At the January 8th Community Unit School District 95 (CUSD 95) Board of Education meeting, the District Administration revealed their plans to implement a new Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) system.

The MTSS system, in simple terms, serves to use data to flag students selected for additional individualized support. The system, in more comprehensive terms, is defined on this webpage here. Previously, the district had been operating through Google, but a team had been selected for the 24-25 school year to identify and approve a new system, which they had narrowed down to three. Synergy’s MTSS and Early Warning System (EWS) was ultimately selected for trial.

On Synergy’s website, the service advertises that it aims to “record adverse student behaviors and respond in a way that is commensurate with each infraction, document incidents and create referrals, track day-to-day observations of recurring negative behaviors, [and] place students into an MTSS plan based on documented history.”

The district department responsible for supporting both student’s physical and mental health and accommodations is the Student Services Department, headed in part by Dr. Lauren McArdle, Assistant Superintendent for Student Services and Administrative Services and Operations. In their own words, “the Student Services Department strives to provide a full continuum of support services, supplementary aids, or specialized programming ALL learners district-wide.”

To support district student services, Synergy aims to “help district administrators understand in real time [what is] working and [what is] not, both districtwide and at individual schools down to the grade and teacher level: which students are most at risk, which interventions are working, what additional interventions are needed, [if there] are there gaps in the curriculum, [and if] additional specialists or professional development [are] needed.”

Additionally, to further develop the District’s Student Services, the District previously partnered with the Jed Foundation, a nonprofit that protects emotional health and works on suicide prevention for the nation’s teens and young adults.

“I know that the board is well aware that we have partnered with the JED [nonprofit] organization,” Dr. Kelley Gallt, District Superintendent, said, “and [we are] really looking to that group to help us with in the area of suicide awareness and prevention and youth, so they did conduct what [I will] just call for easy sake as an audit, essentially, of our system.”

CUSD 95 Student Services already has a multitude of tools and systems at their disposal to ensure the continued well-being of students. Additional developments, such as the ones introduced at this Board of Education Meeting, bring the collective community closer to the previously defined Empower95 strategic plan.

“If the board would recall, Synergy is a tool that we really did struggle with originally,” Gallt said, “and now, because of the incredible work of our technology department and our data team, we now really have a very strong partnership, which Dr. McArdle and her committee was able to access and work from that relationship, [as well as] build on the next step in utilizing [it].”

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This board of education meeting and others have been recorded, logged, and transcribed on Vimeo by Mr. Marcel Graham.