State Super toured local St. Ig schools yesterday

Students and staff members of St. Ignatius School District are doing so well that Denise Juneau, Montana State Superintendent of Schools spent the day Oct. 21 touring the district’s campus.

Recognized as a Gold Star School, St. Ignatius High School made history by becoming the first reservation school in the state to reach gold status. St. Ignatius middle and elementary schools received bronze statuses.

The Montana Behavioral Initiative School Recognition System is designed to highlight outstanding positive-reinforcement classroom management and is difficult to achieve.

State-level MBI representatives evaluate potential criteria.

“We have an outside person from the State evaluate our systems and determine if we qualify based on our systems, data and benchmarks,” Jason Sargent, St. Ignatius School District superintendent said.

“To qualify, the school must have positive behavioral systems and RTI (Response to Interventions) systems in place and working with benchmarks for all three tiers,” Sargent said.

The district has lower discipline referrals, a working RTI system and its universals are known by students and staff and fully implemented, he said.  

“We recognize positive behaviors and recognize students to make then feel safe and welcome at our school,” Sargent said. “We have mileposts plans in place for students at-risk and interventions for students that may be struggling behaviorally or academically. Our data is very positive and results on the MY Voice survey that monitors students feelings towards their school experiences in eight categories  has gone up in 16 out of the 20 we set out to increase.”

Sargent said these benchmarks as well as others have made the district eligible to reach the criteria as a Gold High School, Bronze Middle and Bronze Elementary schools.

MBI is Montana’s version of PBIS which is Positive Behavioral Intervention Systems. 

The PBIS system is a national criteria and in Montana we have MBI, he said.  

“(The Montana Office of Public Instruction Superintendent) Denise Juneau has been impressed with our systems and best practice systems that we have implemented and shown great results with,” he said. “We are a Graduation Matters and MBI School and we have presented our results and systems at the MBI summer institute and the Milepost conferences in Boise the past summer.”

Sargent said the district has systems that are working with great results to back up what it is doing.   

“St. Ignatius Schools is becoming a school with great systems for student achievement and positive behaviors,” Sargent said. “Our systems include best practice and research-based programs that are working with great data results.”