Ask nearly any student at A.B. Day Elementary what the school rules are, and he or she will rattle them off without a second thought:
Be respectful. Be obedient. Have a positive attitude. Be responsible.
The rules are tacked up to bulletin boards. They are displayed in the hallways. They're important, said fifth grader Jeremy Reynolds.
"We try to be nice to people," Jeremy said. "We try to be good and not bully."
Social skills, character education, bullying prevention, and a program that sets up a system of rules and consequences called Positive Behavior Supports (PBS) have long been embedded in the Day curriculum.
In the Philadelphia School District, effective violence prevention programs have flourished in small pockets, at Day and elsewhere. But the district has failed to replicate them on a large scale.
Demand for them is growing, however. Citywide, students have urged the district to embrace antiviolence efforts.
There are no magic formulas, but Day - a school much like the district as a whole, with an African American majority and three-quarters of its students considered economically disadvantaged - is better because of these violence-prevention measures, said the principal, Karen Dean.
"We're not a perfect school," Dean said, "but when things happen, we deal with them, and we report them."
At Day, which ranks low for violence among elementary schools, incidents have dropped since the 500-student K-8 school moved toward the PBS model seven years ago. Day had 14 violent incidents in 2003-04, for instance, and just two in 2009-10.
The school, on Crittenden Street where East Germantown borders Mount Airy, stands in marked contrast to the high school it feeds - Martin Luther King, which has a higher violence rate and was as recently as 2007-08 on the state's persistently dangerous list.
Day has what many schools do not: A long-term principal, stable teaching force, formal staff training in antiviolence programs, and the will to keep them in place.
Dean and her team have seen funding for different programs wax and wane, but they seek out lessons in best practices whenever they can find them, and carry over what works from year to year, the principal said.
Teachers, students, and staff all agree on the school's rules, Dean said, and, more than adults just reciting them to students, they teach in their classes specifically what good behavior looks like in the lunchroom, in the hallway, moving to another classroom.
It's obvious to anyone who walks through the school.
Academics have also improved since the school began focusing on violence prevention. In 2003-04, 33 percent of Day's students met state goals in math and 30 percent in reading. In 2010, 69 percent met goals in math and 61 percent in reading.
"The child can focus on learning, and the teachers can teach. It really helps with classroom management. It gets better every year," Dean said.
'A long way to go'
Top district officials acknowledge that they haven't been able to duplicate Day's successes districtwide.
A Fla. district leads in violence prevention
Deputy Superintendent Leroy Nunery said that the district was "just at the very beginning of implementing a comprehensive approach" to violence.
And Superintendent Arlene C. Ackerman acknowledged that the district still had "a long way to go" in getting all of its schools to implement programs effectively.
Over the years, multiple violence-prevention programs have been hailed as models, but then they have either fallen out of favor with the district's administration, failed to spread, or been implemented haphazardly.
The district lost a $600,000 grant to implement Positive Behavior Supports over disputes on how to carry the program out. The district pressed ahead and now, some experts say, the program is floundering.
At Washington High and a handful of other schools, students are defusing problems through peer mediation, but the approach remains underused, some say, and the district has laid off the two staffers responsible for training others.
Restorative Practices, another program that focuses not on punishing offenders but on repairing harm done and addressing underlying problems, helped calm an out-of-control West Philadelphia High. But administrative changes ordered by Ackerman last school year meant the program faded away after three years. Some staff say the loss of the program has contributed to an increase in violence.
The nationally recognized program "I Can Problem Solve" got some traction in Philadelphia beginning in the 1970s but ended for lack of administrative support in the early 1990s.
"There have been so many good ideas about what to do about violence that have gone by the wayside," said David Fair, a former Philadelphia Department of Human Services deputy commissioner and United Way executive who has dealt with the district for 20 years. "There's this addiction to trying the flavor of the month, instead of bringing to scale the things that are proven to work."
Tomás Hanna, an associate superintendent, said the district was trying to expand proven programs. This year, teams of senior staffers are concentrating on the district's "Focus 46" schools - those deemed most troubled.
Each school is graded on its progress in addressing various problems, from safety flaws to lagging academics. Ackerman has said that violence can often be traced to students who are performing poorly.
"You've got some schools that are working it, and you've got some that are struggling," Hanna said.
The district has also implemented two antiviolence programs in 139 of its 268 schools - Second Step for grades K through 8, and School Connect for high school grades.
Still, Hanna said, the district doesn't believe any one program should be foisted on every school.
"We want to make sure that schools are providing an environment where teachers can teach and young people can learn, but for us, this notion of a cookie cutter is problematic," Hanna said.
Problems with program
At one point, the district was much clearer about its support of at least one program, PBS, a nationally recognized, data-driven program that calls for schools to develop and teach clear, consistent school rules, and reinforce good behavior.
There are interventions for students with chronic behavior problems, and incident data is examined closely.
PBS requires ongoing training, resources, and staff buy-in, but when fully implemented, it often leads to a reduction in violent incidents and a better school climate, research shows.
Beginning last school year, United Way offered a $600,000 challenge grant over three years to implement PBS in 10 district schools. The money would go to an outside organization, in this case the nonprofit Public Citizens for Children and Youth, to administer a pilot program, with help from other city nonprofits.
The district said it would have had to pay an additional $400,000 for coaching.
There were problems almost from the start, from central office staff turnover to differences in vision for the scope of the program, according to Fair, who was a United Way vice president at the time.
At first, the district insisted the pilot happen in 20 schools, not 10, he said.
Then Hanna told Fair that Ackerman was having second thoughts about PBS as a demonstration project.
"She thought that a lot of this was common sense, that we should just do more training and eventually the staff would adopt this by osmosis, I guess," Fair said.
There were disagreements over how much training and oversight the program required.
In a statement, Ackerman held to her position that the program can work even if the district doesn't follow the United Way's model. In fact, her Imagine 2014 strategic plan for the district includes that strategy.
"Much of what is prescribed in PBS are in fact things that a good school principal should already be implementing in his or her school," Ackerman said.
