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Playing for Pride And Prizes

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By KLINT LOWRY The Suncoast News

The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 28, 2008

PORT RICHEY - Teachers are on the lookout like never before at Gulf Middle School, watching how students conduct themselves, handing out tickets and daily taking names.

With this stepped-up surveillance, students are trying harder than ever to get caught.

There's a new game at the school meant to encourage positive student behavior in a way that's not only fun, but also rewarding.

The game, called "Bears' Pride," is based on an idea Principal Stan Trapp found in a book called "Tough Kids." It includes a chapter filled with ideas for programs that encourage good behavior.

"Basically we just followed the book," Trapp said.

Every day, 10 teachers are assigned to find one student each who does something to exhibit the qualities of being respectful, punctual, responsible or prepared as they go about their day.

"One was as simple as stopping to hold open a door for one of our teachers who gets around in a wheelchair," Trapp said.

Teachers are encouraged to try to award tickets to students other than those in their classes.

"It kind of creates the sense that this is omnipresent, everywhere you go someone might be watching and hand you a ticket," Trapp said.

A large game board, similar to a bingo card, is posted in the school cafeteria. At the end of each day, the names of the students who got citations that day are written into a space on the board. The spaces are randomly chosen.

The game goes on until a vertical, horizontal or diagonal row of 10 is complete. Then the board is cleared and a new game begins.

Every student in the winning row gets a prize. Then a drawing is held to see which of the 10 gets the Mystery Motivator Mega-prize. Along with getting a spot on the game board and the chance at a prize, whenever a student gets a ticket, their parents get a call letting them know their child was caught behaving well.

The first game started Aug. 25. Since then, Trapp has been having some fun of his own spreading a rumor that the grand prize was going to be "a homemade broccoli and asparagus casserole, handmade by the principal himself."

Interest in the game has been schoolwide, especially as the first game board began to fill in.

"I think one of the biggest things that happened was when we took the board down on Sept. 9," Assistant Principal Sue Lepisto said. "Kids went, 'Where's the board? Someone won! Where's the board?'"

Someone had won - a horizontal row was completed. But they noticed that one of the diagonals was also complete, and nobody was sure if they had missed it or if both lines were completed the same day. So they decided the only thing to do was to declare 19 winners - one student was part of both lines.

The winning students gathered at the school media center, where they each received a school water bottle. Then Trapp and Lepisto drew the name of the prize winner, eighth-grader Nenad Gruborovic, who won an iPod Shuffle.

The room filled with exclamations of "whoa!" when Trapp presented Nenad with the miniature Apple music player, worth about $47.

"I knew it wasn't going to be food," Nenad said. "I didn't know it was going to be something this good."

The prize might not always be quite this grand, Trapp said after the presentation, but they wanted to have something extra good the first time out to raise more interest in the game.

The expectation of Bear's Pride is to help create a positive school climate, Trapp said, and to show students that people notice when they do the right thing.

Klint Lowry can be reached at 727-815-1067 or at klowry@suncoastnews.com

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