[MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to this brief overview of Florida's Multi-Tiered System of Supports, which is also referred to as MTSS. The purpose of this overview is to increase the mutual understanding between family members, community members, and schools. Because we have one thing in common. We all want students to be successful in school and in life. At the Florida Department of Education, we believe that when parents and educators form partnerships to support our students, the potential for our students to be successful and to reach learning goals is limitless. So a new way of thinking and working to help students is being used by schools throughout Florida and the United States. In Florida, we're calling it Multi-Tiered Systems of Supports. MTSS refers to a set of ideas focused on how to help all children be successful in school. It means your child's teacher and other educators are always asking themselves and each other, how well are the students responding to this instruction, and how can we make it better for them. It is not a program, strategy, or trend. Instead, it's a way of thinking and problem solving in order to figure out what kind of instruction each student responds to best. If the instruction a student is getting is not helping the student to learn, problem solving used within a Multi-Tiered System of Support is a way of measuring progress and then making decisions about how to improve the instruction and add interventions that will help the student. If your child is having trouble meeting grade-level learning expectations and is enrolled in a Florida public school, you should get information and be invited to participate in meetings to decide what interventions will be provided. When the type of help for your child increases or decreases based on how he or she responds to the instruction and intervention is provided by the school, you will be part of the decision making. Depending on how often your child's responses are measured, you will get information, often drawn on a graph, of how your child is doing. This will help you understand whether the instruction and interventions are helping or not. If they are helping, the school will continue to monitor how your child is doing. If they are not helping, the teachers and specialists will invite you to work with them as they use the problem-solving solving process to improve the instruction and the interventions. The problem-solving process involves four questions that help parents, teachers, and specialists find solutions to both academic and behavioral difficulties. The first question is, what is the problem? This question is important, because we must be sure that we are working on the true problem. The second question is, why is this happening? This question is important, because we must understand the problem in order to design solutions that are more likely to work. The third question is, what are we going to do about it? This question is important, because we must plan what needs to be taught and how it will be taught. In this step, we are designing and then doing the intervention. The fourth question is, how well is it working? This step is the fourth step of the problem-solving process. During this fourth step, we measure how your child responds to the intervention in order to know if it's helping or not. These four questions should guide the meetings you will attend with the school. The problem-solving process is used while working within three types or levels of instruction or intervention. These levels are often described as tiers. The purpose of the tiers is to help the school provide effective teaching and effective classroom environments so that all of the students are able to meet grade-level standards. Thinking about three tiers helps the school provide help to students who are having difficulty in addition to what everyone gets, rather than replacing it with something different and disconnected from and all the other students are getting. The tiers allow the school to provide help to students that matches student needs. Some students have more intensive needs than others. Tiers make it possible for the school to organize a specific help it provides to students to ensure all students achieve success. Most importantly a school that provide students with help across different levels or tiers based on what students really need, helps the students sooner as an ongoing part of education. When we talk about three tiers, we have to be careful to remember that they are not categories of students or stepping stones towards a special education program. There are no fixed rules about each tier. Instead, they are basic guidelines to help us understand the school's framework for meeting all the student's needs. Tier one describes the high-quality teaching and school support for positive behavior that all students in the school receive. If what the school provides at the tier one level is working, most students in the school will be successful without needing additional help. Tier two describes the additional interventions that smaller groups of students might get it they need extra help to learn specific skills. Tier three describes interventions that are designed to help individual students who need even more support on specific skills. Students who are receiving tier three level help might need this level of help for a short time or for a longer period of time, depending on how they progress. Any student in the school may at some point need tier two or tier three help in order to learn all the necessary skills of their grade level. The goal of the problem-solving team will always be to provide whatever the student needs and responds positively to so that they are successful in school. It's important to remember that the three tiers don't have rules because they are meant to describe different levels of help that students may get when they need it and that the levels of help will change as the needs of the student change. As an involved family member, you are encouraged to attend and be an active member of teams that include teachers and specialists who are finding solutions by answering the four questions that we discussed earlier. Teachers and specialists value and rely on your input because you are your child's most knowledgeable expert. You have more knowledge and experience with your child than anyone else. This means you have important information and insight to contribute to the solution finding process. One way you can contribute is by asking key questions to help guide the conversations and keep the focus on improving your child's learning. Some key questions are, is my child successful? How do I know? If not, why , and what can we do differently? If needed, how is additional help going to be provided? By whom? How often? For how long? What can I do to help with interventions for my child, and how will I know if interventions are working? The answers to these questions will need to be discussed and worked out by using the problem solving process. If your child is struggling, or at any time you wonder how things are going at school, you are encouraged to talk with your child's teacher, asking the problem-solving questions. Ask for progress reports on how your child is responding to the instruction that he or she is getting in the area of difficulty, celebrate when it's working, and ask more questions when you see little or no improvement. And make a list of specific questions to ask about your child's progress. Some people think that problem solving or receiving additional help is only something for students with disabilities. The truth is, using problem solving and multi-tiered supports for children is a way of thinking and working for schools that benefits every student in the school. For some students who need the most intensive and individualized help to maintain progress the school may access special education resources in order to maintain that level of support. Every child will continue to benefit from the problem solving that happens in schools' multi-tiered system. So problem solving within a Multi-Tiered System of Support exists and continues for all students from kindergarten through graduation. This is good news, because it means that help for your child does not depend only on whether special education is option. However, if information about your child is being evaluated in order to determine if special education resources can be accessed by the school, the information that is gained through ongoing problem solving about what your child really needs to be successful will help the school make a good decision about special education resources. It is most desirable to be able to meet your child's individual needs so that he or she can be successful without unnecessarily labeling him or her as a student with a disability. You may want more information about problem solving and Multi-Tiered Systems of Support. The Florida Department of Education has a website you can visit at www.florida-rti.org. A family brochure is available at that website as well as many other national and state resources. If you need help accessing any of these resources or you have additional questions, you may contact your child's principal. Thank you for supporting your child's education and for working with us to make sure that your child's educational needs are met. Our partnership with families helps us to provide your child with the best education possible. [MUSIC PLAYING]