As administrators in Indian Prairie School District 204 continue to monitor student behavior and discipline, they have a new tool to help this year.
The district has launched a new behavior dashboard that tracks the location, time of day, day of week, type of incident and incidents by grade level across all 34 schools to help with “responsive planning,” administrators told school board members during their meeting on Monday.
“This (dashboard) will allow us to leverage our resources in the right places at the right times so we continue to grow, improve and ensure all of our students are learning in environments that help them achieve to their greatest potential,” said Nicole Howard, assistant superintendent for high schools.
Dashboard tracking safety, dignity, drug-free environment
The dashboard has been in use since the first behavior incident was recorded this school year, Howard said. And it’s part of the district’s ongoing work to address behaviors that negatively affect student safety or dignity, the safety of school and student property, or what board policy describes as the provision of a “positive, weapons-free and drug-free learning environment.”
For each violation in any of these areas, administrators strive to choose the most appropriate consequence to promote better future behavior and also to use what’s known as restorative practices to help students repair any harm done, said Sarah Mumm, director of research and assessment.
‘Very positive’ behavior picture
Behavior data reported from last school year “paints a very positive picture for Indian Prairie,” said Brad Hillman, assistant superintendent for middle schools.
A total of 96% of district students met behavior expectations for safety and ensuring dignity, administrators said. And a higher percentage of students reported feeling safe in each of four areas measured by the 5Essentials survey last school year compared to the year before, including outside the school, in classrooms, in hallways and in bathrooms.
Administrators specifically pointed out progress in the area of feeling safe in bathrooms, which 72% of students said they do — up 4 percentage points from last year’s responses to the same question.
“Last year, we really worked on monitoring, using digital hall passes, so we would know when and who was in our bathrooms,” said Laura Rosenblum, assistant superintendent for elementary schools.
Discipline aims to produce ‘better choices going forward’
School board members, however, noted that more middle school students were given suspensions in 2025-26 than the previous year. Last year, 8.2% of middle schoolers received at least one suspension as a consequence for negative behavior, according to data presented to the school board. But that number had risen from 7% in 2024-25.
School board member Mark Rising said that while it’s concerning to see an increase at the middle school level, the suspension rate at the high school level decreased (to 3.6% last year from 4.3% the year before), so he is optimistic that earlier disciplinary action is working.
“We’re still disciplining kids,” Rising said. “We’re just looking at different ways of handling it so students learn from their behavior and make better choices going forward.”
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