From 'MTSS Light' to System-Wide Success: How Goshen County Schools Transformed Support

Goshen County Schools, a rural district in Wyoming serving 1,600 students across ten unique schools, embarked on a mission to address literacy in their district. Soon they began to see that what they needed was bigger than just literacy. Dr. Kelsey Walker and Taren Hendricks were literacy coaches at the time, before transitioning to the MTSS work within their district.

“As we dove into this world of literacy at a deep level, we kept hearing about MTSS. And if we're not doing MTSS, we're not doing literacy correctly in our district. What we found is that MTSS was really integral in order to build sustainable, efficacious literacy ecosystems within our school district,” shared Dr. Walker. 

DISTRICT MTSS CHALLENGE:

Low Adoption and Lack of Consistency

To improve literacy, the district had invested in a data warehouse that proved very clunky. This system was frustrating for teachers and administrators, leading to low adoption rates.  The implementation ultimately fell flat because the tool was not user-friendly and lacked a solid rollout plan. Each school was developing its own system, resulting in a lack of clarity about roles and inconsistent definitions of support tiers.

MTSS was being practiced as "MTSS light." 

The district recognized two distinct groups of educators:

• One group was trying to implement MTSS best practices but needed a central place to house their work.
• The other group was unsure of what best practices entailed and needed foundational learning. As MTSS and Instructional Coach Taren Hendricks explained, "You can put any data warehouse in front of a teacher, but if they don't have that foundational learning, it doesn't matter."
  

DISTRICT MTSS RESULT:

Empowered Leadership and Stronger Collaboration

When they launched the Branching Minds platform to support MTSS, Goshen County Schools began to see tangible shifts in their practice, turning their challenges into opportunities for growth.

• Features like the leadership dashboard and staff login reports made MTSS implementation more transparent and available to principals. This enabled district coaches to support administrators and create protocols for district-wide consistency. 
• Teachers embraced the visual nature of the platform, especially the progress monitoring graphs that show ROI and trend lines. 
• Digital check-in/check-out made the process more discreet and efficient for secondary students and teachers, leading to better fidelity and data collection.

Turning Everyday Practice Into Lasting Improvement

Branching Minds provided more than just a data warehouse for Goshen County Schools; it became a catalyst for improvement. Hendricks noted its streamlined, user-friendly design was an immediate selling point. Most of all, the platform is designed to support best practices. When teachers found they couldn't do certain things in the platform, it sparked conversations about why. Dr. Walker shared a powerful insight: "Through adoption of Branching Minds, we have become better at MTSS."

🎧 Listen to Taren Hendricks and Dr. Kelsey Walker share their experiences and insights on implementing MTSS and literacy initiatives in Goshen County Schools.