MTSS
You may or may not have heard the acronym MTSS or Tiered Interventions before. If you haven’t, I am here to fill you in a little more about what it means for your child(ren) and our district.
MTSS stands for Multi-Tier Systems of Support which basically means supporting all students through prevention, early intervention, and support to ensure students are learning from instruction. This can look different at each district and even each building within a district.
At LES specifically, we dedicate 30 minutes a day for Math MTSS and 30 minutes a day for ELA MTSS. Now, this is still only our second year in, so it remains a work in progress. With LES being a Title school, we previously had some additional support in place for students, but with MTSS, we are able to work with ALL of our students. For the time being, we focus on MTSS by grade level. For example, all Kindergarten students travel to their group and work on skills that they need individually. Group sizes can range from 2 to 18 students working with classroom teachers, title staff, and special education staff. This is the same for each grade.
You may be wondering how we determine what skills students are focusing on or how we create those groups. We recently adopted Fastbridge, a universal screening, diagnostic reporting, and progress monitoring tool to help us gather data and information. This has been such a great resource for our district by giving us the ability to really dig down to understand our students learning better. This tool will help us determine if those interventions are working or not and make sure all students are showing growth throughout the year.
With Fastbridge, there are various assessments for Math, Reading, and Social-Emotional. We do benchmarks three times a year, Fall (September), Winter (December- actually starting next week), and Spring (May). These assessments are done for all students in Grades: PreK-8. If we have any new students arrive in High School, they also get a benchmark assessment.
While we are not experts and this continues to be a learning experience for us all, we can say that we already are seeing growth. Meeting all of our students’ needs is important and this is a way we can work towards that.