Oak Park and River Forest High School continues to fine tune its Behavior Education Plan with a focus for the next school year on improving the accuracy of data reporting that feeds into understanding behavior and discipline issues at the school.
Audrey Williams-Lee, vice president of the District 200 school board, said the proposed changes would provide a better understanding of what kind of behavior is actually taking place at OPRF.
“Part of it is really understanding what is happening so that we can accurately report on any behavioral concerns that we have within the school,” Williams-Lee said.
Williams-Lee said the Behavior Education Plan has helped reduce the discipline disparity at OPRF.
“Out-of-school suspensions for our African American students are a lot higher and with the implementation of the plan, we saw a really great reduction during the 2023-2024 school year.”
According to Williams-Lee, the goal was to reduce the number from the prior year by 10 percent, but it ended up decreasing by almost 57 percent.
During an April 20 committee of the whole board meeting, recommendations made for changes to the Behavior Education Plan were presented by OPRF Principal Lynda Parker and OPRF Vice Principal David Narain. The proposed changes were recommended by the Culture, Climate, and Behavior Committee for the 2025-2026 school year.
The eight recommendations include minor adjustments to language, as well as additional incident codes that more accurately capture misconduct. Objectives of these changes would be to improve the school’s ability to use data to determine areas of improvement and to respond to areas of community concern. The improved data would also help staff and administrators better support students through interventions and/or appropriate disciplinary actions.
“This year we had eight different suggestions and those typically arise from things that have happened in our building where we need to make sure that our plan is addressing those correctly,” Parker said.
Two of the proposed changes include renaming the “Bullying” section to “Bullying/Harassment” and updating the language within the plan’s appendix regarding student searches.
According to Narain, the school’s deans have reported that situations have come up during the 2024/2025 school year that do not fit into the existing plan’s Behavior Response Grid, which provides staff and administrators with guidance in making decisions about how to respond to student behavior.
Narain said certain behaviors are currently being categorized with more general incident codes within the Behavior Response Grid. In order to measure how often certain occurrences are happening, he said it would be helpful to have more detailed and appropriate codes.
One example of this is more detailed codes regarding students propping open exterior doors, either to come back in after sneaking out, or to allow others to enter. The proposed change is to add two new incident codes: one for propping open an exterior door for any reason, and another for holding open or propping open an exterior door to allow another person to enter and bypass security protocols.
“The goals are mainly about precision in our data reporting,” Narain said of the proposed changes.
At its core, the Behavior Education Plan, say educators, is a teaching and learning plan designed to support every student in their social, emotional, and academic development. It is intended to help turn mistakes into authentic learning experiences and to pair appropriate consequences with additional support.
“We are concerned with making sure that we are doing our best to give every student a positive experience at the school,” Parker said. “We are trying to really focus in on having authentic restorative action so that students feel as though there is a true desire for them to learn new behaviors versus just the need to punish.”
Williams-Lee credits improvements in behavior to the Behavior Education Plan, as well as other factors like the school’s community outreach coordinator, the trauma and intervention specialist, and mentoring work that is being done.
“Making sure that we can actually get to the root cause of what the behavior is will hopefully help stop it from happening again in the future,” Williams-Lee said. “Using restorative practices doesn’t take away consequences. It just allows us to both address the issue and also issue the appropriate consequence.”
The proposed revisions and additions will be brought to the school board for approval at its April 24 meeting.
