The Zero Tolerance System

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In schools, teachers and administrative staff hope and think that bad behavior can be fixed with detention and or suspension, a system known as the punitive system of punishment or otherwise known as a zero-tolerance policy. Students are not being given the opportunity to work through their aggression and instead are obligated to sit in a room where nothing gets accomplished. Bottling up emotions and not being able to get the proper emotional support that should be given to a student, can cause unresolved issues when the child grows up, lead to more misbehavior, and ultimately weakens their academic success. A zero-tolerance policy has been ineffective seeing as a student's behavior never gets dealt with and what tends to happen is the situation …show more content…

Researches at the University of Oregon, in response to this urgency, began a series of applied demonstrations, research studies, and evaluation projects to highlight that a significant amount of attention should be focused on “prevention, research-based practices, databased decision-making, school-wide systems, explicit social skills instruction, team based implementation and professional development, and student outcomes” (Sugai & Simonsen 1).. PBIS is also derived from a reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. That shows that this system mainly started to benefit those with disabilities and in turn worked out in all students …show more content…

Research conducted over the past 15 years shows that PBIS is efficacious in advocating positive demeanor in students(Winfield 2). It’s also been proven that schools who implement system-wide interventions for problem behavior exhibit reductions in office discipline referral from 20-60 %(Winfield 2). A review of the research indicated that there was over a 90% reduction rate in behavioral problems in over 26% of the studies(Winfield 2). Not only are the people who get in trouble constantly being helped, but students with disabilities and learning impediments are getting the emotional support they need to improve their academic success and substantially lower their rates of discipline referrals. When appropriately implemented, PBIS can lead to dramatic improvement that has a long-term effect on the lifestyle, functional communication skills, and problem behavior in individuals with disabilities(Winfield 2). This graph shows the difference in a school that has implemented PBIS effectively vs a school that has not effectively implemented a PBIS system. The first school does not meet the criteria for a PBIS system, therefore have a higher office discipline referral, to be exact, a percentage of about 0.83%. The school that effectively implements PBIS has a lower percentage of about 0.63% creating a 25% difference(Horner & Sugai