Join us for light snacks, beer, wine, and time to network! A total of 76 schools are being recognized for installing and sustaining PBIS to improve academic outcomes and support the well-being of students. Come raise a glass to all these educators, families, and students for their important and outstanding work.

This session will review the economic burden of mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders as well as the known costs and benefits of supporting student social, emotional, behavioral, and academic functioning in schools. We will also identify some key considerations and helpful tools to assist with the collection of cost data specific to school-based mental health programming. We conclude by offering some practical recommendations and implications to support capacity building for the use of economic evaluations in decision-making to promote student mental health.

Through this training, educators will examine how they can protect children from adversity by considering themselves not just mandated reporters, but mandated supporters. The strategies and techniques explored are rooted in the Strengthening Families™ Protective Factors Framework, an approach that recognizes when families have access to the supports needed to deal with life's stressors, children thrive.

In this workshop participants will hear the tragic story of the loss of Zach Sumner to suicide and how stigma played a role. 'The Penny Pledge" is an individual call to action that reminds children and youth how to reach out to others, take care of their own mental health and how to be a safe and caring person that others can talk to.The Penny Pledge is designed to strengthen our communities by starting difficult conversations, building protective factors, learning about mental health resources and how to advocate for ourselves and each other. Taking the Penny Pledge builds strength and resilience one individual at a time.

Do you ChatGPT yet? Within 2 months of its introduction in fall 2022, 51% of teachers reported using it and 40% reported incorporating it into lessons every week. Come play, and practice, and use Generative AI in this session. BYO phone, tablet, or laptop. After we play and experience the power of this tool we’ll talk about what it is (generative AI, LLM, ChatGPT 3.5/4.0, Bard, etc.), benefits and challenges, and brainstorm ways to use it more.

Do you have "resisters" to implementing PBIS at your school? We all do!! We know the data and facts about the benefits of implementing a strong PBIS system at schools at all grade levels. This presentation takes a look behind the "Heart" of PBIS. Why students "need" School-wide Behavior Expectations, Reinforcement, and Accountability. You will leave this session with a renewed spirit of teaching and why we all got in this business to begin with.

Implementing Tier 2 in PBIS/MTSS schools is very hard. Many Tier 2 teams struggle with developing an effective structure for Tier 2 students. This session will focus on teaching school staff classroom interventions (The Good Behavior Game’, Group Contingency, Check-in-Check-out, Pros and Cons of Social Skills training, Peer Tutoring and Self-Monitoring) with a focus on a targeted group of students. Focus will also include how to monitor whether the interventions are effective and include a discussion about time management when meeting and developing strategies for a specific group of students who have been referred for Tier 2 intervention.

Asians are considered the model minority and celebrated for their hard work and their financial and academic success. This session will discuss the history of the model minority myth. Is it possible for this positive stereotype to have a darker, more damaging side?

Attendance rates can dramatically impact a student's current and future success, and schools and parents must work together to minimize absences. In this session, participants will become familiar with what factors are most likely to impact school attendance rates, how they have evolved since the pandemic and explore a tired framework that supports positive attendance trends and promotes academic and social success.

Bullying is often poorly defined and under-detected. This lecture will define bullying and look at the many facets of the problem. Bullying behaviors are displayed by an unusual population who do not fit into our stereotyped schema of the character. Neurodiverse children including those who are gifted to those with autism, as well as students who identify as LGBTQ+ are most often targeted. What issues does the problem cause and what do you do about it?

Trauma-informed practices and applied educational neuroscience support all students. Our bodies hold onto trauma and we show trauma in many different ways. Many of our students come to us with not only specific needs, but having experienced significant trauma as well. PBIS is for all students and needs to be implemented through a trauma-informed, all-inclusive lens at each tier.

Community care is about using our power, influence, and time to pour into our communities when they are struggling. This interactive workshop covers strategies to heal inidviuals, communities and systems from bias and address systemic barriers to belonging. We will mindfully engage in healing practices and strategize how to embed them into our lives for our individual and collective healing.

Organize all of your progress monitoring data today! Learn to quickly collect daily/weekly/monthly data for easy analysis and team decision-making. One spreadsheet for ALL programs/students/interventions - get your team on the same page! Free spreadsheet, protocol, and video tutorial.

In this experiential learning workshop; participants will explore and experience the power of allowing time and space to create community through the implementation and utilization of the circle process. Circles allow participants to acknowledge and share thoughts and feelings, work through challenges, and in the end help create dynamic dialogue, resolve conflict, and restore community.

Family and student voices need to be heard and used for optimal educational outcomes. The ability to use one's voice can be encouraged by learning self-advocacy skills through instruction and through the power of relationships with students and family members. In this workshop, educators and family members will learn to share their own mistakes, needs, and likes/dislikes with their students, thereby encouraging students to interact with peers and adults differently, building positive peer and adult relationships from learning self-determination and self-advocacy.

In this workshop participants will hear the tragic story of the loss of Zach Sumner to suicide and how stigma played a role. 'The Penny Pledge" is an individual call to action that reminds children and youth how to reach out to others, take care of their own mental health and how to be a safe and caring person that others can talk to.The Penny Pledge is designed to strengthen our communities by starting difficult conversations, building protective factors, learning about mental health resources and how to advocate for ourselves and each other. Taking the Penny Pledge builds strength and resilience one individual at a time.

Students require access to educational environments where they can learn and thrive. However, transgender and gender diverse youth often attend schools where they face both intended and unintended forms of exclusion, harassment, and discrimination. Working together, school community members can create transgender-inclusive elementary, middle, and high schools. Workshop participants will explore how to do so, focusing on evidence-based policies and practices.

Learning about students' cultures allows for deeper learning and improved disciplinary practices. Culturally competent educators learn about and research their students' cultures. This knowledge helps to understand student behavior as well as their ways of doing things. Secondly, culturally competent educators help students link new learning to prior knowledge and experiences.

The 5 Rs is a comprehensive, memorable and effective set of guiding principles used to train and support school teams working with students with significant emotional and behavioral needs. The 5 Rs can improve outcomes for students needing behavior support in the general education and special education classroom, community settings and home. 5 Rs are: Relationships, Readiness, Reinforcement, Redirection and Reintegration.

Aligning initiatives reduces the stressors for everyone in the school community. When we work to align, we identify the common instructional practices that help our students; we identify the information we need to guide those practices; and we invest, as a district, in the support that makes the work easier for our educators. This commitment to alignment can simultaneously reduce stress for teachers, and increase success for students. This session will go deeper to provide examples and non-examples of alignment, and provide a handful of tools leaders at every level can use to create one master plan, and get everyone rowing in the same direction, toward academic achievement and student wellness!

Learn from a diverse panel with a superintendent, MTSS director, educator, school psychologist, and PBIS expert on how to build and sustain capacity for multi-tiered systems of behavior support in a post-pandemic school system. The District System Fidelity Inventory (DSFI) is an evidence-based roadmap districts have been using to manage change for over a decade - panelists will share their experiences and advice.

By utilizing data sharing, anecdotal stories and participant discussion, this presentation will share the experience of creating a sustainable PBIS system from ground up, and ways in which we have changed approaches over a 8 year span in order to maintain a thoughtful and reactive system and culture that has survived administration changes, personnel issues and a global pandemic.

Educators are overburdened by competing priorities. We are not handed a clear pathway forward, but often carry the burden of figuring out how to make everything work together. This isolated, super-hero model results in burn-out and missed chances to support our students, and one another. We CAN do something differently. We can align our work.

Join us for a continental breakfast, networking, and exhibitor lounge from 7:30-8:30 AM as BET-C registration opens.

Kimberly May, MEd., will deliver the Conference Welcome and Opening Remarks at 8:30 AM in the main ballroom followed immediately by the Keynote Address.