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Stamford School District adopts Branching Minds to centralize MTSS supports
Summary
District staff told the board the Branching Minds platform will centralize student screening, attendance, behavior and assessment data to support MTSS teams at every school; the district plans training and custom reports while stressing privacy safeguards and parent-facing communications.
At a Sept. 3 workshop, Stamford School District staff described plans to use the Branching Minds platform to centralize Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) across the district and to give MTSS coaches digital tools to create interventions, invite parents and track progress.
Amy Delgadia, who said she is in charge of Teaching and Learning for the district, told the board the district implemented Branching Minds with a custom configuration built by an implementation team representing nearly every school. "We built custom for Stamford," she said, noting the vendor account used in the meeting was a dummy training account to avoid exposing student records in a public session. Delgadia said Branching Minds aggregates attendance and behavior records from PowerSchool and assessment data including SBAC, DIBELS and i-Ready into a single student snapshot.
Why it matters: District leaders said the platform will let MTSS teams move more quickly from screening to targeted supports and will preserve intervention history when students change schools. Delgadia said MTSS is a team process that includes principals, teachers, interventionists, school psychologists, social workers and parents; the MTSS coach will support—rather than replace—school-based teams.
Details of the rollout: Delgadia outlined near-term features that will be available to MTSS coaches within weeks: the ability to create named intervention groups, set individualized goals, log meetings, invite parents and select vetted, research-based interventions from dropdown menus. She said the system syncs with PowerSchool overnight so historical interventions travel with a student when they move to a new school.
Board members pressed on data privacy and reliability. One member asked whether the platform had a "safety wall"; Delgadia said the system meets the district's city IT standards and acknowledged occasional scheduled maintenance is possible, as with other systems. "Worst comes to worst, I can go to PowerSchool and see someone's attendance," she said, adding that the underlying source systems remain accessible if Branching Minds is temporarily offline.
Parents and languages: Delgadia said Branching Minds can generate parent-friendly reports, translate communications into multiple languages and send invitations and notifications by email. She said the district will work to avoid automated subject lines that could push messages into spam folders.
What's next: Senior leaders will receive a workshop later the week of Sept. 3, followed by building-level training and deeper MTSS coach sessions. Delgadia offered one-on-one demonstrations for board members who want to see live district data outside a public meeting.
The meeting closed with procedural business and an adjournment motion approved by the board.
