Scaling MTSS Without the Spreadsheet Chaos

When Assistant Superintendent Gina Marie Frasca Ed.D., and her team at Pinelands Regional SD began refining their MTSS (Multi-Tiered System of Supports)  process, they found a familiar problem: their data lived everywhere. Teachers were documenting student supports in a fragmented mix of different Google spreadsheets and forms,  leaving the district in a state where information was…

“everywhere, but hard to access.” 

Interventions were happening in classrooms, but without a centralized system, it wasn’t always clear when a strategy should remain a Tier 1 support or be elevated for additional services. This created a massive documentation void; families lacked visibility into their child’s long-term progress, and district leaders struggled to see a clear, building-wide picture of student health.

Instead of adding more tools or complicated steps, Pinelands chose to consolidate. Since the district was already partnering with OnCourse for their SIS (Student Information System) and Special Education, it made strategic sense to bring MTSS into that all-in-one system.

 [About the district: Pinelands Regional School District in Ocean County, NJ serves students in grades 7–12 across two public schools: a junior high and a high school. As of the 2023–24 school year, the district had about 1,512 students]

The downside to managing MTSS in spreadsheets

Before integrating their SIS and MTSS, data lived in silos, slowing down the process to deliver timely interventions. Gina Frasca, Assistant Superintendent, noted that when students were referred to the Child Study Team (CST), the documentation simply wasn’t there.

“It was very hard to kind of extract all the work that was done—if the work was done,” she explained.

The shift began with a simple question from the intervention team: “Can’t we just have a tab in OnCourse that we could just click on and start to put everything in one place?”. Pinelands saw consolidating MTSS into their SIS as the logical next step to make interventions a native part of the teacher’s workflow.

Moving from busy work to big ideas

By integrating MTSS with their SIS , they ensured student history became a permanent asset rather than a temporary file. Now, when a student moves from the junior high to the high school, the interventionist doesn’t have to “ask that teacher anything” or hunt for a shared Google folder. They simply drop down a menu to see years of progress monitoring and historical data.

With time-saving adjustments made to the workflow of MTSS, staff have shifted their focus to the high-value work of analyzing data, not collecting it. These features include:

MTSS icon within the OnCourse Gradebook.

• MTSS icon: Small icon right in teachers’ Gradebook makes identifying students in need fast and simple.
• Instant context: By hovering over that icon, a teacher sees exactly what strategies a student needs—like “order of operations” or “visual cues”—without leaving the page.
• Five-Minute documentation: Because the system includes a pre-set “intervention bank” of language, documenting a session now “really takes… five minutes”.
• Universal screener: After key data points and parameters are designated, the universal screener built within Multiple Measures allows for direct identification of students who would benefit from interventions and helps pinpoint specific skill deficits based on the data. This screener is  also used in meetings such as PLCs or SSTs to discuss student status using multiple data points rather than relying on anecdotal information or a single measure.

Universal Screen built in OnCourse Multiple Measures

Building buy-in and battling “one more thing to do” fatigue

The biggest barrier to any new school initiative is the “One More Thing” fatigue—the feeling that every new tool is just another weight on a teacher’s already overflowing plate. The Pinelands leadership team knew that for MTSS to succeed, it couldn’t feel like an addition; it had to feel like a replacement for a broken process.

• A Thoughtful Rollout: Adoption didn’t happen by mandate, but through a thoughtful, phased approach. By focusing on bite-sized PD, leadership gave staff the space to breathe and learn without the pressure of a “day-one” total overhaul. Department by department, Pinelands has been building foundational Knowledge around MTSS during trainings with OnCourse’s MTSS specialist, Rebecca Fisher. 
• Reducing the Planning Burden: To prove they valued teacher time, the district paired the rollout with a reduction in lesson planning requirements for tenured staff. This “give-and-take” signaled that the district was committed to removing “busy work” in exchange for high-value data.
• Integrating the Workflow: Because the team was already comfortable in the OnCourse SIS, the MTSS tools appeared right where they already worked. Instead of a new login  it was just a few clicks away.

The direct path to student services

The most profound shift occurred in the transition to Intervention and Referral Services (I&RS) and the Child Study Team (CST). In many districts, special education is where the “clerical drain” is most intense, as teams scramble to find proof of prior interventions.

Now, when a student at Pinelands is referred, the team doesn’t start from scratch. “We have mountains of documentation of what we’ve already done,” the team shared. This allows the district to move forward immediately rather than “wasting as much time going back and forth”.

Building a safety net with proactive alerts

The Early Warning System (EWS) within the SIS allows them to flag non-academic issues like “absenteeism, behavior, or social-emotional concerns” before they become a crisis. Instead of waiting until November for the first round of data to be analyzed, they can initiate supports “day one” in September.

• Automated Alerts: To keep everyone in the loop, the system sends an automated email every Monday morning with an updated version of who’s in tier 2 or tier 3. This acts as a safety net, catching the kids “that maybe we just are not seeing” says Dr. Frasca.

Ultimately, the Pinelands transition proved that when data lives where teachers work, student support becomes a permanent asset rather than a temporary file. By ensuring documentation follows the student across grade levels, vital supports are never lost in transition, and no student is left to slip through the cracks of a fragmented system.

This shift has not only saved staff countless hours of clerical hunting but has fundamentally changed the nature of their professional dialogue: “It’s really allowing the conversations to be data focused and data centralized and not just observational and theoretical.”

Interested in learning more about OnCourse MTSS? Schedule a meeting with Rebecca or watch the video below!