The Palo Alto Unified School District is developing a new student support initiative to improve student academics and mental health for the 2023-2024 school year.

Multi-Tiered Student Support is a framework made to identify struggling students early to be able to support them with academics, behavioral, or social emotional learning. According to Assistant Superintendent Yolanda Conaway, MTSS is meant to identify students’ struggles early in the year.

“We can look at patterns from the year before to identify whether a student may be at a greater risk of having some difficulty in school,” Conaway said. “We want to be able to support those students.”

Conaway said Palo Alto High School is establishing a student success platform that gathers data on students.

“[The] platform is the system that holds all the data from all over the place, even from some state assessments and universal screeners, and makes a profile of that student,”  Conaway said. “Paly had access to that system already and they formed what’s called an MTSS leadership team.”

According to Conaway, once the system is fully developed, educators will be able to pull any student’ profile and see academics, behavioral issues or attendance. 

But, according to Deanna Chute, Palo Alto High School math teacher and head of the MTSS committee, the panorama database is not accessible to all teachers and educators at PAUSD yet.

“We are trying to make sure that everything is functioning in a way that is helpful and it needs to be meaningful to the staff to roll it out,” Chute said.

The goal of the MTSS is to get as much information about a student’s learning and use that information to see the root of any problem that may be occurring.

“The biggest win around MTTS is that we can find students who are struggling early and we don’t have to wait for a student to fail for us to do something about it,” Conaway said.