How Middletown Public Schools Moved From Skepticism to MTSS Success

Nothing stops a school initiative like a lack of teacher buy-in. After decades of churning through partnerships and initiatives, Middletown teachers were skeptical of something new. But with help from Branching Minds, Middletown schools found a way to establish a feasible Multi-Tiered System of Supports.

Ron Dumais, Technology Educator in Middletown Schools, shared, “I've been in this since No Child Left Behind got initiated, and we went through company after company trying to find something that would support us and be easy to implement. Every time we tried to come up with something better, for whatever reason, it didn't work out, and we have found our partner in Branching Minds.”

THE CHALLENGES:

Time-Consuming and Inconsistent Intervention Plans

Middletown staff had reservations about MTSS due to the time the system required along with all the other demands on teachers. Gathering and putting all the data together from different systems was time-consuming and antiquated.

“When a teacher administered an assessment three times a year, to take that data and then to do something productive with it was quite a challenge.”

Creating consistent intervention plans for implementation was inefficient and time-consuming, not to mention tracking and monitoring all those plans!

The other challenging area of MTSS was collaboration between staff about student needs. Without a common system for visibility into data and progress, staff struggled to work together to support students.

"One of the things that we quickly identified is to really make MTSS work as it should, you really need to have time for teachers to talk about students and come up with collaborative, best practice and intervention solutions for kids.”

THE RESULTS:

Best Practice Aligned Plans With Teacher Investment

Since partnering with Branching Minds, Middletown has pursued its MTSS work more strategically and unifiedly.

A Unified Approach
Middletown started by creating an MTSS handbook, a chance to reintroduce the staff to the core of MTSS and clearly lay out their processes. “It gave us that reflection of where we are, where do we need to be, and how do we get there, because that provided us a vision of what we are really lacking in that common planning time, meeting time to discuss kids.”

Invested Teachers
Now, teachers are more bought into the MTSS process.“When teachers overall get to see how easy they can access data on a kid, even if they're a science teacher, they're thrilled at how much simpler the process is, how much time they've saved. It certainly helps them to know their reading abilities and all of that, their social-emotional data, et cetera."

Improved Intervention Plans
Even better, the interventionists are excited about how the intervention plans have improved! “The plans we are creating are better regarding best practices. They're much more guided, they make more sense, they're smarter, goal-driven, they're more doable.”