Watch this video [2:37] for information on what a great Behavior Support Team can accomplish.

Polly Bath: Hello. First of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time out of your busy day to view this. As an administrator, I know that you’re facing the daunting task of having to address everything that’s going on in your building, and every day something else gets put on your plate.

What I’d like to do is to help you to get a plate that’s a little more digestible and focus on how to deal with the issues of behavior in your building. Now, because you can’t do it all single‑handedly, I recommend something that is called the Behavior Support Team.

The Behavior Support Team can be four or five people in your building who become the “Department of Behavior.” The Behavior Support Team is that close team that focuses on just that, behavior. We develop a common language for behaviors. We teach the teachers what that common language is. We develop a new referral form that runs through the office for office-level behaviors. We look at all of maybe the weak components of our Tier 1 system and why it may not be working as efficiently as it should. We address the roles and responsibilities of support persons or programs in our building and how to utilize them as a Tier 2 intervention to prevent those kids from going up into the much higher level of behaviors, which is our Tier 3s.

Now, what the Behavior Support Team can do for you is to really focus on the stuff that you don’t have the time, quite literally, to be able to do and organize it in such a way that it becomes a very clear monthly data cache. It allows us to shift our resources into more targeted areas, if you will, within the building.

It also allows us to assist those teachers that are really struggling or perhaps have a chemistry in their classroom of difficult children that they just don’t know what to do with, and we can start to address those skills as well.

Of course, the ultimate goal of having a Behavior Support Team is to, number one, take some of this stuff off of your plate, but also give more enhanced skills to the teachers in our building, so that they’re able to handle those mild and moderate and even some low‑level severe behaviors within the classroom, because we know that the more children get sent to the office to see you, the more they’re not going to behave for the teachers and the more control the teachers give up.

So instilling this type of behavior team, if you will, will really help to enhance the skills of all of the professionals in the building, so you won’t have to be addressing that line at the office.