While most students can successfully handle high school academics, there are still those who struggle. Some struggle with motivation, and others struggle with content. One thing Yutan is doing to help those students is making changes to its MTSS process.
“MTSS stands for multi-tiered systems of support,” MTSS co-head Alyssa Hansen said. “It means for students that they’re going to get the help they need to be successful.”
Teachers explained that the purpose of MTSS is to identify students’ weaknesses and provide extra support so students don’t fall behind.
“So it’s essentially a support system to help students who are struggling. You kind of talk about interventions or what kind of tiered support students need outside of just your regular classroom instruction,” MTSS co-head Kassie Trevarrow said.
This year, one of the main focuses for the MTSS team has been the missing assignment list. The missing assignment list is a report that comes out every Monday and shows which students are missing assignments and from which class. Then, Chieftain Time teachers can use this to help remind their students about their assignments.
“We started looking at missing assignments, and I kind of found the correlation that if you are missing 10 or more assignments, you are either failing, or you’re close to failing,” Trevarrow said.
In addition to tracking the assignments, the MTSS team is in charge of the academic study hall, which is where students who are failing report to the library for Chieftain Time. But in the middle of the year, they noticed a problem with the system.
“We found that 30 minutes really wasn’t a lot of time for kids,” principal Stefanie Novotny said.
So this semester, after Christmas break, the MTSS team decided that the academic study hall would run until 3:45, meaning students on the failing list would stay an additional 15 minutes after school, giving them more time to do their homework and catch up.
“We extend the time—that gives them more time, and it’s also kind of a punishment, of well, now you have to stay after school a little bit, trying to motivate,” Trevarrow said. “So our thought process was this gives the kids more time with teachers. It gives them a more structured space to work. But then also…it’s not fun, and it’s not convenient.”
As the year continues, the MTSS team plans to keep meeting and reviewing data to adjust the program. But so far, teachers have agreed that the new things added this year have helped the number of failing students and missing assignments.
“I think we’ve seen success. The number of kids on the failing list has gone down. The number of kids with more than 10 missing assignments has gone down. The number of overall missing assignments has gone down, which has more motivation to get out of an academic study hall,” Hansen said.
Novotny agrees that the changes the MTSS team has made are helping.
“Improvement that I see is that students are more diligent about getting their work done and understanding that that work is to show their knowledge and what they’ve learned, and if we don’t have that work, then we don’t know where they are,” Novotny said.
