Mound Fort Junior High: Improving School Climate and Teacher Recruitment

Location: Ogden, UT
Website: Mound Fort Junior High
Enrollment: 708
Demographics: NCES Data

The Challenge

Mound Fort Junior High School in Ogden, Utah, was struggling to align its PBIS and teacher observation initiatives to improve positive school climate and culture.

The positive behavior reinforcements were hard to track, too broad, lacked teacher and student buy-in, and always rewarded the same honor students.

Their teacher observation efforts included cumbersome spreadsheets that were hard to manage and even harder to glean insights from. The leadership team needed a way to improve and align these two important initiatives.

The Solution

First, they implemented SchoolMint Hero, a behavior accountability tool. They liked that they could reward positive behavior and redirect negative behavior and that none of it was intrusive to teachers’ workflows.

Getting student buy-in was easy because they received points for positive behavior that could be redeemed for prizes, and teachers liked that they could track and measure changes in behavior.

Next, school administrators implemented SchoolMint Grow, a teacher coaching and development platform, to complement the positive outcomes they were seeing from their behavior management.

They chose the SchoolMint platform to serve as the central hub for all of their observation data, quick feedback, and meeting notes. The platform was used to set goals and assign action steps, track progress, and measure growth. They especially appreciated that it was fully customizable to meet their needs.

The Results

• Decreased disciplinary infractions by almost ⅓ year over year.

Using these platforms in tandem allowed Mound Fort Junior High School to create positive classrooms with a cohesive teacher–student effort using data cross-functionally.

The student behavior data guides the teacher coaching initiatives. It has supported both teacher and student recruitment efforts and made them more competitive by going beyond academics to showcase a positive school culture.

Mound Fort is on track to reach their behavior improvement goals and has even found that using these systems has aided in re-entry behavior reinforcements during transitioning from the virtual setting to in-person.