by Tyler Lambing

This year there have been many changes to the PRIDE program to promote positive behavior among the Tussey Mountain student body. 

The PRIDE team constantly strives to improve and change the program to help students. This year they gave the program a complete revamp, getting rid of PRIDE tickets at the high school level and replacing them with tokens. Miss Amanda Adams, a teacher on the PRIDE team, states, “A PRIDE token is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a token of the staff’s appreciation for students showing PRIDEful behavior.” As to why tickets had to be replaced, tenth grader Barrett Brode says that the problem was that PRIDE tickets started to lose their value and that people were getting them for the simplest things.

Another big change is that the PRIDE team has introduced the PRIDE stick. Adams said, “The PRIDE stick is just a badge of honor right now for the class that has won the most recent challenge. It’s just the honor of having the PRIDE stick to show your Titan PRIDE.” 

Besides the tokens and PRIDE stick, the PRIDE program has also changed how they run the middle school PRIDE program. Adams explains, “At the middle school level it’s become much more focused on individual classes and individual smaller goals so that hopefully when you get to the senior high the bigger things are more of a reward because they are special for the senior high. We’re not counting tickets and doing a PRIDE wall this year because there are no tickets [in the senior high].” Adams also says, “We just wanted to mix it up. We saw that there was a new way that maybe we could motivate more students and this looked like the way to go.”

Anytime changes are made to the PRIDE program there is feedback. Brode indicated that the team has heard a lot of people’s opinions, but everything is up in the air right now.

This is just the beginning for the improved PRIDE program; there are many more anticipated changes. Adams states, “Our goal is always to be better than before and to always be flexible. We don’t ever want to get to the point where [the PRIDE program] is set in rigid stone because it should be something that is new and different and as fun as we can make it.” While Brode says he is looking forward to seeing the improvements in the school as something that  other people look at and get excited about.