Fairfield Hopes to Curb Bad Behavior with OISM

BY EMILY STEWART
SEPT. 11, 2007

Fairfield Freshman School launched a new disciplinary plan with the new school year to curb inconsistent handling of misbehavior.

Fairfield City Schools, recently named the largest district in the state of Ohio, began implementing the Ohio Integrated Systems Model (OISM) two years ago to address academic needs and behavioral problems among its large student population.

“It’s our hope that students come into school and know how to behave,” Freshman School Assistant Principal Matt Wissman said. “Unfortunately, some do not, so it’s up to us to teach them how to behave. That’s where OISM comes in.”

Wissman, a team of six teachers, a guidance counselor, and the district’s school psychologist formed a training committee in January to get OISM up and running at Fairfield Freshman this fall. This year’s freshman class is one of the largest in school history with more than 800 students enrolled. The school was the last in the district to add OISM, but is the first school to actively use it at the secondary level since Fairfield Senior High School’s plan is still in the works to accommodate its population of more than two thousand students.

The OISM plan has three distinct goals: respect, responsibility and problem-solving. To achieve those goals, OISM breaks discipline issues down into five steps: defining a problem, analyzing it, setting goals for resolution, planning the resolution and evaluating the process. Committee members like Freshman School Guidance Counselor Jean Platt value this new system over previous disciplinary systems that varied from classroom to classroom.

“Before, our disciplinary system was very haphazard and individualistic,” Platt said. “Now we have more uniform rules for every classroom, and there’s a paper trail of disciplinary action before getting parents and administrators involved.”

Platt said common misbehaviors among students are bad language, disrespect (for peers and teachers alike) and making too much noise in the halls. Teachers now must meet with errant students and have them complete a form to report how they feel about a situation and what they should’ve done in place of that particular behavior. The form then asks students to work with their teachers to implement and enact a plan to prevent that behavior from recurring. If that proves ineffective, teachers are encouraged to issue detentions and contact parents at least twice. The last stop is a principal’s office referral and, subsequently, Saturday school detention, suspension or other punishment.

“With our old disciplinary system, some teachers would send students straight to the principal’s office, and under our new OISM plan we leave administrators out until the problem becomes unmanageable,” Platt said. “So we’re asking teachers to enforce school-wide rules all can adhere to. For example, if a student’s feet don’t cross the threshold of the door by the end of the bell, they’re considered tardy with no questions asked. If the problem persists past a verbal warning, that’s where the new plan starts.”

To ensure that all incoming freshmen understand the new OISM system, Fairfield Freshman School required an orientation for all incoming students to explain the new system. Any students absent the first day and/or late transfer students will also have to attend a mandatory videotaped orientation.

“Our lunch was short the first day so we could have mandatory orientation,” new student Chelsea Sewell said. “We have a lot of rules to follow, and they’re rules we’ve had all the way through school, but they seem to be pretty serious about us following them this year.”

Fairfield Freshman School is especially emphasizing the use of hall passes this year, especially with classrooms reaching or exceeding the maximum number of 30 students. Students are required to sign out when they leave the room and sign in when they get back so teachers know exactly how long they’re gone, and whether they are using passes everyday to get out of class.

“We have different color passes to use to go to the bathroom, office, etc., and they said they would be checking to make sure we have passes in the hallway,” Sewell said. “It’s different than what I’m used to at school, but you never know how strict they’re going to be.”

The OISM training committee has placed posters throughout different parts of the building to remind students of appropriate behaviors.

“The posters are located in different spots in the building to accommodate what good behavior looks like for that part of school, so there’s no excuse for unbeknownst bad behavior,” Platt said. “It’s another way for us as a faculty to present a united effort in confronting disciplinary problems given the large number of students we have.”

Fairfield District School Psychologist and OISM Committee Member Ray Soh believes “uniformity” among staff will be a key to OISM’s success.

“When teachers speak a common language students will follow suit,” Soh said. “No longer is the special education teacher asked to ‘look after’ students with high needs. All teachers who come into contact with the student will need to collaborate to design effective behavior interventions.”

Soh has been actively involved in implementing OISM at the elementary and secondary levels, and provides inservice training to teachers and administrators on the OISM model. His role at Fairfield Freshman is to help teachers design intervention plans for students with behavioral issues before getting the administration involved.

“We analyze behavior data [based on principal office referrals] to monitor the nature of behavior problems in the school. Monitoring data is an important part of my job,” he said. “Our OISM team will meet monthly throughout the year to discuss assessments and interventions.”
Soh echoes Platt’s optimism that OISM will work better in reducing disciplinary problems.

“OISM is a prevention model, and we identify students who are falling through the cracks to provide intervention and support so they can be at the expected benchmarks,” he said. “We won’t know how we’re really doing until the school year really gets going and have our first monthly meeting in a few weeks. We are, though, highly optimistic that we will see definite improvement from class to class.”