ROCORI district adopts student self‑report screener for secondary behavior monitoring

The ROCORI Public School District board on an evening meeting heard a presentation from Amy Notch, the district’s director of teaching and learning, about adding a 20‑item student self‑report screener called MiSavers to the district’s secondary assessment suite.

Notch said the screener produces domain scores in social behavior, academic behavior and emotional behavior and an overall risk score, and that the district will use the results in aggregate to “do climate checks” and to evaluate programming and tier 1 interventions. “It’ll give us some direction for our programming,” Notch said, adding the screener can be administered in Spanish for students who receive EL services.

The nut graf: school staff said MiSavers is intended as a quick screener to identify students who may need additional supports so counselors and student assistance teams can prioritize limited intervention resources. Staff described the tool as a complement to teacher observations, attendance and grade data rather than a replacement for clinical evaluation.

School counselors and building leaders described how the district will use both aggregate and individual reports. Britney Beckers, a school counselor at Kultbury Elementary, noted the items are the same from second grade through senior year so the district can observe longitudinal patterns: “these questions stay the same. So you can kind of reflect back at past times as well.” Marcia Giberson and Emily Peterson, who work in secondary buildings, said counselors will pull lists of students flagged at one or two exclamation‑point risk levels to check for existing supports (for example an IEP or case manager) and to decide whether to open additional interventions.

Staff described quality‑control checks built into scoring. Notch said the screener includes “inverted” items and response‑pattern checks to help identify students who may be randomly responding; those patterns will prompt staff to review whether the responses are valid. Reported example item stems included statements such as “I disrupt class,” “I get along with my peers,” and “I have trouble working alone.”

Counseling staff said parental notification is typical when a student receives an intervention beyond tier 1 supports. “If we do an actual...intervention…those conversations happen and parents are aware,” a counselor said. Counselors also described cases where a brief check‑in based on a screener prompt surfaced serious unmet needs that had not been visible to teachers or coaches.

District staff said the platform vendor is Renaissance and that the district uses FastBridge for other academic screening; Notch said the district confirmed the vendor meets standard school‑data privacy expectations (vendor compliance with COPPA/FERPA and district access controls were discussed). Brian Mikulski, the district’s director of technology, was cited by staff as the point person for technical privacy settings that limit staff access to only the students they work with.

Board members had no substantive objections at the presentation’s conclusion and thanked staff for the overview. The presentation materials and summary data were described as preliminary; Notch said some homerooms and some elementary and middle school classes had not yet completed the screener and that the district will continue to refine how teams use the reports.

Looking ahead, staff said the screener is one element of a multi‑tiered system of supports (MTSS) approach and part of the district’s effort to use data to guide classroom and building‑level programming decisions.

Ending: board members asked no further questions at the meeting and the board moved on to scheduled action items.