October 9

It is so important to teach children expectations. We work really hard in teaching our PBS ROAR expectations and our children are doing a beautiful job. I wanted to give you some positives about PBS and how well it is working for us. We track the data of office referrals at Swift Creek. We have had a 50% drop in office referrals this year compared to last year. Furthermore, we have had an 80% drop in the physical aggression category. I really attribute this to having consistent school wide expectations and positive rewards. On the flip side, October is usually one of the months when there are discipline referral spikes. We talk to the teachers about making sure they continue to celebrate students following expectations and to use behavioral strategies to tightly monitor during this month. I hope you will reinforce this at home and continue to help teach the PBS ROAR expectations and to celebrate when your child is doing what is right!

One additional and important note about our expectations at Swift Creek. Please remember our safety expectations at Swift Creek carpool. Recently, we have had many complaints about safety issues at carpool with people going in to the building to check out there child or pick them up during dismissal time. We all have emergencies or situations when we need to get out of carpool in a hurry. What we need to remember is to try to limit these occasions. Please try not to check out your child after 3:30. If it is after 3:30, we will ask you to wait in carpool. This is an extremely busy time of the day for teachers and students and it is very hard to get a student ready to leave at that point. Also, please do not get out of your car after 3:30 and go to the dismissal area unless you have arranged that with administration. Both of these situations cause safety issues and help to create confusion with the children that have learned our ROAR expectations for carpool. Thank you so much for your assistance in keeping Swift Creek safe and for being a model for your child.

Until next time, have a ROARing week! We hope to see you at the Fun Run on Thursday!

Jim