The DE-PBS Project proudly serves as a technical assistance center for the Delaware Department of Education to actualize the vision to create safe and caring learning environments that promote the social-emotional and academic development of all children.  The statewide initiative is designed to build the knowledge and skills of Delaware educators in the concepts and evidence-based practices of Positive Behavior Support (PBS) as a Multi-tiered System of Support (MTSS).

The Delaware Positive Behavior Support Project (DE-PBS) project began in 1999.  In the early years of the project, more focus was placed on supporting individual students when initially working with schools, as schools would often request assistance in this area.  The major objective at this time was to develop and implement a set of training modules on current principles and practices of positive behavior supports, with more content focused on individual supports.  The project utilized a train-the-trainer model with representative district level teams.

However, after a couple of years the focus shifted to supporting schools in creating a positive school system so that there will be fewer students who need individual supports and that these individual supports will be more effective because they are implemented in a large system of School-wide support.  Staff provided training and technical assistance at the school level to implementing their own School-wide PBS systems.  In the 2002-2003 school year, staff from the Illinois PBS project provided consultation and training to assist with the development of a larger infrastructure of technical assistance and training capacity in Delaware and share their training resources for working with school teams.  Training was provided by Illinois consultants to district level staff, considered DE-PBS Coaches, as well as training provided directly to school teams in School-wide PBS.

A DE-PBS Cadre of Coaches from active districts receive training and technical assistance from Project staff so they can in turn train and support schools in their district. Additionally, with the professional development and support structure for assisting schools to develop effective School-wide systems in place and the number of schools implementing School-wide PBS is increasing,  the training and supports for students with more significant behavioral needs was re-evaluated.  The content from the Illinois state project in Targeted and Intensive Team Training was revised and blended with material from the original modules on Functional Behavior Assessment, Behavior Support Planning, and Person-Centered Planning.

Through the years that followed, a primary goal became to increase local capacity to support the schools implementing multi-tiered systems of support for behavior and social-emotional competencies.  The Project provides professional development opportunities each year that focus on Tier 1: Universal, Tier 2: Targeted and Tier 3: Intensive behavior supports.  An additional Project focus has been to develop of online modules to make access to content more accessible to district staff and schools.   Module topics focus on topics such as improving aspects of school climate, building team leader skills and integrating social-emotional learning in a multi-tiered system of behavioral support.  The Project looks forward expanding and enhancing these resources.