Travis High School
A Growing Leaders Case Study
“We found something that the kids were hooked on immediately.”
– Julie Diaz, Principal of Travis High School
Watch as Principal Julie Diaz shares how Travis High School utilized Habitudes® to help decrease disciplinary incidents and develop a leadership culture.
Video Transcript
So when I first came to Travis, the superintendent said go in there and do leadership. So I looked around at programs. There’s lots of programs on character ed, but Habitudes has it all. It has the implementation of why we’re doing this and the why behind “you should have integrity”. We found something that the kids are hooked on immediately.
So the first year before I was there we had 3,067 discipline referrals. The next year when we brought in the three minute words of wisdom and some structure and expectations we went down to 1,395 referrals and then the end of this year as of May 1st of this year we were down to 880 and we really feel it’s contributed to the Habitude lessons. We’re doing it in an advisory where the kids all have one teacher all year and so they’ve made those adult connections.
Referrals for being disrespectful or things like dropped tremendously, because we were giving those kids leadership. The juniors and seniors who were the mentors turning it around became our role models in the hallways and we tell them that all the time. We held them to a little different standard.
One girl in particular was a sophomore when she started and she said at the end of the year, “You know I came in as a sophomore and I was just gonna be hanging around and I didn’t care. There’s no way I was gonna be a senior by the end and graduate.” Then when we did the Starving Baker lesson. She came in to my associate and said, “You know it’s Starving Baker… that’s me… now I understand. I mean I’m working two jobs at home. I’m taking care of my siblings. I’m doing my friends homework for them, and I’m not turning my stuff in. So I need to stop and I need to start taking care of myself.” So it gave them the language. I could tell you so many stories like that.
The confusion of teenagers and everything nowadays… it’s it’s tough being a teenager. But [Habitudes] gave the kids like oh that’s what’s going on and that’s what I need to do… I need to stop doing everything for everybody else first and take care of myself.