Building a consistent discipline policy helps set clear expectations for your students and saves your staff valuable time. This guide will help you translate your school's physical discipline policy into a digital workflow using Minga’s Behaviors and Automations tabs. By the end of this article, you will be able to automatically trigger warnings, detentions, or referrals based on how many times a specific behavior occurs.

Permission Level Required: Owner | Manager | Behavior Manager

Enable consequences: You can turn on Consequences so consequences can be created and assigned in Behaviors.
Create Consequences: You can build each consequence (warning, detention, referral) that matches your discipline policy.
How to create an Automation Group in Minga: You can create an Automation group that assigns consequences when behavior thresholds are met.
How to Add steps in your Automation Group
Additional Features or Settings
Troubleshooting
FAQs

Important: You must have your behaviors set up before you can create consequences.

How to Use Automatic Consequences for Progressive Discipline

The first step in setting up a progressive automation is enabling and configuring your consequences. Then you can build an automation sequence, so Minga assigns consequences automatically when a behavior repeats.

Step-by-step guide to Enabling Consequences

Navigate to Behaviors.
Open the Minga area where your school manages behavior definitions and behavior settings.
Open the Settings tab.
Locate the Settings tab within Behaviors where feature toggles are managed.
Toggle on Enable Consequences.
○Confirm the Enable Consequences toggle is switched on so the Consequences tab becomes available.

How to Set Up Each Consequence in Minga

You can create each consequence in Minga so it matches a step in your discipline policy (for example, “Guidance” or “Tardy Warning”).

For our example, we will be using the following Minga High School Tardy Policy:

Step-by-step Guide to Creating the First Consequence

Navigate to the Consequences tab in Behaviors.
The Consequences tab is where you create and manage the consequences that can be assigned to students.
Click Create Consequence.
A creation form opens where you define the consequence name, type, icon, and notification rules.
Enter the Consequence name from your discipline policy.
Use the exact wording used in your policy (for example, Guidance).
Add an optional internal description.
The description is for internal admin reference only and is not described as student-facing in the source content.
Select the Type of Consequence.
Choose the type that matches how the consequence should be tracked and completed.
Select the Icon and Icon color.
Pick an icon and color that helps staff quickly recognize the consequence in the UI.
Configure notifications (optional).
Toggle on parent and/or admin notifications and edit the notification content as needed.
Click Create.
The consequence is saved and becomes available to assign manually and via automation.

Important: Detentions and referrals must be completed in Minga or they will show as Overdue in the Consequence History report

How to Set up the Remaining Consequences for your Automation

You can create the rest of your policy’s consequences by repeating the same creation steps and confirming each consequence is active.

Step-by-step Guide to Creating the Remaining Consequences

Repeat the consequence creation steps for each policy step.
Create each consequence your discipline policy requires (for example, lunch detention, after-school detention, in-school suspension, referral).
Set each consequence to Active.
Confirm the Active toggle is enabled for every consequence you plan to assign via automation.
Map each consequence to the correct consequence type.
"Lunch Detentions" and "After School Detentions" will be a Detention for Type of Consequence and "In School Suspension and Referral" will be a Referral.

Consequence type mapping

Policy consequence example	Type of consequence in Minga	Why this type matters
Lunch detention	Detention	Detentions require completion in Minga or they can appear as Overdue in reporting.
After-school detention	Detention	Detentions require completion in Minga or they can appear as Overdue in reporting.
In-school suspension	Referral	Referrals require completion in Minga or they can appear as Overdue in reporting.
Referral	Referral	Referrals require completion in Minga or they can appear as Overdue in reporting.

Pro Tip: You can customize parent and admin notifications per Consequence so each step has the right message and audience.

How to Create an Automation Group in Minga

You can create an Automation group so Minga assigns the right consequence when a student reaches a defined count of a behavior (for example, number of tardies).

Step-by-step Guide to Creating an Automation Group

Click Create Automation in the Automations tab.
Select the behavior that triggers the automation and save the automation group.
Click Add Automation to add each progressive discipline step with thresholds and consequences.
Navigate to the Automations tab in Behaviors.
The Automations tab is where automation groups and automation steps are created.
Click Create Automation
A setup form opens for naming the automation group and selecting the triggering behavior.
Enter an Automation Group name.
Name the automation group after the policy (for example, Tardy Policy).
Add an optional internal description.
The description is intended for internal admin reference only.
Select the behavior in Behavior triggering automation.
Choose the behavior that counts toward the threshold (for example, the behavior for tardies).
Configure the reset option (optional)
Toggle on Reset counter automatically if you want the behavior count to reset on a schedule.
Click Create
The automation group is created and is ready for you to add automation steps.

Tip: If you use Reset counter automatically, a common setup is a custom time period aligned with the semester and an early-morning reset time (example given: 12:01am) so counters reset outside operating hours.

How to Add steps in your Automation Group

You can add steps to the automation group so each behavior occurrence assigns the next consequence in your policy sequence.

Step-by-step Guide to Adding Automation Steps and Thresholds

Click Add Automation inside your automation group.
The Add Automation action opens a form to define one step in the sequence.
Name the automation step.
Use the consequence name as the step name (example: Tardy Warning).
Set the Behavior Threshold.
Enter how many times the behavior must occur before this step assigns its consequence (example: 1 for the first tardy).
Select the consequence in Consequence to assign.
Choose the matching consequence you created earlier so it is assigned automatically.
Turn on the student note option (optional).
Set the note toggle to Active if you want to send a note to the student.
Set the completion time frame (optional).
Choose the number of days the student has to complete the consequence if it is time-bound.
Configure repeat rules (optional).
Toggle on Repeat automation if the same step repeats at multiple points in the sequence.
Click Add.
The automation step is saved into the automation group sequence.
Repeat step creation for each consequence in your policy.
Add one automation step per policy consequence until the full progressive discipline sequence is represented.

Important: The example policy repeats a warning across multiple steps, so Repeat automation can be set to repeat every 1 behavior and end after 2 occurrences when the policy requires the same warning at steps 1 and 2.

Additional Features or Settings

Behavior Counter Reset Scheduling

You can reset behavior counters automatically so a progressive discipline sequence restarts on a consistent schedule.

Reset counter automatically: You can toggle this on to reset behavior counts without manual intervention.
Custom reset timing: You can choose a custom schedule aligned to your semester and set a reset time such as 12:01am to avoid disrupting daytime operations.

Notifications Per Consequence

You can tailor communication by consequence so stakeholders get the right message at the right time.

Parent notifications: You can enable and edit parent notifications per consequence.
Admin notifications: You can enable and edit admin notifications per consequence.

Troubleshooting

Issue: A detention or referral shows as Overdue in the Consequence History report.
Solution: You can prevent overdue status by completing detentions and referrals inside Minga.

Issue: The automation is not assigning a consequence when the behavior occurs.
Solution: Double-check that the automation group has the correct Behavior triggering automation. Each step has the intended Behavior Threshold so ensure that the correct number of behaviors have been assigned to trigger a consequence being issued.

Issue: A consequence does not appear as an option when building an automation step.
Solution: Check that the consequence has been enabled and is available for automations. Confirm this by going to Behaviors → Consequences and ensure they are set to Active.

FAQs

How do I enable consequences in Minga Behaviors?

You can enable consequences in Minga Behaviors by opening Behaviors, selecting the Settings tab, and toggling on Enable Consequences.

How do I choose the right consequence type for my discipline policy?

You can choose the right consequence type by mapping policy items like lunch detention and after-school detention to Detention, and mapping in-school suspension and referral items to Referral so completion and overdue tracking work correctly.

How do I set behavior thresholds for automatic consequences?

You can set behavior thresholds for automatic consequences by creating an Automation group and adding steps where each step’s Behavior Threshold matches the number of times the behavior must occur before assigning the selected consequence.

How do I reset a student back to an earlier step in the automation framework?

You can reset a student back to an earlier step in the automation framework by using the Updating automation counters flow.

How to Update Student Counters to the Correct Step in your Progressive Discipline Automations

Escalate Overdue Consequences or Assign Additional Consequences Automatically

View and Edit Consequence Reports in Minga

Setting Up Behavior Consequences & Automations in your Minga