Paychecks Best Practices

Track and Encourage Parent Involvement

Paychecks include a spot for parents to “sign off” after they’ve reviewed their child’s Paycheck. You can encourage this behavior by awarding points if students return a Paycheck with a parent’s signature. 

STEP 1

Add a “Signed Paycheck” Behavior to Your Rubric

Add a new behavior named "Signed Paycheck" so teachers can record points as they check for parent signatures.

If you want to track when students don't return a signed Paycheck, make the behavior both positive and negative, and record negative points when students return an unsigned Paycheck.

Make the value of "Signed Paycheck" 0 if you only want to track parent signatures and not award points.

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STEP 2

Award Points to Track Signed Paychecks!

Use our Select All feature to make recording points for signed paychecks quick and easy! You can then record a negative point for students with an unsigned Paycheck.

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STEP 3

Track Signature Totals

You can filter and sort Students Scoreboard to see the total Paychecks students have returned signed, or unsigned. To do so, take the following steps:

1. Go to Students Scoreboard
2. Add a behavior filter for "Signed Paycheck"
3. Sort the Merits or Demerits column from high to low to see students with the most signed, or unsigned paychecks.

Read our Introduction to Scoreboards article for more on how to sort and filter Scoreboards, and if your "Signed Paycheck" behavior is worth 0, make sure to check out the Weight By Points section.

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Use a Daily Bonus

Daily bonuses are a great way to facilitate buy-in for your points system, especially if your school is subtracting for negatives. Bonus points ensure that all students are earning points, even if some teachers struggle with regularly recording points, making rewards and incentives more obtainable.

When you set a daily bonus, the amount you choose will be deposited into each student's bank account, every weekday morning.

If your school is switching from a Starting Amount to Daily Bonus, turn off your Starting Amount by logging into the admin page, click Rewards, then click the Settings tab. Delete your Starting Amount, and click Save Settings.

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Add Interventions for Low Earners

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STEP 1

Identify Low Earners

You can use Students Scoreboards to organize your data and see students that may need additional supports. For example:

• View the students with the most demerits by sorting the demerits column from high to low.
• Identify students not earning enough points by adding logic to the merits column, and viewing students with less than a certain number of points
• Add a behavior filter if there's a specific behavior you're focused on, then sort from high to low to view students with the most records of that behavior
• If your school subtracts for negatives, you can sort the Saved column from low to high to see students who have a negative balance.

Read our Introduction to Scoreboards article for more on how to sort and filter Scoreboards

STEP 2

Add Supports and Opportunities to Earn Points

There are many ways you can provide support, and some can include ways to earn extra points. For example:

• Provide points based on a student's completion of a reflection letter
• Quick check-ins with students that had the most demerits yesterday
• Offer points for counselor visits
• Award points in return for help as a teacher's assistant

You can create a category on your rubric called "Supports" and add your specific supports as behaviors on the rubric. Consider making the behaviors worth more, which can help build buy-in for your supports.

Ask teachers and counselors to add a comment as they record the supports, for more detail and some extra words of encouragement.

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Watch Out for Inflation!

Sometimes teachers giving too many points can inflate a small group of students' bank accounts, which can throw off the economy of your school store.

Admins can access a Teachers Scoreboard to view the total points each teacher is recording, and add "More Than" logic to the merits column to see teachers that have recorded more than a certain amount of points.

Keep in mind each teacher's total points can be influenced by the amount of students they see each day.

Teachers can also access their own Teacher Dashboard to see their total positive and negative points, and additional info like for which students they're recording the most positive and negative points. For more on Dashboards, view our Introduction to Dashboards article.