Driving MTSS Momentum in Attendance and Data Culture

We understand that implementing your school's MTSS framework is a journey, not a sprint. It takes time, dedication, and a clear vision. That's why Branching Minds recently embarked on a search to find and celebrate  schools that are making significant strides and building meaningful MTSS
momentum within the first 90 days of the school year.

We're thrilled to spotlight one of these inspiring schools and 2025-2026 MTSS Momentum Award Winner for the category of MTSS & PBIS: Woodberry Hills Elementary from Danville Public Schools in Danville, Virginia.

Robyn Brandon, a reading specialist at Woodberry Hills who submitted the nomination, shared that through the school’s focus on improving attendance and strengthening intervention participation, they “are seeing stronger attendance habits, increased buy-in from students, and more consistent data-driven intervention work from staff, which has strengthened our schoolwide MTSS culture.”

To learn more about the incredible MTSS and PBIS work happening at Woodberry Hills, we had the wonderful opportunity to sit down with Robyn and her dedicated team of instructional coaches, Ashley Harper and Rubetta Carr.

How did you approach setting these goals and what inspired the focus this year?

Robyn: This year, we set an overall school wide goal to be able to increase our attendance and reduce our chronic absenteeism by strengthening like our positive reinforcements that we had for students, making sure we communicated with our families, making sure that we made meaningful engagement attempts through opportunities with intervention, with small group learning, and as well as remediation. 

Tell us a little bit more about what these initiatives entail?

Robyn: When I first came to Woodberry, we talked about how we could best support our students in growing. One of the things that they suggested was that we needed to highlight their strengths. So we decided to have a student of the month! Let's put the criteria out there for students who want to achieve that. Each classroom has a classroom tracker on top of a student tracker where the students are monitoring their progress with their goals. Having that tangible evidence of how they're growing has been impactful.

Can you share how this has been received by students and staff so far this year?

Rubetta: The kids are excited, but the teachers are also excited about it.  If you go down our hallway, you can see that we have an attendance board and every teacher's name is on the attendance board and a star is denoted for that class that wins for the attendance. I've heard some conversations between even the teachers “Well, this month, third grade didn't quite get it, but we're really going to work hard, to encourage their students to attend school more regularly.”

What are some of the strategies you've used to encourage consistent attendance and buy-in from students and staff?

Ashley: When we started the school year, we sat down and decided what events or ways we could engage our students with the PBIS engagement piece. We've had popcorn incentive parties, a snow globe party, and even an ice cream sundae reward. For the first two parties, fifth grade was in the lead. And by that third party, second grade knocked them out. They were so excited. It was an uproar. We were glad to just see students be motivated just behind showing up.

Rubetta: We have our academic celebrations every quarter. I have noticed that when we are in the gym and assembly, the children are so excited. If you mentioned who the attendance winners were, if you mentioned the spotlight student winner, their names, they're celebrating each other. We also have shadow boxes with pictures of the students. They all want to see their picture up there.

For improving engagement for staff in the data driven culture, Robyn led the charge in implementing Branching Minds to keep track of data and utilize insights across the school.

Ashley: Our Tuesday PLC meetings are specifically focused on data. We try to incorporate all subjects and give all teachers time to reflect. We look at where the kids scored and then what they missed and why. Our teachers really have to dive into their data to find out what we need to do to close these gaps, or what we need to do differently in our classroom to address an issue. It's very eye-opening.

How do you feel like the work that you've done has impacted morale or collective teacher efficacy?

Ashley: In the past years, morale was low, because we focused more on “what we can do better” instead of focusing on the positive as well. There needs to be a balance. We need to focus on what we can do better, but we also need to focus on what we are doing right. Let's celebrate the successes we have had. 

What progress have you seen from the momentum you are building?

Robyn: We found a report in Branching Minds, which has our social emotional learning support and our behavior supports. We could look at a specific student and determine what time of day the student is most likely to be out of class. We were able to make instructional adjustments using the Branching Minds data with the teacher's data, to better support the student. Now we're not losing as much instructional time as we were with some of our frequent flyers. We have some students that we see daily in ISS who we have not seen since implementing some of these systems, which we're excited about.

We are excited to cheer Woodberry Hills on in their MTSS Momentum and can’t wait to see the progress they make with their team!

Listen to the full conversation here.