PASS: A Positive Approach to Student Success
What is PASS?
PASS is a process for managing the behavior of students who are behaviorally at-risk and who have not responded to campus code of conduct interventions, classroom management strategies, or small-group interventions.
PASS provides individualized behavior education services to students with serious emotional or behavioral issues.
PASS teaches behavioral expectations primarily in mainstream settings.
PASS employs daily and weekly behavioral analysis to guide intervention.
PASS is an alternative to the levels-system approach to services for students.
How Does PASS Work?
With the ongoing support of a PASS specialist, each student in PASS learns, practices, and implements individualized strategies that address targeted behaviors of concern. PASS is a four-phase process:
Phase 1: Preplacement • incorporates activities prior to PASS placement, such as identifying appropriate students, developing behavior plans, and formalizing placement in PASS.
In • Phase 2: Orientation, PASS provides intensive individualized social skills instruction and assists mainstream teachers in modifying and presenting limited academic instruction in a self-contained PASS classroom.
In • Phase 3: Inclusion and Maintenance, PASS monitors students’ social/emotional progress in mainstream classes and corrects/re-teaches replacement behaviors as necessary.
In • Phase 4: Aftercare, PASS supervises and supports PASS sponsors.
Movement by the student through the second and third phases of PASS is not linear. Instead, the level of services a student receives is fluid and dependent on current behavioral needs. Students may, therefore, move from PASS monitoring back to the PASS classroom for a period of Re-Orientation and/or from PASS monitoring to self-monitoring. PASS staff analyze the data gathered during monitoring and uses it to inform the level of service they provide throughout these phases.
PASS staff provide consistent, ongoing support for students throughout each phase, but most intensively during Inclusion and Maintenance. PASS staff reinforce replacement behavior and motivate students by frequent supervision (PASS Monitoring System) and by providing credits toward rewards (PASS Rewards System). All intervention decisions are made by each student’s PASS team and are driven by a functional analysis of the student’s behavior supported by daily data collection.
PASS is a collaborative effort by all key stakeholders in a student’s school life. Parents, administrators, the PASS staff, mainstream teachers, and others partner in their efforts to effectively support positive behavior change.
© 2009 James R. Poole and Hope Caperton-Brown | Blackline Master 1