At St. Rita Catholic School (SRCS), we foster positive relationships as the foundation of our work with students. We establish a positive school climate by implementing The Spartan Way, a virtue based positive behavior intervention support system, to foster a sense of community at our school. We are committed to inclusion and strive to create a safe and warm atmosphere for all students. The Spartan Way focuses on increasing faith practices while reducing and preventing problematic behaviors. Our expectations focus first on our students’ interior state, then on how that interior state impacts the way students treat others. We rely on the foundation of virtue (holy habits that imitate God) first, then restore relationships damaged by poor decisions. Incidents require different types of responses depending on whether they are low, mid, or high-level harm, and we commit to intervening early and often. 

We follow four guiding principles. 

1. We dedicate ourselves to living virtue: Catholic virtues will be taught from Scripture and Catechism, and we will prayerfully discern upon which virtues to work. 

2. We support others in living virtue:  we will share what we learn freely and with others and offer encouragement by acknowledging the good. 

3. We commit to constructive thoughts, words, and deeds: we will refrain from gossip, rumors, and criticizing judgment and actively express our Catholic faith through the words we use and actions we take. 

4. When faced with challenges or conflict, we find solutions that cultivate virtue for ourselves and one another: we will uphold the human dignity assigned to each of us by God when dealing with one another. Virtues will be expressed and practiced in identifying the injustice, restoring equity, and working to reach common agreements that promote peace and restore harmony. 

The Spartan Way provides all students with high structure, which includes clearly communicating expectations and having high accountability for each and every student. The Spartan Way provides high support, which includes listening to and valuing our students, encouraging their voice, fostering relationships, and building upon the strengths of each and every student. We explicitly teach our students how to meet our common school-wide behavioral expectations and support students in developing appropriate behaviors. We believe we must teach, model, cue, and reinforce behavior to provide a meaningful and positive atmosphere for students. 

A whole child approach to education includes policies, practices, and relationships that ensure all students in our school community are healthy, safe, engaged, supported, and challenged. At SRCS, we develop skills to ensure all students can lead a positive and productive life, by strengthening foundational social and emotional skills such as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, problem solving, interpersonal skills and focusing on the importance of students’ commitment to the community. We do this by explicitly teaching social and emotional learning skills through guidance programs and supporting students in individual and small-group counseling. 

At SRCS, we commit to providing staff and students with a safe and orderly place to work, learn, and play. We examine and follow procedures and strategies to promote an effective approach to behavior (discipline) and believe doing so helps us maximize instructional time improving student opportunity to develop to his or her potential. We analyze problematic behavior (misbehavior) in the context of the whole child and use a proactive, faith-filled approach rather than punitive method.