At their September meeting, the Washington Community School Board approved developing a Multi-Tiered System of Support (MTSS) that can be implemented across the entirety of the school district. Students’ mental health and well-being have been a much-talked-about issue at previous school board meetings, with Superintendent Willie Stone stating that students’ mental health is one of his primary goals for the year.

A large part of this MTSS is developing and teaching strategies to students to help them deal with and process mental health issues they may be having. Superintendent Stone talked with KCII radio about how these strategies will be taught at the different levels of the intervention system.

“The core of our students, which we consider to be 80%, will all get those same strategies taught to them and are able to process them without issue. Then the next 15%, which we consider to be our tier two, are students that may need a little more guidance, so we’ll do some small group learning with them and have them check in every day with someone at the school. Tier three focuses really on individualized learning so that we can help those kids by teaching them strategies that will be able to help them throughout the day.”

The next meeting of the Washington Community School Board will be Wednesday, November 9th, at 7:00 pm at the district’s central office in Washington.