It’s a Monday and the echoing chime of the bell sounds as the 5th hour ends. Not much changes because most students stay in their classrooms. In five minutes, it will be time to start the AFT lesson for today.

While many students may find these lessons boring, they’re designed to create a better environment at West High. With the last two and a half school years being unconventional, Tyson Smith, a social studies teacher here at West High, said that some students in junior high didn’t learn how to behave in a high school-type environment.

“Many students here, lost their junior high experience, which is part of when you learn to navigate a school with a lot of people and navigate something beyond just your class,” Smith said. “That junior high experience was just a portion of what it might be, or it happened from somebody’s couch or bedroom.”

Similarly, Jenny Eustice acknowledged that because of COVID-19, students aren’t familiar with the expectations of West High. When the external Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) coach asked students and teachers what the three values of West High were, most only knew about kindness.

With this information, West High decided to focus this year on three values: kindness, community and learning.

“We, as a PBIS team decided we wanted to do a reset and just remind the school [that] these are expectations and we really want to work to promote kindness, community and learning here at West,” said Eustice.

What many students don’t know is that a lot of work is put into the AFT lessons. Every summer, a group of teachers in the ICCSD come together and have a PBIS matrix. They look at the behavior expectations for each area in a school and modify them to fit their core values. They look at some of the issues the school has had in the past two years and make lessons to help fix those.

The challenging part is making those lessons engaging for students. Both Eustice and Smith agreed that it’s hard to make the lessons hit home for kids.

“I used to teach biology so whether I’m teaching a lesson on meiosis or a lesson on how to build community, right, you’re probably always going to have a few students who are like, ‘Oh, I love this. I want to engage with it.’ And a few students are like, ‘man, whatever,’” Eustice said.

“It’s really hard as a teacher to create something that’s sort of appropriate and challenging for all students in one classroom. But to try to create a thing for the whole school? It’s always difficult,” Smith said.

The biggest question, perhaps, is are these lessons working? It’s too early in the school year to tell right now, but that’s something the PBIS coach does. They interview random teachers and students to see what they know. If the lessons aren’t working, they go back to the drawing board, and ask themselves “What isn’t working? Why isn’t it working? How do we make it work?”

However, student Ben Klieman ’24 felt like the lessons weren’t working at all.

“I don’t really feel like it’s much different from what we did in the past years. And clearly, we haven’t seen much improvement in previous school years,” Klieman said.

Klieman thought there’s not much the school can do to help change the actions of West High students.

“I think usually people know what they’re doing is wrong. And they either don’t care or there’s some sort of external factor that I don’t think is really being addressed right now,” Klieman said. “So people know, Littering is bad or you shouldn’t get into fights. Like saying that on a Google slide doesn’t really help anyone.”

He thought using the time to do homework is a better use of students’ time.

AFT lessons may be something students don’t look forward to every Monday, but the school district does put a lot of time and effort into creating the lessons.