Your MTSS Data Lives in 14 Spreadsheets and Everyone Knows It

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over a room when someone asks a straightforward question about MTSS data and no one can answer it quickly.

How many students are currently receiving Tier 2 interventions in reading? Which buildings have the highest percentage of students who have been in Tier 3 for more than one marking period? Are our interventions actually working — and how do we know?

These are not unreasonable questions. They are, in fact, the exact questions that a well-functioning Multi-Tiered System of Supports is designed to answer. And yet, in district after district, the response to these questions follows a familiar pattern: someone promises to pull the numbers, retreats to a shared drive, opens several spreadsheets across several buildings, attempts to reconcile formats that do not match, and returns days later with a summary that everyone treats cautiously because no one is entirely sure which version of the data is current.

I have watched this play out enough times to believe it is not a personnel problem. It is a structural one. The people managing MTSS in our buildings are dedicated, capable professionals. The issue is that we have asked them to manage a complex, data-intensive system using tools that were never designed for it.

The Spreadsheet as Default Infrastructure

It is worth pausing to consider how we arrived here. MTSS, by its nature, requires tracking students across tiers, monitoring intervention fidelity, documenting progress at regular intervals, and communicating outcomes to teams that include administrators, teachers, specialists, counselors, and parents. The data is longitudinal, multi-dimensional, and high-stakes.

And in a remarkable number of districts, the infrastructure supporting all of this is a collection of spreadsheets — maintained independently by each building, formatted according to the preferences of whoever created them, stored on shared drives or in Google folders with varying levels of access and version control.

The result is predictable. When a district leader asks a question that requires data from across buildings, the answer depends on which spreadsheets exist, whether they have been updated recently, and whether the person asking can locate and interpret them. When a building-level team wants to compare their intervention outcomes to another building's, the data structures do not align. When a new coordinator inherits the MTSS files from a predecessor, the learning curve is not about MTSS itself — it is about deciphering someone else's spreadsheet logic.

We would not accept this level of fragmentation in our financial reporting or our student information systems. And yet, for a process as consequential as identifying and supporting struggling students, we have collectively settled for it.

The Version Control Problem

Of all the challenges that spreadsheet-based MTSS creates, the version control problem may be the most corrosive. It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. It simply introduces a persistent, low-grade uncertainty about whether the data anyone is looking at is actually correct.

Consider the scenario: a child study team meets to discuss a student's progress in a Tier 2 intervention. The intervention specialist has her spreadsheet. The classroom teacher has a different document tracking the same student's performance. The school psychologist has notes from a previous meeting that reference numbers which do not match either file. Twenty minutes of the meeting — time that should be spent making decisions about a child — is spent reconciling data.

Or consider the district-level view: the superintendent needs to report MTSS outcomes to the board. The Director of Special Services reaches out to each building for their data. Four buildings submit spreadsheets. One submits a PDF. One asks for an extension. The data that arrives uses different column headers, different tier definitions, and different date ranges. The director spends a weekend building a master spreadsheet, knowing that the moment it is finished, it is already outdated.

This is not an exaggeration. It is Tuesday.

What We Lose in the Fragmentation

The operational frustration is real, but it is not the most significant cost. What we lose in a fragmented MTSS data environment is something more consequential: the ability to see patterns.

When intervention data is siloed by building, we cannot easily identify which interventions are producing results and which are not. When tier movement data is trapped in individual spreadsheets, we cannot see whether students are progressing through the system or stagnating within it. When the only way to get a district-wide picture is to manually compile files from every building, we get that picture infrequently — and by the time we have it, the window to act on it may have closed.

There is also a communication cost. Parents who are told their child is receiving Tier 2 support deserve to understand what that means, how progress is being measured, and whether the intervention is working. When the data infrastructure behind MTSS is fragmented, our ability to communicate clearly and confidently to families is compromised — not because we lack the information, but because accessing it requires more effort than it should.

And there is an equity dimension that I think we do not discuss often enough. If the quality of MTSS implementation depends on which building a student attends — because one school has a coordinator who built an exceptional spreadsheet and another does not — then we have introduced a variable into our support system that has nothing to do with student need and everything to do with the organizational habits of individual buildings.

The Standard We Should Expect

I am not suggesting that every district needs an enterprise data platform to manage MTSS effectively. But I am suggesting that the current default — independent spreadsheets maintained in isolation across buildings — falls short of what our students, our families, and our teams deserve.

What we should expect, at minimum, is a system in which a district leader can answer basic questions about MTSS without waiting days for someone to compile data. One in which building-level teams spend their meeting time discussing students, not reconciling spreadsheets. One in which the data is current, consistent, and interpretable by anyone who needs to see it — including parents, board members, and the educators themselves.

The students moving through our intervention systems did not choose to be there. They were identified because they needed support. The least we can do is ensure that the systems designed to help them are built on something more reliable than a shared Google Drive folder with seventeen tabs and a naming convention that only one person understands.

The work of MTSS is too important to be undermined by the tools we use to manage it.