When students at Lindbergh Elementary enter their building Tuesday for the first day of school, they’ll pass by new flowering plants and prairie grasses that, in a way, they grew with their own generosity.

It all started with “behavior bucks,” small green slips of paper that serve as currency at the North Side school.

Invented last year by Lindbergh staff, the bucks were designed to curb discipline problems. And the program worked. For a gesture of kindness, children earned a buck on the spot. Perpetual rule-breakers won a buck for obeying the rules. Some made a buck simply by paying attention in a class they normally disrupted.

“Behavior was really an issue here” before the bucks program, said school psychologist Kristen Thompson. “We were really struggling. Not all of our kids are motivated to be here. This gave them something tangible and a place to start.”

Teachers kept track of the bucks and, once a week, students used them to buy goodies from the school store — mostly items donated by their teachers, ranging from notebooks and folders to gently used backpacks, winter coats and shoes. Chapstick and mechanical pencils proved wildly popular.

Then a staff member offered to match any donated behavior bucks with her own cash gift to Heifer International, an international charity.

Students were so generous that the giving grew. A fund for behavior bucks was set up for the Dane County Humane Society and for American Family Children’s Hospital. With staff matches, the school — with 230 students, three-fourths of whom qualify for free or reduced lunch — raised more than $700 in real cash for the nonprofits.

Ganshert Nursery and Landscapes heard about the effort through Thompson and her husband Michael, a Ganshert employee. This week, the company donated a landscape design, labor and plants worth more than $10,000 to frame the school’s entrance, often mistaken by visitors for a side door.

With the plantings, “It’ll be more welcoming for people,” said PTA president Rebecca Kemble, whose daughter Hannah Nyoike is a 5th-grader at the school.

This fall, Hannah and other Lindbergh students can again donate their behavior bucks to charity, or pool them to buy a bench for their new garden.

“For kids who don’t have a lot, to have the focus on charity both ways has been a really neat thing,” Thompson said. “For our kids, this is what they have to give, and they give it.”