SEELEY LAKE – When students start school at Seeley Lake Elementary this year, there will be a new game in their classrooms. Thanks to the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services and Providence Hospital, SLE is one of more than 30 schools to receive a grant to implement the PAX Good Behavior Game. SLE kindergarten teacher Sheila Devins sees the program as an opportunity to provide continuity in the way SLE’s approaches teaching healthy emotional regulation and social skills and gives students the ability to navigate various social situations.
This past May, Montana received $2.1 million in federal grant money to continue to implement the PAX Good Behavior Game in schools across the state. Through House Bill 118 funding from the 2017 Legislature and various other funding sources, hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in 47 Montana schools have already been trained on the Good Behavior Game over the past several years.
The PAX Good Behavior Game encourages students to work in groups where they are rewarded as a team for working well together. They are kindly reminded when their behavior doesn’t meet classroom standards.
“Behavior is taught as a skill,” wrote Nancy de Pastino, suicide prevention coordinator for the Missoula City-County Health Department, in a Missoulian editorial May 12, 2019. “Instead of being an additional classroom lesson, teachers integrate PAX into their lessons as a way of managing, encouraging and rewarding the students as they learn.”
The PAX Good Behavior Game is a classroom management system which has proven to significantly reduce aggressive and disruptive behavior in the classroom and increase students emotional regulation and social skills. Research has also shown that high school graduates who have played the Good Behavior Game to have significantly lower rates of drug and alcohol use disorders, smoking, antisocial personality disorder, incarceration for violent crimes and suicide ideation.
“This is super important because in this day and age when we see alcohol, tobacco and marijuana use getting younger and younger, it teaches kids social emotional skills to better cope on their own without using substances,” said Shannan Sproull, Missoula County Substance Abuse Prevention Specialist.
Sproull said these coping skills can also be used to prevent suicidal behavior. With Montana having the highest suicide rate in the nation, this is important to address.
“People think of suicide when they feel like they have no hope and they don’t know how to cope,” said Sproull. “If they can learn the social emotional skills of how to cope, then they are less likely to engage in that behavior or that thinking. This program has been shown to address those issues at an early age and help prevent those behaviors either all together or put it off.”
Missoula County Public Elementary Schools implemented the Good Behavior Game in 2018 and have experienced noticeable improvements.
“The teachers I work with who are utilizing this program share how it has increased student self-regulation and improved classroom culture,” said Carol Ewen, School Wellness Coordinator for Missoula County Public Schools in a press release.
Applications for the grant were due by the end of June. When Devins realized that no one at SLE was working on the grant, she wrote the application with the help of District Clerk Heather Mincey so SLE did not miss the opportunity.
Devins was impressed that the PAX Good Behavior Game provided research that shows a correlation between implementing the program in the early school years and higher graduation rates, less school dropouts and lower suicide rates. She also feels the repetition of positive social skills that continue to build at each grade level and the common vocabulary for students and teachers within SLE and across the state will unify the effort and help keep students from falling through the cracks.
Devins added that she hopes the PAX Good Behavior Game will not only help with behavior in the classroom but will also help students learn the invisible social rules that are assumed in public facilities outside of the school.
“There is a whole dimension of social behavior that if it isn’t taught, they won’t have and they need to learn to navigate the world,” said Devins. “We will teach them some of that skill set of how you share public space and move in society.”
The grant is designed for pre-kindergarten through fifth grade. All of the teachers at SLE will receive the training this week prior to the start of school. Sproull said along with the training, the grant also covers the materials to implement the program in each of the classrooms and a stipend for other classroom materials.
Devins said, “The hope is that we will be giving kids a set of skills that will help them be really successful.”
For more information visit http://www.GoodBehaviorGame.org
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