What Started in One Classroom in North Fond du Lac

By Carrie Nitz, Dean of Students and Mental Health Navigator, School District of North Fond du Lac

The Problem We Couldn't Solve With Supports

A few years ago our leadership team sat down with our data, and I left that meeting frustrated. We'd done the work. Tiered interventions, counselors, student services, screeners, restorative practices, an advisory period, real money behind all of it. And attendance was flat. Referrals weren't going down. The same students were still in my office week after week, and my office is not a place you want to be a regular.

Every administrator knows the difference between a student making a mistake and a student making the same mistake after three different adults have tried to help them make a different choice. It was that second group we weren't reaching. Not because nobody intervened. We intervened constantly.

One student, who I'll call Maya for confidentiality, was in that second group. She could do the work, and when she was in class she did it well. What she couldn't do was the day. A conflict before third hour, a grade lower than she expected, a text from home at lunch, and the rest of her schedule was gone. We could respond to all of that. We were good at it, honestly. What we didn't have was anywhere in her week where somebody taught her what to do with the twenty seconds between the trigger and her response.

So what were we missing? The answer I kept landing on wasn't one I loved. Maybe our supports weren't insufficient. Maybe supports by themselves were never going to be enough.

Discipline here isn't just about consequences. It's about teaching, reteaching, accountability, and repairing harm when that's needed. We were good at most of that list. Teaching is where we kept coming up short.

Meanwhile, Two Doors Down

While we were working on this at the district level, one of our teachers was working a much smaller version of it in his own classroom, and he was closer to an answer than we were.

Kurt Wismer teaches business, marketing, and entrepreneurship at our high school, and he wasn't thinking about student mental health at all. He had a teaching problem. His students couldn't collaborate. They couldn't communicate under pressure, and when a project went sideways they had no idea how to recover. His curriculum assumed a set of durable skills they simply didn't have.

Two entrepreneurs, Kim Galske and Fritz Baertschy, came in as guest speakers in that class. They ended up showing him a set of executive leadership tools, the kind actually used to develop CEOs and senior teams, and he asked the question a teacher asks. What happens if I level these for sixteen-year-olds?

In the fall of 2023 that became a course, the one we now call GRiT. One semester, one classroom, one teacher.

When a Classroom Solution Turns Out to Be a District Solution

Students who took that course started showing up differently in the rest of the building. Not dramatically, and not all of them. But teachers who had nothing to do with the course started mentioning it to me on their own. A student paused instead of escalating. A student named what was happening to them instead of walking out. My office started seeing some of those students less.

That's when this stopped being one teacher's elective and turned into a district question. We'd been looking outward for a program to buy, which is what you do. What we needed was already being built, one section at a time, by somebody on our own payroll. Our job was to notice it, and then protect it long enough to find out whether it was real.

We took our time with that. It stayed inside our district for two more years while it was refined and measured, and it wasn't offered to another school until late 2025, once we had enough data to say honestly whether it worked. It's since grown into RewiredEdu.

I should be straight with you about where I sit. I watched that first version run as an administrator with no stake in it whatsoever. I have one now. In 2025 I joined RewiredEdu as Director of Human Insight while staying in my role here. Kurt and I are both still employed by this district, the curriculum is owned by RewiredEdu under a formal agreement, and North Fond du Lac uses it at no cost as the pilot site. I'd rather you weigh what follows knowing all of that.

Why It Worked When Other Things Hadn't

Why did this one stick when the last three initiatives didn't? Because it was built on how learning actually works, not on how we wished students would behave.

It taught the mechanism, not the rule. Students learned what's happening in the brain when they're calm, when they're flooded, and when they've shut down entirely. Once a student can name the state they're in, they've got something to do about it. Telling a student to stop is just telling a student to stop. Understanding what's going on inside gives them somewhere to go next.

It was taught, practiced, and revisited. The lessons were built for retrieval and spaced practice instead of one-time exposure, and I think this is where our earlier efforts fell down. We'd delivered genuinely good content in assemblies and one-off advisory lessons and then wondered why none of it transferred. It didn't transfer because we never practiced it.

What It Looked Like Across Our Buildings

At Horace Mann High School it runs as a semester-long elective inside our Tier 2 framework, and both halves of that are deliberate. Putting it on the master schedule with a grade and credit attached told students and staff this was academic content and not an add-on. Nobody gets pulled from class for it. Nobody is assigned to it as a consequence of anything. Some students choose it outright, some are recommended by counselors, but either way they're walking into a course rather than an intervention.

It also does something Tier 2 rarely does. Most of what we call Tier 2 is more monitoring, more check-ins, more adult eyes on a student who's struggling. Or put another way, we were watching them more carefully. We weren't teaching them anything.

Duane Hartkopf, our principal at Horace Mann, has watched this closely. "Students are not only developing a better SEL toolkit, but also developing self awareness of what needs to be better supported or developed," he told me. "In addition, students are able to self advocate and share the supports they may need."

Bessie Allen Middle School looks different, and so does the tier. An exploratory course arrived for 2025-26, and this spring we added a shorter weekly version for homeroom and advisory that reaches every student. Same content, Tier 2 in one building and Tier 1 in the other, because the buildings needed different things. When every adult uses the same words, a student gets the same response in the hallway that they get in the classroom.

Jillian Esquivel, our principal at Bessie Allen, put it this way: "GRiT is the first curriculum tool I've seen in my 21 year career that truly equips today's students with the skills they need to be successful. It's real and relevant, pushing students to recognize, analyze, and respond to the many situations, emotions, and challenges they face every day. Even in the early stages of implementation, we've seen promising growth in how our students understand themselves, navigate challenges, and interact with others."

This fall Friendship Learning Center joined, piloting an elementary version. Across our secondary buildings we've now got roughly 800 students and 70 educators inside this work.

What Moved

We've seen 15% growth in student mindset measures and an 11.1% improvement in what the curriculum calls the Peace Index, a regular student self-report on how settled they feel in their own week. Attendance improved by 2.9%. Behavior referrals among participating students dropped by nearly 60%.

I want to be careful about what those numbers prove. This is one district, we changed more than one thing over these years like everybody does, and at the high school this is an elective, which means those students aren't a random sample of our building. I'm not claiming a controlled experiment.

That being said, the story and the spreadsheet agree, and in my experience that's when you should pay attention. Teachers were describing students pausing before they reacted. I was seeing fewer of the same names on the same referral list. Then the data moved the same direction.

Three Lessons for Leaders

Support is not the same as capacity. A support system responds to a student in crisis. A capacity-building system reduces how often the crisis happens in the first place. Most of us have built a lot more of the first than the second. Go look honestly at your own Tier 2 menu and ask how much of it teaches a student a skill they didn't have, and how much is a well-intentioned adult checking in more often.

Give it a schedule or it won't survive. The initiatives that quietly died here were the ones with no protected time. The one that lived got a course number and a defined block. If this only happens when there's time left over, there won't be time left over.

The solution may already be in your building. We spent a long time looking outward for something to purchase while a teacher on our own staff was solving a narrower version of the same problem three doors down. He wasn't solving it for the district. He was solving it for his own students, which is exactly why it worked. Somebody in your building is solving a small version of your biggest problem right now. The skill is noticing, then giving it room to find out whether it scales.

Looking Ahead

We're not finished, and we're watching whether the gains hold two and three years out.

Maya took the course. What stays with me isn't her attendance, which is in the numbers above. It's something she said afterward. "GRiT literally changed my life."

I've worked in schools and in human services long enough to be careful with a sentence like that. Students say big things. But Maya sat in my office for two years, and in all that time we never once gave her anything to do differently. We gave her support, and support wasn't nothing. It just wasn't the thing.

We spent years helping students get through hard days. We never taught them how to have one.

Carrie Nitz is Dean of Students and Mental Health Navigator for the School District of North Fond du Lac and Director of Human Insight at RewiredEdu. The GRiT curriculum described here originated in a North Fond du Lac classroom and is owned by RewiredEdu, not the district.