About PBISApps

Our Mission: PBISApps is a not-for-profit organization supporting educators to create more effective, equitable learning environments for all students through high-quality data systems and training.

PBISApps is embedded in a research unit called Educational and Community Supports (ECS) within the College of Education at the University of Oregon — a real nesting doll of academia. It might not sound like the kind of place that springs to mind when you think of innovative software development, but stick with us; we promise it will make sense.

Researchers at ECS study how schools use the kinds of practices that create positive, lasting change in the lives of students and their families and Dr. Kent McIntosh is our director. In his research, he focuses on helping schools figure out how to sustain their PBIS efforts, create equity in their discipline practices, and integrate their academic supports with their behavioral ones. Our partner schools are elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools located in rural communities, urban neighborhoods and everywhere in between. The solutions ECS creates bridge the gap between research and practice. The apps we build are no exception.

We might be in the business of developing data systems, but we’re on a mission to help you create the kind of educational spaces where everyone shows up excited to teach and eager to learn.

Dr. Robert Horner was the first director at ECS and one of the founding creators of the PBIS framework. In his early research, he helped local schools implement PBIS systems and practices. A key aspect of their work was to use data to monitor progress, look for trends, and create effective solutions. Dr. Horner wanted his schools to be able to turn their office discipline referrals into simple reports. He figured, if school teams could see which behaviors happened in their buildings along with when, where, why, and how often they happened in real time (not after weeks or months had gone by), their students would get the supports they needed faster and their team could respond directly to the problems presented in front of them.

The software they needed didn’t exist.

So in 1999, Dr. Horner hired a university student to help him create a system where teams entered their referrals and automatically generated the reports they needed on-demand. That system Seth May developed became the first version of the School-wide Information System (SWIS) — one of the first online apps of its kind. Within five months, SWIS had 10 schools subscribed; four years later, there were nearly 1,000.

Now, there are more than 10,000 schools subscribed around the globe and we remain committed to blending current research findings with practical solutions that empower you to make data-driven decisions in real time. We didn’t stop at creating SWIS. In 2003, we released an app to track the progress you make in your PBIS implementation called PBIS Assessment. Two years after that came PBIS Evaluation — an app to combine survey and behavior data across multiple schools into summarized reports. By 2012 the SWIS Suite was complete with two more apps that monitor Tier 2 and Tier 3 interventions — CICO-SWIS and I-SWIS.

We might be in the business of developing data systems, but we’re on a mission to help you create the kind of educational spaces where everyone shows up excited to teach and eager to learn. Our team is full of educators, trainers, school psychologists, families, and community members. We care about kids and hold nothing but love and respect for the work that teachers do. No matter our experience, our focus is clear: We’re here to make sure you have access to the information you need to be as successful as you can be.

We know. It’s a tall order. Big goals simply mean we can do more than give you online applications to store and report your data.

Everything we offer at PBISApps is based on research and offered at prices that work within the current realities of school budgets — namely free where we can and affordable everywhere else. Our webinars, blog posts, podcast episodes, live customer support, every video we film, manual we write, and tutorial we create, all of it is free to anyone who visits our website. We even made an entire application free because we believe schools should be able to assess their own implementation whenever they want. As members of the educational community, we feel compelled to make our knowledge and expertise accessible. Our invitation for you to join us is always open. We can’t wait to meet you.