How the SOAR Store rewards positive behavior at Butler Intermediate High School
At the beginning of the school year, the Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports committee instituted the SOAR Store as a way to reward gold ticket earning students.
The store at Butler Intermediate High School was created as a new way to reward students for demonstrating the tenets of the program with a variety of prizes that they can buy with their golden tickets. Prizes range in “price” and include anything from a framed picture of Intermediate High School assistant principal Harold Dunn, to gift cards, food, and a basketball.
According to teacher Scott Stoner, who has been instrumental in the store’s implementation and promotion, the SOAR store offers a fun environment and “cool prizes that have really motivated students to SOAR.”
The acronym SOAR has been used at the school since the committee started in 2019. Mindy Neigh, a seventh grade mathematics teacher and faculty leader for the committee, said that a lot of discussion went into choosing the acronym.
“Every school had to select their own acronym, and we thought that safety, ownership, attitude, and respect were a high priority for our building, so we chose it,” Neigh said.
Stoner added, “Basically, we want to create an environment that makes everyone feel welcome, and where there is no negativity or bullying.”
Before the creation of the SOAR store, students were randomly put into a drawing to decide who wins an already selected prize. Before this, only 10 students every two weeks would win a prize from a golden ticket. Now, more than 10 gold ticket earning students can get a prize from the store in one day.
“We wanted to change the way that students were rewarded for earning gold tickets,” Gretchen Crissman, an assistant principal, said. “We had an empty room that wasn’t being used for anything, so we turned it into a store, and the students seem to really like it.”
The SOAR store being here creates what teachers would like to have as a culture of positivity, and people working to do the right thing here in the school.
To promote the store, the team members have made “Little Scotty Videos,” featuring Stoner and Neigh to encourage students to be like “Soaring Scotty” and earn gold tickets. The committee is always looking for new prizes and motivational ideas to promote positive behavior, because according to Stoner, “We are old people. We don’t know what the kids want.”
The SOAR store staff is considering adding a suggestion box for more prizes in the store.
Tyler Culley and Josh Fink are seventh graders at in the Butler Area School District.
Taking Flight: An Eagle student journalism project
Taking Flight is a student journalism project conducted by the Butler Eagle to encourage responsible journalism and inspire more informed readers.
The project encourages students in seventh to 12th grade to write an article or review an event in the community or at their school. Articles were submitted for review and will be edited by the Eagle staff.
The article is then be published in an edition of SOAR, a student newspaper produced by the Butler Eagle in cooperation with area school districts.
