Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is an evidence-based three-tiered framework to improve and integrate all of the data, systems, and practices affecting student outcomes every day. PBIS creates schools where all students succeed!

PBIS is a framework for creating safe, positive, equitable schools, where every student can feel valued, connected to the school community and supported by caring adults. By implementing evidence-based practices within a PBIS framework, schools support their students’ academic, social, emotional, and behavioral success, engage with families to create locally-meaningful and culturally-relevant outcomes, and use data to make informed decisions that improve the way things work for everyone.

PBIS Establishes a Healthy School Culture and Climate
Our school’s culture should be a reflection of the people learning and working within the community – students, their families, and their teachers alike. Through our PBIS implementation, we’ll engage the school-wide community to co-create our school’s culture and establish a climate where everyone feels welcome and seen. In fact, when schools implement PBIS, teachers, students, and their families all perceive their school’s climate more positively.

PBIS Increases Student Engagement and Instructional Time
Establishing school-wide expectations with our students sets the tone for the classroom. When we spend time getting to know our students and use strategies to deepen connections every day, we are building a healthy classroom environment. When students have clear expectations, are regularly acknowledged for the things they do well, and receive instructional consequences more often than exclusionary ones, they are going to spend more time in class than out of it. Not only that, when schools implement PBIS, students are more engaged in instruction.

PBIS Empowers Students to Play a Central Role in their Education
Schools implementing a PBIS framework define positive expectations like respectful and kind and teach students skills to help create the environment they want to see. For example, when schools work to address bullying within a PBIS framework –teaching students how to interrupt bullying behaviors – schools actually see fewer incidents of bullying. Within the PBIS framework, students have lower levels of unwanted behaviors and higher levels of positive, prosocial behaviors and emotion regulation. PBIS schools also report lower illegal drug and alcohol use than schools that aren’t implementing.

PBIS Reduces Racial Inequities in Discipline
The work we do to produce equitable outcomes for all students is not an afterthought; it’s embedded in the foundation of our PBIS implementation. When we align our school-wide expectations with the values and experiences of our students and their families, we establish our school as part of our community, create consistency across their contexts, and reduce everyone’s assumptions about expected behaviors at school. By specifically centering equity within a PBIS framework, rigorous research shows schools can significantly decrease the racial disparities they see in their discipline practices as well in their overall office discipline referral rates.