Pike Case Study

Pike High School & Freshman Center | Indianapolis, IN

“Even the teachers that have been with Pike High School for 20 years are blown away by the empty hallways.” Chris Newkirk, School Police Department Chief of Police

Challenge

Pike High School needed a solution to take care of excessive tardiness combined with students’ loitering in school hallways after each bell.

Solution

FACTS AT A GLANCE

Pike High School & Freshman Center in Indianapolis, IN Number of Students: 2,850 Customer since August 2009 Chris Newkirk, School Police Dpartment Assistant Chief of Police

Pike High School discovered PlascoTrac in action while attending a conference in Florida.  Chris Newkirk, School Police Department Assistant Chief of Police, was tasked with getting the system up and running at Pike.  PlascoTrac was installed at Pike High School & Freshman Center in August of 2009.

Two months after implementing PlascoTrac, Pike High School experienced a staggering 50% drop in tardiness.  “The very first week of the semester there was an immediate drop in tardiness, and since then, student tardiness continues to decline,” notes Newkirk, “And I think PlascoTrac will continue to produce even better results as time goes on.”

At Pike High School, PlascoTrac means teachers no longer have to manually track tardies or enter them into the Skyward student information system because it is all automated. When the bell rings, Pike teachers are simply required to close the classroom door and let the hall monitors and PlascoTrac Mobile units handle any tardy students.  Teachers are thrilled to be able to begin teaching within seconds after the bell rings.  Before PlascoTrac, teachers wasted an average 10-12 minutes managing tardy students and assigning appropriate consequences.  The use of PlascoTrac translates to an additional 10 minutes of productive class time. This time savings is exponential when you consider how many classes are conducted per day/week/month.  Administrators and teachers love the benefits of PlascoTrac.

While the primary challenge Pike High School faced before implementing Plasco Trac was excessive tardiness, the school now uses PlascoTrac for much more than tardy tracking.  Nearly 20 student actions are monitored using the system, including:

• In-school after hours, unsupervised
• Cutting class
• Disruptive behavior
• Failing to display ID
• Failure to follow directive
• Gang activity
• Inappropriate language
• Improper clothing
• Insubordination
• Late bus
• No ID
• Disrespecting teachers
• Hall sweeps
• Detention
• Saturday school
• Truancy
• Habitual offenders

 PlascoTrac helps Pike track and deal with habitual offenders with the core goal of getting students on the right track. With PlascoTrac, Pike can effectively observe habitual offenders from semester to semester to identify ongoing behavior problems and create behavior modification solutions.  Once student are on the right track, Newkirk and his team have established a policy to reward a student’s positive behavior in the form of a clean-slate each semester. For instance, a habitual offender in the fall semester has the chance to redeem himself in the spring. Pike believes positive change should be rewarded and that everybody deserves a second chance.

Beyond student discipline, PlascoTrac helps Pike High School track the use of their new grant-funded Learning Center. “Instead of someone having to be in the Learning Center keeping track of who is coming and going through a spreadsheet or handwritten notes, they put their PlascoTrac Mobile devices in “Learning Center mode,” scan the kids’ ID’s as they come in, and PlascoTrac keeps the statistics needed for grant compliance,” says Newkirk. In the future, Pike High School anticipates using the PlascoTrac Mobile for events and off-site tracking.

The bottom line for Pike High School is that PlascoTrac does much more than the administration ever expected.  PlascoTrac helps manage grant compliance statistics and monitors student actions, which in turn modifies behavior. Ultimately, PlascoTrac gives Pike teachers more time to teach. The value extends well beyond the original goals and has made PlascoTrac a vital part of school operations.