Short takes: Doing the right thing pays off for these K-5 students 

Since it opened in 1992, Rio Vista Elementary school in Southern California’s Apple Valley Unified School District has run a program that accomplishes the nearly impossible: It pleases educators, parents and students. The unlikely name for this minor miracle? The Responsibility Program.

The plan works by encouraging and motivating students to accept responsibility for their actions, attitudes and academics. It pleases educators and parents because it correlates to improved test scores: In 2000, the school’s API was 800. By 2001, it had grown to 843. In 2002, it registered a small dip (to 837), but it rebounded in 2003 with a score of 853. Its upward trajectory continued with an 864 score the following year.

Perhaps most importantly, students like and “work” the program because it’s fun and they receive rewards and recognition for their actions.

Here’s how it works. The program, originally devised cooperatively by parents and teachers as a no-cost but motivating tool, rewards students with “responsibility slips” when they accomplish goals. These can include staying on task or completing their homework on time, or exhibiting positive behaviors such as being respectful to students and adults, or picking up trash, or helping others in some way, like coming to the aid of a child who is injured.

The slips are pooled, and every Friday a drawing selects 25 winners. Rewards range from a free Popsicle or reading a story to their classmates to a half-hour of uninterrupted time on a computer or a night without homework.

The favorite reward is lunch with Principal Theda Smith, who frequently welcomes an award winner to her inner sanctum, where together they eat lunch, chat and typically play a game.

The program is a “huge success,” according to Smith. “Kids want to hear their names called over the intercom! It teaches students to be responsible for their own actions and their own academics… for being well-behaved, which is a huge part of being responsible.”

A telling sign of the program’s success is the long-term effect it has on some students.

“It’s an ongoing tradition for even high school students to come back bearing their old responsibility slips, to show they still have them,” Smith said. And some fifth-grade students are so proud of gaining their slips that they never turn them in, instead saving them as keepsakes as they leave Rio Vista and go on to middle school.

Such loyalty makes the school’s motto —“Roaring with Responsibility”— easy to understand.