As I reflect on my sixth year at Barnet School I continue to feel very grateful for the opportunity to serve in such a warm, supportive, and welcoming community. The community’s unwavering support of its school and its faculty and staff is commendable and very much appreciated. I want to recognize our faculty and staff as dedicated and caring people who understand the importance of keeping the best interests of children in mind whenever decisions are made.

Our students continue to be interested in learning, enthusiastic, inquisitive, energetic, and well behaved, most of the time. For those times when a few of our students have difficulty behaving, we have instituted some new procedures to address their challenges. Beyond that we are embracing Vermont Positive Behavior Supports (VPBS) a statewide effort to help school teams form behavioral and discipline systems that support students’ learning and social development.  For the past year Barnet’s team has been attending workshops and monthly meetings to prepare for a four-day institute this summer. Team members Jean Densen, Nedra Willard, Susan Jensen, Cindy Mosedale, Bill Douglas, Cathy Browne, Susan Persson, and I will attend the institute and return with an action plan to train other staff members and to implement positive behavior supports for all students.
Target goals will include:
- Support for all children and adults to build community by modeling and enforcing
positive behavior
- Emphasis on the importance of positive relationships, respect, and support for others so
that all can succeed
- Clear expectations, taught and reinforced verbally, visually and continuously
- Improvement of academic achievement

The purpose of school-wide PBS is to establish a climate in which appropriate behavior is the norm. Introducing, modeling, and reinforcing positive social behavior is an important part of a student’s educational experience. We believe that teaching behavioral expectations and rewarding students for following them is a much more positive approach than waiting for misbehavior to occur before responding. We are looking forward to an enhanced, more positive, school climate in the years ahead!

As I noted in previous years, we have many reasons to be proud of our school but even very good schools can get better. We have been working hard to continue development of our school as a professional learning community with a focus on learning, rather than teaching. This shift in focus continually forces us to rethink our strategies and practices as we continue to ask ourselves the same three key questions.