MARSHALL — Along with the high school, Marshall’s Southview Elementary and middle school have implemented a new framework to support students in their academic careers, and are seeing positive outcomes.

BARR (Building Assets, Reducing Risks) is an intervention program used to evaluate student attendance, address behavioral and academic needs, and build relationships. It’s been used at the high school the last few years, and expanded to the middle school and Southview after the two were awarded a grant from the state to put it in place.

Southview Elementary Principal Peter Thor, Marshall Middle School Principal Peggy Reynolds and Marshall Middle School Assistant Principal Bennett Appel updated the school board Monday night on how the framework is going at their schools.

“Number one, we want to focus on the whole student. The academic part of the student, and their social and emotional needs,” Reynolds said. “It (BARR) actually focuses on eight strategies that work together to focus on building relationships with students and staff, using data and enabling schools to help achieve those academic, as well as non-academic, outcomes for our students.”

The eight strategies BARR focuses on are the priority of the whole student, professional training for staff, weekly lesson periods to practice life skills, create cohorts between student and teacher teams, hold regular cohort meetings, community connect meetings, engage families in student learning and involve administrators.

The schools hold weekly breakout lessons that last about a half hour where students will meet with the same teachers, and go through different lessons. It’s labeled as ‘U-Time’ at Southview, and ‘I-Time’ at the middle and high school.

“Those BARR lessons focus on helping students learn and practice essential life skills,” Reynolds said. “Some of those lessons are really, really applicable, focusing on executive functioning or how to handle conflict.”

Southview is technically in its second year with BARR, and has been growing the number of faculty members involved.

“We started out with the pilot team last year where I asked for volunteers, and we actually had more than what I needed to be a pilot team. So, I picked one team from each grade level of two teachers, and they went through the implementation training,” Thor said. “This year, the main focus we have is on our U-Time activities … We’re pulling a lot of different teachers to do it, instead of just our homeroom teachers.”

Both schools sent a group of faculty to the national conference last spring to learn about BARR training.

The middle school also had a pilot team begin BARR last year, and grew it into the official framework this year.

“This year, we had all of our certified staff trained for two days in August,” Appel said. “We talked about the I-Times, like Peter had mentioned about the U-Times. It’s activities getting to know the students as a whole. I-times are the same thing, but it’s just at a more advanced level. They connect really well. So that way, when our students from Southview are coming over, they’re going to know exactly what it is. It’s just a little bit more deeper, or it’s helping them at that higher level.”

BARR helps to recognize students on different “levels” to address the specific needs that become apparent.

“Our level zero students are students that are doing amazing and thriving. We have no concerns about them,” Appel said. “Our level one students are maybe they have some slight concerns, or maybe some behavior academics where we need a little bit of intervention … Our level two students, those are students where we tried some of those interventions with our level one students. However, we’re not seeing the progress that we were looking with, so now we need to escalate it just a little bit more.”

The level three students are more at-risk, and the schools will bring in other administrators to help support the students.

“Our last piece that we’ve just started up and running here at the middle school are Community Connect meetings,” Appel said. “That would be our administrators. That’s our nurse, counselors, school resource officer, drug and alcohol counselor, or anybody outside of our schooling system that we think could help us with our students at our level three.”

Both Thor and Appel said they run frequent reports to track where student’s attendance and behaviors are compared to last year, to see further what changes are taking place.

“So far, we found that our level three and our level four behaviors are down quite significantly from last year, which is great to see,” Appel said. “I’ve been pulling weekly data for our chronic absentee students and keeping track of how many absences they have each week.”

The two schools will implement further steps of the BARR framework next year, and hope to continue seeing positive results.