New Guide for District Leaders: Connecting MTSS, RTI, and Special Education
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    Identify Threats Early. Respond With Confidence.


    Streamline behavioral threat assessment, suicide risk screening, and student support workflows with connected software built for K-12 leaders, safety teams, and MTSS staff.

    Canopy threat assessment software

    Disconnected Tools Put Student Safety at Risk

    Many districts manage threat assessment documentation across spreadsheets, paper forms, emails, and disconnected systems. This creates information gaps, inconsistent follow-through, and limited visibility into student safety concerns across schools.

    • Limited districtwide visibility
    • Inconsistent documentation practices
    • Follow-up tasks slipping through the cracks
    • Time-intensive reporting and audit preparation
    • Fragmented communication across teams
    Threat Assewsment Guide

    Integrating Threat Assessment and Suicide Risk Screening
    into MTSS

    Get practical, evidence-based strategies for building safer, more responsive student support systems using proven tools like CSTAG and C-SSRS.

    student safety platform Canopy

    Turn Threat Assessment Into Coordinated Student Support

    The only platform that connects threat assessment, student safety, and MTSS workflows in one place.

    • Holistic Student View: See the full picture behind a concern — attendance patterns, behavior incident history, academic performance, interventions, support meetings, and family communication — all in one place.

    • Scaffolded Behavior Support Planning: Move from threat evaluation to ongoing support with targeted intervention plans directly connected to what the threat assessment revealed about a student's needs.

    • Progress Monitoring & Follow-Through: Assign intervention delivery, track student growth, and maintain a clear record of who did what and when. 

    Canopy Case Management helps districts move from fragmented documentation and disconnected workflows to a coordinated system for identifying risk, planning interventions, and monitoring follow-through.

    What Connected Student Support Looks Like in Practice

    See how Phoenix Elementary School District #1 and Evanston-Skokie School District 65 moved from fragmented safety processes to connected systems that support threat assessment, intervention, and student success.

    Canopy-Phoenix
    Evanston-Skokie School District 65

    A School Safety Platform Built for Student Support Teams

    Canopy makes behavioral threat assessment and suicide risk screening part of a connected system that considers the whole student story. 

    Which approach is your district using?

    The Disconnect
    The Status Quo Approach
    From Risk to Response

    Decisions Are Being Made Without the Full Story

    Critical moments are shaped by fragmented tools, missing context, and isolated teams.

    • A student makes a threat, but no one can quickly see their attendance history, behavioral patterns, or what supports (if any) are already in place
    • Evaluations are completed, but follow-up responsibilities are unclear, undocumented, or simply forgotten
    • Protocols like CSTAG or C-SSRS exist on paper, but there's no system to guide teams through them consistently
    • Safety teams and support staff work in parallel, with no shared view of what's happening or what's next
    • Paper trails and spreadsheets make accountability almost impossible
    school safety platform

    Manual Workarounds That Can’t Keep Up

    Many schools rely on paper or tools that don’t meet the urgent, complex needs of safety teams.

    • Cases are managed in spreadsheets, shared drives, or paper files that are hard to find, update, or audit
    • Protocols are implemented inconsistently across schools, with no guided workflows or district-level oversight
    • No connection to student support systems means safety and MTSS remain two separate worlds
    • Tools lack visibility and coordination across teams
    • Teams spend valuable time tracking down information instead of responding to student needs
    disorganization in school

    Risk-Informed MTSS, Support-Informed Safety Response

    Canopy bridges safety and student context to ensure targeted, timely, and coordinated action.

    • Guided CSTAG and C-SSRS workflows ensure consistent, defensible evaluations — every time, across every school
    • Student safety data connects directly to academic, behavioral, attendance, and intervention data, so teams respond to the whole student, not just the incident
    • Built-in task tracking keeps follow-up steps assigned and highly visible across the full team
    • Granular access controls support collaboration without compromising the sensitivity of case information
    • District leaders gain real-time visibility across schools and cases
    Connected Safety Insights

    How Does Your Team Move From Risk to Response?

    From assessment to follow-through, Canopy ensures every step is connected.

    Evaluate Safety Risks

    Evaluate Safety Risks

    Use built-in suicide risk screening and behavioral threat assessment protocols to understand the level of risk.

    Timely Targeted student Support

    Provide Timely, Targeted Support

    Move directly from threat and risk assessment findings to action, building intervention plans that reflect what the evaluation revealed about a student's needs.

    Monitor and Collaborate

    Monitor and Collaborate

    Track intervention delivery, monitor student progress, and ensure every follow-up action has a clear owner and timeline.

    See Canopy Case Management + the Branching Minds MTSS Platform in Action

    Bring student safety, threat assessment, and support planning together in one connected system.
    Canopy from Branching Minds

    Get Visibility and Real-Time Safety Insights

    Identify students who may be at risk of harming themselves or others, and track how those concerns are being documented, escalated, and resolved — across every school in your district.

    🎥 Watch Canopy in action.

    Identify Risk. Plan Support. Monitor Progress.

    Give safety teams the ability to assess behavioral threats and suicide risk using built-in, research-backed screening tools and protocols.

    Connect safety insights to targeted intervention plans through an integrated MTSS software platform that helps you provide personalized, data-driven support.

    Canopy Branching Minds
    Building Systems to Support Student and School Safety

    From Inconsistent to Aligned Response

    In Phoenix Elementary School District #1, inconsistent threat and suicide risk assessments were creating gaps across schools.

    By implementing Canopy and standardizing protocols like CSTAG, they created a consistent, systemwide approach to evaluating and responding to student risk.

    Watch the full webinar here. 

    School Threat Assessment Built on Evidence-Based Protocols

    Built for early detection and response, Canopy Case Management helps schools:

    • Evaluate students at risk of harming themselves with the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) and the Suicide Assessment Five-Step Evaluation and Triage (SAFE-T) protocol
    • Evaluate students at risk of harming others with the Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG) model for behavioral threat assessment
    • Use data from the Branching Minds MTSS platform to inform threat and risk assessment follow up
    Canopy Evaluation of Risk

    Comprehensive, Collaborative, and Confidential Case Management

    One place for everything your safety team needs:

    • Protect sensitive information with role-based permissions that limit access to those who need it, without slowing down collaboration
    • Maintain a complete, auditable record of every case — decisions made, actions taken, and follow-up completed
    • Give district leaders visibility across all schools and cases from a single, secure dashboard
    Canopy Risk

    Effective, Consistent Evaluation

    Canopy guides your team through every step, so no critical decision is left to memory or chance:

    • Guided evaluation workflows walk safety team members through each protocol step-by-step, reducing variability across schools and staff
    • Built-in task management turns evaluation outcomes into assigned, trackable next steps with clear ownership and due dates
    • Standardized risk classification ensures teams across buildings are evaluating and documenting threats the same way
    Consistent Responses with Canopy

    Streamlined Workflows for Safety Teams

    Keep safety teams aligned:

    • Collaborate in a confidential, purpose-built platform designed specifically for safety team workflows
    • Connect threat and risk assessment directly to your MTSS framework — so safety isn't a separate initiative from MTSS, it's an extension of it.
    • Reduce time spent on administrative overhead so your team can focus on what matters: the student in front of them
    Canopy Safety Workflows

    Success Story

    How “Know Every Student” Became a Reality at Springs Charter Schools

    Read more

    "Once we could see the whole child in one place, we could finally identify what students really needed."

    Products / Features Used

    Springs Charter Schools using MTSS to centralize student data and reduce suspensions with Branching Minds

    Success Story

    How Beaumont ISD Improved Alternative School Collaboration with Branching Minds

    Read more

    "Bringing all departments together through Branching Minds showed how each role fits into supporting students and why everyone’s expertise matters."

    Products / Features Used

    How Beaumont ISD Improved Alternative School Collaboration with Branching Minds

    Success Story

    How CCSD 59 Flipped Its Triangle and Transformed Student Support

    Read more

    "The systemic change had a huge impact on morale, teacher confidence, confidence in what they’re doing, our collaborative practices as a team, and how we support students."

    Products / Features Used

    Community Consolidated School District 59 and Branching Minds

    Success Story

    How Duneland Increased Consistency and Communication for Student Interventions

    Read more

    "Every decision we make is made because of the data that Branching Minds helps us collect and analyze."

    Products / Features Used

    Duneland educators collaborating on student intervention plans using shared data

    Uncompromised Data Privacy

    Our security practices are audited annually as part of our SOC 2 Type II compliance, ensuring that we continuously meet industry standards for data privacy and security. Learn more.

    DA Ed Tech Top 2025 Products
    SOC 2 Type 2
    Project unicorn certification
    Privacy Rating by Common Sense - branching minds
    BRM 2 Codie Awards 2024
    DA Ed Tech Top 2025 Products
    SOC 2 Type 2
    Project unicorn certification
    Privacy Rating by Common Sense - branching minds
    BRM 2 Codie Awards 2024
    DA Ed Tech Top 2025 Products
    SOC 2 Type 2
    Project unicorn certification
    Privacy Rating by Common Sense - branching minds
    BRM 2 Codie Awards 2024

    Behavioral Threat Assessment & Suicide Risk Screening Platform FAQs

    A threat assessment platform helps K-12 schools identify, document, manage, and respond to student safety concerns in a consistent and coordinated way. Modern threat assessment software supports collaboration across teams, tracks interventions and follow-up actions, and improves visibility into student safety risks districtwide.

    Canopy is Branching Minds safety suite for managing suicide risk assessments (self-harm) and threat assessments (harm to others). It helps safety teams document, track, and manage cases with clarity, while integrating that data into your MTSS ecosystem so support doesn’t stop at the safety team’s door.

    Canopy supports some of the most widely recognized and evidence-based protocols in K–12 safety:

    • Behavioral Threat Assessment: Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (CSTAG).
    • Self-Harm: Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS).

    Each is structured as a guided, step-by-step flow in the platform, ensuring teams follow the protocol in a user-friendly interface.

    No. Canopy doesn’t make decisions for your team. The protocols built into Canopy—like CSTAG, C-SSRS, and NTAC—are designed to guide your process, not override it.

    You’ll get structured workflows and built-in prompts aligned to each protocol, but your team leads the judgment, classification, and next steps. 

    Not at all. Canopy provides structure without restriction. It supports your district’s chosen protocols but doesn’t dictate safety decisions, next steps, or outcomes. Your team stays in control while Canopy guides documentation, visibility, and compliance.

    Most safety tools focus on documentation. Canopy focuses on documentation AND follow-through. Canopy is designed for practicality, usability, and real-world team dynamics with features like auto-saving, pause-and-resume flows, a built-in dashboard, change logs, and individual profiles detailing the historic safety information of a student.

    Canopy creates a layer of protection, like the canopy of a tree, over your MTSS system by ensuring that safety data isn’t siloed or overlooked.

    By bringing suicide risk, threat assessments, and behavioral evaluations into the same platform as academic, SEL, and intervention data, Canopy helps teams move response from reactive to proactive, risk-aware MTSS. It doesn’t just track student crises, it helps you see them in the context of long-term support.

    • C-SSRS: Protocol training is helpful but not required and can be accessed for free on The Columbia Lighthouse Project website. 
    • CSTAG: Formal certification and methodology training is required. We partner with protocol creators and can connect your district with the right training partner when needed.

    Absolutely. Canopy is fully FERPA-compliant, with strict role-based permissions and encryption in transit and at rest. Only authorized users can access safety cases, and every action is logged for auditing. Your most sensitive student data stays protected, organized, and accessible only to the right people.

    Canopy is a separate add-on, not part of the core Branching Minds platform.

    It’s designed to complement your existing MTSS workflows by supporting student safety protocols, but it’s purchased and implemented as its own solution. If your district is already using Branching Minds, Canopy integrates seamlessly. If not, it can still be used independently for suicide risk, threat assessment, and case management.

    See How Branching Minds Supports Safer Schools

    Bring threat assessment, student safety, intervention, and MTSS workflows together in one connected platform designed for K-12 schools.

    "Canopy is doing for us in the realm of school safety what Branching Minds did for us years ago, which is giving us insight into what is happening across our district, where things are similar, where they’re different, where we have areas of higher need. It’s allowing us to re-evaluate from a lens of safety and student behavior that we’ve never done before. And because we are gathering information on threat assessments and suicide risk assessments in one location, and we have data on what actions schools are taking as a result of those assessments. "

    Dr. Katie Ahsell

    Assistant Superintendent, Community Consolidated School District 59, IL

    "Before Canopy, things were a hot mess. Now, we're all trained in C-STAG protocol, and our teams love having the decision tree pop up in Canopy to guide them through evaluations. "

    Dawn Baumgartner

    Coordinator of Social Services & Wellness, Phoenix Elementary School District #1, AZ

    "Canopy is well built in terms of steps - walking administrators through the process of doing suicide and behavioral threat assessments, so we are gathering all of that data into a single, secure place, where it can be referenced by those that need it in the future."

    Stephen Prange

    Director of Data, Assessment, and Mathematics, Teton County School District , WY

    "Canopy is very intuitive, even without the MTSS Hub courses!"

    Sara Council

    Director of Student Services, Roanoke Rapids Graded School District, NC

    "With Canopy, overseeing suicide risk screening and behavioral threat assessment is much easier, and much clearer. … And then I can see all of that information across the whole district."

    Dr. Jessica M. Plaza

    Director of Student Supports and Services, Evanston Skokie, IL

    Resources to Support Your Success

    Threat Assessment Guide MTSS

    Guide

    Incorporating Threat Assessment and Suicide Risk, Response into MTSS

    Learn how to integrate these vital components into your school safety and well-being.

    2026 MTSS Mini Summit keynote discussing the connection between behavior support, academic success, and integrated MTSS systems

    Article

    What If Behavior Is the Key to Academic Success? A Mini Summit Recap

    Discover why behavior is core to student success and how connected MTSS systems help schools improve engagement, attendance, and academ...

    03.25.26_WEB_26_Building_Systems_to_Support_Student_and_School_Safety(tile)

    Webinar

    District Panel: Building Systems to Support Student and School Safety

    📆 March 25, 1:00 ET

    District leaders shared practical strategies for strengthening suicide risk and behavioral threat assessme...

    Choose a Best-in-Class MTSS Platform that Integrates Student Safety Insights

    Canopy Case Management unifies safety, behavior, and academic data—empowering a smarter, more responsive approach to student well-being.

    Canopy Safety