Part 1 of the MTSS series talked about the basic things that needed to be established.
- Finding a convenient time for the team to meet with no interruptions.
- Have a meeting agenda.
- Determining the team members who will help with implementation.
At the heart of this process lies the next step.
Determining Liaison Support.
The liaison takes charge, setting the stage for effective intervention and progress monitoring. The liaison does the following:
- initiates a meeting with the referring teacher.
- gathers essential information
- brainstorms tailored strategies
- implements robust data tracking mechanisms.
Ultimately the liaison ensures a smooth transition through the MTSS process.
Let’s deep dive into the process:
At this stage, our liaison will:
- Schedule a meeting with the referring teacher for more information and review data. The liaison tightens up those Tier I strategies. At this point, the teacher implements strategies and gathers data for two weeks. Liaison will be available to provide more support during this time as needed.
- After two weeks, the liaison will check in. :
- If intervention is successful, continue interventions, data collection, and check-ins.
- If student isn’t responding, the liaison will review the data and adjust the intervention.
- Depending on the data and the student’s need, the liaison may set up an MTSS team meeting.
What role does the school psych play at this step?
Your mileage may vary by district. Some districts want you to be involved the entire way. Others want you to come in at the 3rd or 4th meetings.
You may get push back saying that the school psych being a part of the MTSS team is a form of predetermination.
It’s not, in my opinion.
You are acting as a consultant to the team. You aren’t putting kids down the pipeline to special education. You’re maintaining the integrity the special education process. We’re making sure that our referrals are solid. We can’t delay evaluation if we suspect a student has a disability. Our role as school psychologists is making sure that interventions are in place. The evaluation process is time consuming and complicated. There’s no purpose of having a student sit and struggle when we can put something in place. Sometimes it’s a parallel process.
If you’re building this process from the ground up, it’s likely that you’ll need to be at every meeting. Depending on your role and responsibilities, it’s not always sustainable.
Reflecting on the previous school years, the school psych doesn’t need to be involved at this step. You are empowering your liaison to collect the necessary data. You can consult on providing evidence based interventions and making resources. You may be working with your MTSS team to create some guidelines and processes.
The school psychologist should not be the liaison. As this stage of the game, your role as the school psych is the consultant.
What to look out for:
- Lack of data collection and analysis.
Effective data collection and analysis is a massive problem.
Every district I’ve worked in wants to cobble something together using google spreadsheets.
Or, they bought some bug fancy sophisticated software that nobody knows how to use. Or something only a handful of people have access to.
You need a robust data collection and analysis system. It’s 21st century, let’s stop the data collection madness.
There’s no excuse for a lack of data. That’s a really good way of making me angry.
- Assign a liaison. One thing we did well in one of my buildings is having liaisons broken down by concern:Behavior: This was our Assistant principal.Academic: Our Academic Liaisons were our intervention teachers. (I’ll refer to them as Teacher A and Teacher B)
- Specialist (OT, PT, SLP). The Liaison for our specialist was one of the intervention teachers (Teacher A). This could be a role fulfilled by the school psych in a collaborative screening process.
- Teacher A got consent for screenings and coordinated with teachers to facilitate screenings. Having one point of contact be the “paper pusher” helped streamline things. Coordinating our specialists was difficult. Some of our team members were fully remote, others were in different buildings. We had a bit of a problem when it came to sharing screening information with parents and team members. The person conducting the screening should share the information with the families. I’ll be doing a case study on how I think this process should have worked. Ultimately and unfortunately, it fell to me. Don’t let that happen to you.
There was a lot of back and forth discussion. We came up with a better process and timeline for next year.
- Once a month or every 6 weeks, we have one meeting dedicated to specialist concerns. I don’t think they need to be at every MTSS meeting. Trying to coordinate who needs to be at what meetings is difficult. There needs to be a way of capturing dates, conversations, and a protocol around it.
- The problem we’re facing is that sometimes the teacher will go straight to the ESA about their concerns. There would be a lot of things happening behind the scenes that the other team members weren’t aware of. Things would get lost or not address, then teachers would start getting antsy. They’d send a bunch of emails, talk to the principals, and bother the wrong people.
And I can’t blame them, something completed in January shouldn’t get a meeting in March or April. When people don’t go through the proper channels. Or they try to circumvent the system, that’s how kids fall through the cracks. The MTSS system isn’t perfect, but it works.
- The benefits of having it once a month is that we don’t take up too much of the specialist’s time.
- We have a streamlined process for addressing these concerns.
- We can respond quickly if needs to move on to evaluation.
Building an efficient MTSS system takes time, patience, and the right roles in place. This by no means is a perfect system. However, empowering liaisons to collect data and support teachers frees you up for consultation. With the right processes in place your team can respond to student needs effectively.