A central feature of a PBIS initiative, at least for students, is your PBIS store. While your staff is busy acknowledging positive behavior and admins are tracking trends, your students are thinking about how to spend their points in the PBIS school store. How you price items and privileges will determine how successful your store is and, by extension, how successful your PBIS initiative is.
Maximizing Student Points
First and foremost, students will earn points by adhering to your school’s behavior matrix. This is where staff buy-in is critical to the process. Pairing acknowledgment of positive actions with awarding points helps to reinforce positive behavior as well as generate excitement for shopping the school store.
Within PBIS Rewards, you can help get your staff on board with awarding points by setting Daily Point Goals for everyone. Set the expectation for staff to acknowledge each student with a minimum number of points each day, provided that the students earn them. At the same time, consider setting a daily point goal for students to aim to earn each day. These two goals will help to create a more balanced economy.
Basic Pricing for Your PBIS Store
When determining how to set prices in your PBIS store, consider how many points students are generally earning. Within PBIS Rewards, this information is readily available within the software’s Points Reports section, both in the Points Awarded to Students and Points Awarded by Staff reports. If students are earning a lot of points regularly, reflect that in your pricing by setting prices higher. If students are not earning a lot of points, set your prices lower. The main objective in each scenario is to encourage students with attainable goals.
Keep in mind, however, that students feel the same way that adults do about inflation. It is better to price items high and then make them less expensive later than to price them low and raise the price.
Assigning Value to Items
Just like adults, students use price to determine value and desirability of items. Every school is different, however. An item’s popularity will vary depending on the unique makeup of your student body – what might be popular at one school may not generate the same kind of buzz at another school. This is where polling your student body to learn what types of PBIS incentives they want can be helpful in stocking your PBIS school store.
Basic retail principles apply here, as well. When it comes to store inventory, the quantity of certain items can help drive the price. If you have a high quantity of an item, price it low. If you have a low quantity of an item, price it high. How you price items can encourage your students to learn principles such as spending and saving – useful life skills for every student!
Using Your PBIS School Store to Teach Responsibility
Sometimes, students have difficulty with being prepared for class. You can help teach responsibility by including necessary items in your PBIS school store and then requiring students to purchase these items whenever they come to class unprepared. Spending their hard-earned points on things like pencils and paper can encourage students to be more thoughtful about what they need to bring with them to class.
Don’t forget that teachers can set up their own classroom stores and stock them with items specific to their class. Many teachers opt to use this feature to teach financial literacy concepts such as saving and spending, debit accounts, goal setting, earning interest, and insufficient funds.
Putting Items on Sale
Another retail concept that works well with your PBIS school store is reducing prices to sell items. This is a great way to clear inventory, reduce store stock, and eliminate items that no longer serve your needs. After all, everyone loves a bargain!
Offering discounts on store inventory can also help your students maximize their points at the end of the school year. Because PBIS is typically a year-long effort, celebrating your students’ behavioral progress is a great way to end the school year on a positive note. Putting items on sale for a big end-of-year blowout can clear both inventory and points balances and help you start the next year with a clean slate.
For schools using PBIS Rewards to manage your PBIS store, putting items on sale is simple:
- Go to the Staff Web Portal
- Click on the Stores tab on the left-hand side Main Menu
- Choose the School Store or your My Store
- Click Edit Store
- Hit SELECT ALL if you want to put all the items in the store on sale or just select the items using the Select column
- Click the ACTIONS drop-down button
- Select Sale Price
- Type in the percent you want to reduce the price by
- Click Change
- To remove the sale, select the items, click the ACTIONS drop-down button, and select Remove Sale
Your school’s PBIS store is a powerful tool in your efforts to build a positive school climate and culture, and PBIS Rewards can make managing the process simple and effective. We’d love to show you more – request a demo!
