know how to use continuous circulation and scanning to monitor their assigned areas?

Consider whether any areas of the school, such as stairwells, have spotty or nonexistent supervision. Should there be adjustments to where supervisors stand or how they circulate so that adults can see and get to all areas quickly?

Expect— Are supervising staff well prepared to consistently communicate and follow through with any rules, procedures, expectations, and basic civilities students are expected to use while in the setting? Behaviors you want to see and hear must first be taught to supervisory staff so they are all on the same page, then taught to students.

A common non-example on the playground occurs when one supervisor allows students to climb up a slide and another corrects students later in the day for the same behavior. Ensure that all supervisors are clear about the nuanced expectations that are being taught to students for each setting, procedure, piece of equipment, and so on.

Connect— Do all supervisors understand the importance of interacting with students in a welcoming and positive manner? Do supervisors use specific positive feedback when they notice students meeting or making growth toward expectations? Throughout the day, staff should be heard frequently greeting students (and families) and making connections as they move from arrival, through the hallways, to dismissal. Also reflect on how often you hear staff give descriptive praise, such as “Thank you for keeping your hands to yourself while going through the cafeteria line.”

Reflect— Are common area supervisors given the opportunity to reflect on the things they are doing well and things they could improve upon in their supervisory duties? Do they regularly receive positive and corrective feedback from their supervisors about how to be as effective as possible in their role?

For schools that have Foundations: A Proactive and Positive Behavior Support System see Module B, Presentation 4 and 5, and have staff use Reproducible B-08: Supervisory Skills Checklist to review and boost effective staff supervision practices. Para Pro: Supporting the Instructional Process also includes a Supervisory Skills Checklist (pp. 102–104) designed for paraprofessionals tasked with common area supervision.

Every staff member will have opportunities to provide common area supervision. Start your school year strong by reviewing effective supervision skills with all staff members—administrators, interventionists, teachers, classified staff members, and even substitutes. For staff members who regularly supervise particular common areas as part of their assigned duties, spending some time highlighting the specific ways they can protect, expect, connect, correct, and reflect can go a long way in ensuring that common areas are well managed, safe, civil, and positive places for students and staff to be.

If you would like to explore professional development options for this content, contact us at info@safeandcivilschools.com .

Jessica Sprick

Safe & Civil Schools

Kicking Off The Year

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 15:57:59 GMT

A thoughtful Classroom Management Plan helps build the routines and relationships that support learning all year.

We hope you’ve had lots of opportunities to relax and recharge over the summer! As you make your final preparations for the school year, consider some of the most essential tasks that can help ensure a smooth start and a productive school year.

Spend a little bit of time clarifying what you would like to accomplish with your students—your vision and long-term goals. If you have a destination in mind from the start of the school year, it can help you take meaningful actions to reach your goals and course correct if the class is veering off course. Think about the climate you want to create for your students, yourself, and families. What does behavior look and sound like in different types of activities and transitions? What habits, attitudes, and behavioral skills would you like students to learn as a result of being in your class?

Think about whether adjustments to your Classroom Management Plan would move students closer to your vision from the start of the school year. Your Classroom Management Plan is a working document that you will change across time as you adjust to meet the needs of each group of students, but starting with a clearly defined and well-thought-through plan can help ensure that students are academically engaged and emotionally thriving. Some of the essential considerations to define include:

Level of support needed for the group of students
Guidelines for Success
Classroom rules
Attention signal
Beginning and ending routines
Expectations for activities and transitions
Procedures for family contact: Click here for a sample letter that would be sent home to families on or before the first day of school*
Procedures for managing student assignments
Procedures for managing technology use
Long-range goals
Procedures for interacting positively with students
Correction procedures for misbehavior

*Family contact sample letter:

See Chapter 1, Task 3, in CHAMPS or DSC for more information on designing your Classroom Management Plan.

A core component of your plan is clarifying the expectations you have for students during various classroom activities and transitions. Carefully plan how you will teach students to meet those expectations, and remember that teaching is not telling. Your behavioral lessons should incorporate principles of effective teaching practice, such as providing rationale; using model, lead, test formats; teaching using examples and non-examples; and having lots of active participation during lessons.

When you teach students how to behave responsibly during the first month of school, you dramatically increase the chances of having a productive year. Follow the three-step Teach–Observe–Feedback process:

Teach your expectations right before an activity or transition begins.
Observe and monitor student behavior by circulating and visually scanning during the activity or transition.
Provide positive and instructional corrective feedback during and at the conclusion of the activity.

When you have finalized your Classroom Management Plan, make final preparations to ensure an orderly, respectful, and comfortable first day for you and your students. You want to make a great first impression that has students thinking, “This class is going to be great!”. Plan to greet students individually at the door and introduce yourself. Outline your modified schedule for Day 1 that will help get students acclimated and give you time to convey the most important information about your class and deal with logistics. Click below for more tips on launching your management plan, planning the first day of school, and continuing to establish a positive classroom culture with clear expectations and routines across the first month of school.

We hope these strategies will help you get your school year off to a solid start. Remember, the information you present and the atmosphere you establish in the first month of school will yield valuable dividends throughout the year. If you would like to explore professional development options for this content, contact us at info@safeandcivilschools.com .

Jessica Sprick

Safe & Civil Schools

Understanding Attendance Goals

Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:55:57 GMT

Many schools aim for 95% attendance, but is that really the benchmark for success? Learn what attendance data reveals and how to set meaningful goals.

I recently had a conversation with a school leader about attendance metrics and goals. She shared that her district set a goal for each school to have 95% Average Daily Attendance (ADA), but there has been some pushback from a few school leaders who believe that anything above 90% ADA is sufficient. This conversation confirmed that we have a lack of clarity about attendance metrics and goals. Part of my response to her was to clarify why even 95% ADA is not quite enough as an ultimate goal. In this newsletter, we hope to provide information to help you guide your school and district in setting appropriate goals as you work to boost whole school and individual student attendance.

The Relationship Between Schoolwide Average Daily Attendance and Individual Student Attendance Metrics

A school with an ADA rate of 95% typically has between 7% to 15% of individual students chronically absent (and a similar or slightly higher percentage of students at risk of chronic absence). This is because some students will have perfect or near-perfect attendance, which pulls the average up even though many students remain in the at-risk and chronic absence categories. An interim goal of 95% ADA is great for schools to strive for, but ultimately we would like to push schools to aim for 97%–98%. At that ADA rate, a very small number of students will fall into the chronic category and require individualized support.

So, the thing to keep in mind is that regardless of a particular school’s ADA, the critical metric is how many students within that school are chronically absent and whether the school has sufficient support personnel (social workers, counselors, psychologists) to work directly with those students and their families.

Average Daily Attendance

Average Daily Attendance is a calculation of the average number of students who were present during a specific time period—a month, a quarter, a year. If you report a rate of 95% ADA for a year, it means that when you take all of the days of actual attendance for your whole school population, then divide it by the total number of possible days of attendance based on enrollment (and multiply by 100), your school had an average of 95% of your students in attendance each day.

While a schoolwide ADA of 95% can be a good starting goal for a school with problematic ADA, it is not an end goal, because even a 95% ADA could mask that many individual students have significant problems with attendance (Sprick & Sprick, 2018).

Individual Attendance

Regardless of a particular school’s ADA, the goal for each individual student in that school should be 95% or better. Regular attendance is 95% or better for an individual student (“9 days or less for school success”).**

When a student has between 90%–95% attendance, that student is considered "at risk," meaning that there are increasing risk factors for the student, especially if this is a multi-year pattern. When a student hits 90% or below (chronic absenteeism), that student is highly at risk due to the level of absenteeism.

** Regular, at-risk, and chronic metrics include excused absences, unexcused absences, and suspensions. For individual students, there are potential risks to academic growth and engagement any time they are absent from the learning environment, regardless of whether the absence is excused or not.

Graphing ADA and Chronic Absence

Using data from a large school district, the attached graph shows the relationship of a school’s ADA rate (the x axis) and the percentage of students within the school who are chronically absent.

Rates of chronic absence and average daily attendance

From Bruner, C., Discher, A., & Chang, H. (2011, November). Chronic elementary absenteeism: A problem hidden in plain sight. AttendanceWorks.

As you can see, at a 93% ADA rate, schools had ~21% of their kids in the chronic absence category (missing 10% or more of school). These students are highly at risk based on their attendance. If we continued to map this line, at 91% around 30% of kids would be chronically absent. This also doesn't include the number of kids in the at-risk category (missing 5%–10% of school), which would probably be very high in these schools. It’s not until schools reach 97%–98% ADA that the number of students chronically absent is manageable enough for most schools to design and implement individualized interventions.

Another way to think of this is that a 95% ADA rate is like a B– or C+. A 93% ADA rate would be something like a D, and anything below would be an F. With these percentages, there are just far too many kids who are highly at risk, and this level of absenteeism is likely having major impacts on grades, academic achievement, social aspects, dependability, students' readiness to enter the workforce, etc. We would never accept having over 20% of our kids highly at risk in reading and say our system is just fine. We would work on refining the system!

Setting Short-Term and Long-Term ADA Goals

As you work on addressing attendance, set a short-term goal to boost your ADA rate by 1%–2% each year. While a long-term goal of 97%–98% might sound far off and improbable, we have seen schools get closer and closer each year by building layers of prevention and intervention and applying a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) approach to address absenteeism. If you are interested in learning more about these approaches, register below for our July 21 webinar focused on designing and refining your attendance approach.

Jessica Sprick

Safe & Civil Schools

Bruner, C., Discher, A., & Chang, H. (2011, November). Chronic elementary absenteeism: A problem hidden in plain sight . Attendanceworks.

Sprick, J., & Sprick, R. (2018). School Leader's Guide to Tackling Attendance Challenges . ASCD and Ancora Publishing.