South Bend schools outline MTSS progress, say more coaches and time are needed

Miss Stewart Bridges, the district curriculum-and-instruction leader who has guided South Bend schools' MTSS rollout, told the school board the district has built a multi‑tiered system designed to identify and support students early but that implementation is uneven across buildings.

Bridges said the framework is "an educational framework" that uses "data‑based problem solving" to match interventions to students' needs and monitor progress. She described three tiers of support — universal (tier 1), targeted (tier 2) and individualized (tier 3) — and said district benchmarks and fidelity checks are being used to monitor practice.

The presentation traced MTSS work back to a 2019 school‑climate transformation grant and subsequent training that reached all 24 district buildings. "We measure fidelity annually," Bridges said, and reported a tier‑one benchmark of 85 percent as a target. She told trustees that currently about 66.7 percent of schools are "highly engaged" with MTSS processes, 20.8 percent are moderately engaged and 12.5 percent demonstrate low engagement.

Anna Boehner, a member of the curriculum team, walked the board through how the district uses dashboards to disaggregate behavior and attendance data by grade, special‑education status, gender and other factors. "Our highest behavior this year is non‑violent misconduct," Boehner said, and those incidents are disproportionately found in middle schools and often in classrooms. She noted the district can now identify patterns by day of week and location and use that root‑cause information to design interventions.

But presenters also flagged gaps. Bridges said the district is only delivering tier‑2 small‑group supports to about 10 percent of the students who appear to need them, a shortfall she tied to staffing and scheduling limits. She asked the board for more district‑level resources — specifically, more coaching capacity. "We have one coach," she said; the team would benefit from another coach who could observe MTSS meetings, support fidelity reviews and expand training.

Trustees pressed on accountability and legal obligations. Board members referenced the Department of Justice consent decree and stressed that district expectations must be enforced consistently across schools. Superintendent Reid said central‑office support and visible leadership have improved schools' willingness to implement MTSS, and he endorsed bringing more coaches and structured accountability to scale up the work.

The presentation included metrics the district will use next year: tier‑one agenda turn‑in rates (currently about 90 percent), tier‑two agenda submission at 49 percent, and 64 percent participation in coaching. Bridges and Boehner said the next steps include improving tier‑two implementation, aligning academic and behavioral MTSS conversations, and using data to monitor whether behavior interventions translate into academic gains.

The board did not take an immediate vote on funding during the meeting; trustees asked staff to include resource requests and implementation timelines in future budget discussions.