TPC _Journal-Vol6_Issue_3-MTSS-Full_Issue

The Professional Counselor /Volume 6, Issue 3 288 fifth graders. Classroom lessons and group activities for the camp were drawn from the evidence- based curricula Student Success Skills (Webb & Brigman, 2006), WhyTry (Bird, 2010) and The Real Game (Barry, n.d.) and covered topics critical to success in middle school such as perseverance, organizational skills and study strategies. Finally, PFI, ODR and standards-based report card data also guided decisions about Tier 3 interventions. School counselors developed Behavior Improvement Plans (BIPs) for students in need of intensive behavioral support in the classroom. They also coordinated with special education or other mental health professionals when referrals were warranted. Positive Systemic Change The grant initiatives resulted in definitive progress and positive systemic changes throughout the district. A new policy was established which mandated that counseling groups be formed based on issues identified in the data and no longer simply by teacher request or anecdotal evidence. This more objective approach to determining which students were in need of Tier 2 social-emotional interventions ensured that students with a documented need for additional assistance received these services. At the beginning of the grant period, the district had been declared “underperforming” by state rankings and was mandated to write an annual Accelerated Improvement Plan (AIP). Throughout the 3-year grant cycle, a number of elements from the grant project were embedded in the AIP including: (a) revising K–5 report cards to use a standards-based system, (b) integration of the PFI within the new report cards, (c) designing and delivering a developmental guidance curriculum for grades K–5, (d) collaborating with building principals to incorporate social-emotional data into data team meetings, and (e) developing tiered strategies to better address the social-emotional needs of struggling students. Officials from the State Department of Education who monitored the AIP expressed their belief that these initiatives contributed to the district’s overall improvement and began to send other struggling school systems to the grant district to learn specifically about their data-based MTSS approach and the school counselors’ role in it. Ultimately, the success of the grant within the district can perhaps best be measured by two key administrative decisions made when grant funding ended: (a) the decision to retain the school counselors, as teachers and administrators now saw these professionals—who had not been employed at the district before the grant—as indispensable to student success; and (b) the decision to hire UPC (who had worked as project coordinator for the grant) to work to support the expansion of the grant initiatives to the middle school and high school over the next several years. At the time of this article’s publication, work was underway to identify means to collect social-emotional data at the middle and high school levels so that their multi-tiered system of supports can be as robust as that at the elementary level. Discussion and Implications for School Counselors Data-based decision making has become an essential component of educational practice (Mandinach, 2012). The implementation of NCLB and standards-based education have created strong pressure for schools to demonstrate improved student performance through state test scores (Ikemoto & Marsh, 2007; Marsh et al., 2006). These data often become the primary consideration of data-driven discussions as schools strive to meet state and federal requirements. Data use has the potential, however, to be more than simply a response to meeting accountability demands. The data-based decision-making process can be transformed when multiple forms of data are viewed from different