The PBIS cup: An award so important that the school will have whole assemblies just about who won it for the semester. Does it really deserve to be that important, though?

Don’t get us wrong; it’s a great idea. Good behavior, good grades and the like deserve to be rewarded. The way the cup being awarded works, though will never be fair. Consider this: when was the last time a grade other than the freshmen won the cup? It’s not the same as it used to be.

Staff Editorial

Freshmen, let it be said that we have nothing against any of you. Our problem lies with the way the cup is given out. You’ve earned the cup. We don’t want to take it away from you.

The big problem with the cup is that the standards for gold cards in particular vary so much between grade levels, and even between the different levels of classes within the grades. A freshman might get a gold card simply for showing up to class on time, but a senior won’t because that sort of behavior is expected by then. It’s basically the same if you compare a prep level class to an honors level class. We can’t say we’ve seen a gold card in an AP or honors classroom in quite a long time. Granted, teachers don’t really need to motivate them, but it’s worth noting, especially where AP-heavy juniors and seniors are concerned.

There’s also different standards between teachers. There are teachers who don’t give out a single gold card all year, and there are teachers who give out gold cards like the world is ending. Heck, couldn’t a teacher just give gold cards to all of their students every day if they really wanted to? It would be gaming the system, but there’s really nothing stopping that sort of thing the way things stand now.

Believe it or not, the cup comes down to more than just gold cards, and this raises another inconsistency: getting help to fix bad grades depends on your class. If you’re a senior, your teachers or your friends can help you get your grades back in shape, but you have to be the one to make first contact. Freshmen with D’s and F’s are automatically sent to the Mastery Lab during their lunch to get help to get their grades back up. It’s great that they do that for the freshmen, but in the context of the PBIS cup, you could consider it as a sort of performance enhancer – the sort of thing they generally ban in competitions like this. This just doesn’t work if the standards are inconsistent between grades and even individual classes.

There should be a way to reward classes for their behavior, grades and so on, but if there’s such a need to do it, the goals should be set for the individual grade levels. Again, it’s nothing against the freshmen, but it has officially become a cliche for them to win the cup. It’s just not exciting anymore.

We certainly don’t advocate that EVERYBODY should win. That mind set is even worse – if everybody wins, then it’s just not special. It carries no meaning. If we’re going to reward the grade levels, let them stand and fall by their own standards, and not measurements that unintentionally skew the whole thing in favor of one grade level.