Good Behavior May Pay Off For Students

Now be good, boys and girls, and it might pay off.

A program proposed by Seattle schools Superintendent John Stanford would reward high school and middle school classes with $50 or $100 for each month free of “incidents.”

The School Board, by a 5-1 vote, with one member absent, on Wednesday made $80,000 available for program.

The cash awards under the Student Peer Anti-Incident Program would go into a class account and could be used for such things as financing proms or other class projects, Stanford said.

“We have many programs to help produce safe, incident-free schools, and they are working, but we believe that we could reduce incidents further if we could acquire student cooperation,” Stanford said.

Incidents that would squelch a monthly cash reward for a class would include “confrontations between students in which shoving, hitting, spitting or use of objects are involved.”

Possession or use of weapons, sexual harassment and disrespect toward adults also would keep a monthly cash award out of class coffers.

The cash program would provide an incentive for all members of a class to work to resolve problems developing between classmates before clashes occur, Stanford said.

He told board members he was delaying action on a similar program that would pay $100 cash to students who report spotting a weapon on campus.