Detroit Public Schools, Michigan

Detroit Public Schools have been concerned with the behavior and discipline problems that are occurring in many of their elementary and middle schools. Students seemed to lack the necessary skills to effectively deal with the multitude of situations they confront on a daily basis inside and outside of school. Truancy, the use of profanity, and the lack of respect for authority was too common in its schools. Fighting, poor classroom conduct, a perception of gang activity, and other troubling behavior led to an overall feeling by the teachers and the school staff that something had to be done.

School officials decided that they needed a systematic approach to teach its students appropriate social skills and to help students manage their own behavior. Detroit was looking for a program that would provide teachers and other school staff with the skills to effectively address students' behavior in all situations. Detroit, with EMSTAC's guidance and assistance, decided to implement Project ACHIEVE, a school-wide discipline program developed at the University of South Florida, that has proven effective in over 20 schools around the country. Findings that have emerged from the longest running site show:

• a 75% decline in special education referrals;
• a 67% decline in special education placements;
• a 28% decline in discipline referrals to the principal
• student academic improvement; and
• improvement in teacher's perceptions of the school climate.

Project ACHIEVE is based on the idea of early intervention, dealing with a problem before it becomes larger. Focusing on the "power of prevention," the program is designed to improve social skills, provide techniques for problem-solving and anger management, and decrease acts of aggression and violence. Project ACHIEVE training involves all school staff, including teachers, administrators, paraprofessionals, transportation providers, cafeteria workers, and cleaning staff, and all students to encourage consistency in responses to students' appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

Detroit is still addressing their original need of improving student discipline in their schools. The Linking Agent finds that this has taken the form of trying to "emphasize the use of the intervention in the whole school." At first, this involved implementing the STOP and THINK practices in all the classrooms. This year, she has focused on "trying to have each class review the steps." To do this, she has developed a training video library for the school. Each video addresses one of the many social skill lessons in the program and they can be played in all rooms simultaneously via a closed network within the school, or teachers can show the videos individually. She has had success with this, expressing that "Teachers really enjoy it. Kids even come up to me and ask why we haven't seen one in a while." In fact, the Linking Agent has found that she spends most of her time (approximately 70 percent) supporting teachers in her school. The rest of her time is divided between working with district and building level administrators.

Next year, the Linking Agent has indicated that she would like to take a different approach. She would like to conduct individual skills assessments to see the ways that the program has impacted students. In addition, she mentioned wanting to conduct small group discussions to accompany the assessments.

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