Support School Staff

Just as an effective academic program requires rigorous academic goals and evidence-based instruction to help students meet those goals, creating a supportive school climate requires fair and clear behavioral expectations and a range of evidence-based supports and interventions to help students meet those expectations while keeping them in the classroom. You can find on this page the federal tools, resources, and technical assistance available to help educators to create supportive school climates.

Featured

Supporting and Responding to Behavior:
Evidence-Based Classroom Strategies for Teachers

This document summarizes evidence-based, positive, proactive, and responsive classroom behavior intervention and support strategies for teachers. These strategies should be used classroom-wide, intensified to support small group instruction, or amplified further for individual students.

Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports:
Implementation Blueprint and Self-Assessment

The Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports Implementation Blueprint is a guide for leadership teams in the assessment, development, and execution of action plans. The outcome is the development of local capacity for sustainable, culturally and contextually relevant, and high fidelity implementation of multi-tiered practices and systems of support.

Addressing the Root Causes of Disparities in School Discipline:
An Educator's Action Planning Guide

A guide to assist schools and districts to identify, analyze, and develop a plan to address, the root causes of disparities. Includes a Disciplinary Disparities Risk Assessment Tool to aid in data gathering and analysis, along with real-world examples, tips, and planning templates.

School District Leader Summit on Improving School Climate and Discipline:
Resource Guide for Superintendent Action [PDF, 12MB]

A guide to support superintendents and their leadership teams in their strategic efforts to engage stakeholders, assess the results and root causes of existing school climate and discipline systems and practices, implement reform, and monitor progress toward a more consistently equitable and rewarding future for all our nation's schoolchildren.

Tools and Resources

Safe School-based Enforcement through Collaboration, Understanding, and Respect (SECURe)
The U.S. Departments of Education (ED) and Justice (DOJ) have designed the SECURe Implementation Rubrics to help school districts, schools, and law enforcement agencies determine the type of school-police partnership that will be most effective in their community and, where appropriate, to incorporate school-based law enforcement officers, commonly referred to as school resource officers (SROs), into the school learning environment. These rubrics include five suggested action steps to ensure safe school-based enforcement though collaboration, understanding, and respect within a community’s schools. Each action step is based on research and evidence and reflects examples of existing school and law enforcement partnerships across the country.
- Local Implementation Rubric [PDF, 131K]
- State and Local Policy Rubric [PDF, 121K]
- Dear Colleague Letter on Role of School Resource Officers (SROs) in Pk-12 Schools [PDF, 33K]
ED and HHS Policy Statement on Expulsion and Suspension Practices in Early Learning Settings. [PDF, 1.3MB]
Recommendations on preventing and severely limiting expulsion and suspension practices in early childhood settings.
Guiding Principles. [PDF, 1MB]
- Prólogo de Secretario Arne Duncan. (Enespañol) [PDF,314KB]

Three key principles and related action steps that can help guide state- and locally-controlled efforts to improve school climate and school discipline.

Directory of Federal School Climate and Discipline Resources. [PDF,1MB]
Index of the extensive federal technical assistance and other resources on school discipline and climate available to schools and districts.
Seclusion and Restraint Resources. [PDF, 1.53MB]
15 principles on the use of restraint and seclusion.