Dana Sisk, director of secondary special education and the district’s MTSS coordinator, told the Ballston Spa Central School District Board of Education on July 2 that the district has moved from audit to implementation of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports framework.

Sisk said the district completed an MTSS audit in 2023 and presented 11 recommendations to the board. Since January 2024 the district has held reboot presentations, surveyed staff, created a district MTSS steering committee and formed building-level implementation teams to align local practices with the New York State MTSS implementation framework released in October 2023.

Sisk said the district asked faculty to volunteer for MTSS work and received 254 survey responses; about 80 staff provided written comments. She said those responses showed significant variation in how MTSS is implemented across and within buildings and a strong desire among staff for consistent, sustainable processes.

To address that, Sisk said the district has established a 16-member MTSS steering committee representing administrators, teachers and related service providers and has run collaborative intervention-development groups for academic, behavioral and social-emotional/mental-health needs. She said 63 faculty members participated across committees this year, with 16 staff serving on more than one committee and 18 administrators involved.

Sisk described concrete work completed this school year: separating the current combined MTSS/special education handbook into distinct documents, developing common MTSS language for K–12 use, selecting a building-level self-assessment tool, completing a district capacity assessment in May, and producing robust intervention banks organized by tier and grade span. She said three buildings had completed the self-assessment used to guide building action plans and three more were in process.

On what interventions look like by tier, Sisk said tier 1 largely reflects effective universal teaching practices; tier 2 is small-group or targeted supports often provided within or adjacent to the classroom; and tier 3 is more intensive, small-group work (for example, 3–5 students) for substantially delayed skills with progress monitoring to measure movement and exit criteria.

Sisk said the steering committee met nine times this year, building implementation teams met 12 times and intervention-development committees met 13 times. She said the district hosted a regional MTSS roundtable and reviewed MTSS plans from the 29 New York State pilot schools to borrow promising models.

For 2025–26, Sisk said her summer work includes drafting the MTSS handbooks with shared sections and level-specific procedures, analyzing the district capacity and building self-assessment results, preparing action-plan templates for the steering and building teams, aligning intervention banks, and exploring web-based tools to make intervention banks accessible. Board members asked about distribution and asked that any repository be easy to search and include tier mappings and cross-links.

Board members praised the breadth of staff participation and asked Sisk to report results from the district and building assessments at future meetings. Dr. Duca, the district superintendent, introduced Sisk and noted the district had adopted the policy revision to Board Policy 7212 to recognize MTSS as the overarching framework.

Sisk closed by stressing the district’s intent to be deliberate and sustainable in implementation and to involve parents and students in further development as appropriate.