South Cook News

The Evergreen Park School District recently received an update on a student mental health and behavioral initiative.

During a Jan. 18 school board meeting, Rebecca Tyrell of the district’s student support services department spoke about the district's Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports (PBIS) program. PBIS is an MTSS data driven framework to establish social emotional health and behavioral habits that create a safe and effective learning environment. The emphasis on mental health as a part of this program is relatively new and was a different experience for some of the teachers.

Each school in the district has PBIS teams that meet regularly to discuss their actions and plans moving forward. The program is directly aligned to one of the main focus areas of the district’s strategic plan: Supporting the mental and social wellbeing of all students, teachers and staff, and is especially a priority as everyone is readjusting after the pandemic. The district has now formed a district and community leadership team in conjunction with Midwest PBIS. As part of this, all the building principals meet monthly to go over new data from PBIS and the community, give reports up to Midwest PBIS and examine how the individual implementation at each of the schools is working.

"So we're adapting this framework, we've been meeting and we recruited our other community members," Tyrell said at the meeting. "We're meeting monthly. We're really looking at our inventory of our current behavioral, social, emotional initiatives, our data collection. We've partnered with the Center for Self-actualization. We have our clinicians in each building, but also adding them to our team so when we start looking and analyzing data, they're really integral parts of that."

The building leadership recently came together and decided to start the program over, going from Tier 1 and building back up to Tier 3 since they felt COVID-19 had prevented a lot of professional development from happening and that a fresh reboot would be beneficial for everyone. The board asked how they were still collecting data during this reboot. The schools are still collecting data, but they will have to look at it differently than normal. They use things like infraction numbers, but also attendance records and nurse visits. Some of the board members expressed interest in implementation and results as there has been so much planning but not a lot of doing.