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MTSS Handbook

What your school actually does for Tier 1, written down somewhere your team can point to.

A working template for your building's Tier 1 implementation plan. The handbook is the shared reference document your MTSS Design & Implementation Team returns to across the year. Fill it out at the start of the year, or update last year's, and keep it short enough that your team actually reads it.

Why this exists: ask five staff members what your school does for Tier 1 and you can get five answers — not because anyone is wrong, but because it was never written down anywhere the whole team shares. The handbook is where “what do we actually do?” stops being a matter of who you asked. A handbook that lives in a drawer is worse than a short one people open.

1What's inside

Seven sections, each a small number of fields your team fills in together:

Vision for Tier 1. One or two sentences naming what all students experience — not what the team does. The template shows the difference with a worked example of each.
Design & Implementation Team. Meeting cadence, standing location, decision-making norm, and who covers when the facilitator is absent.
School-wide expectations. The three to five commitments taught everywhere, where they are posted, when they are taught, and how staff acknowledge them.
Discipline flowchart. Which behaviors are staff-managed, which are office-managed, and how staff are trained on the difference.
Universal screening schedule. Fall, winter and spring windows with dates, who screens, and what is screened.
Data-meeting cadence. Frequency, standing agenda, protocol, where decisions get recorded, and who prepares the data.
Professional development. PD planned, coaching available, how new staff are onboarded, and when the handbook is reviewed.

Plus a revisit cadence for start of year, end of year, and an optional mid-year check.

2How to use it

Fill it out as a team, not as an assignment. The disagreements that surface while completing it are the useful part. If two people answer the discipline flowchart differently, you have found something worth fixing.
Keep it short. Resist the urge to write a policy manual. Every section here fits in a few lines on purpose — length is what stops handbooks being read.
Hand it to new staff. This is the document that answers “how does MTSS work here?” without anyone having to explain it from memory in September.
The vision statement is the section most often skipped and most worth doing. “Our team meets monthly and reviews screener data” describes a meeting. “Every student receives high-quality core instruction, clear school-wide expectations, and universal screening three times a year” describes what students experience — and that is the thing the rest of the handbook has to deliver.

3Where it fits

The handbook is the top of the stack: it records what your school decided. MTSS Team Roles fills in section two in detail — who holds each rotating job and who backs them up. BOY MTSS Setup Checklist is the sequence that gets the handbook's decisions actually standing before day one, and The 30-Minute MTSS Meeting gives the data-meeting cadence in section six an agenda to run.

Most useful in August, when the year is being set up. Worth reopening at the end of the year, before the next team takes it over.

⬇ Download the template (PDF)
Five pages · 7 sections · No email required · Free to share

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A completed copy of this template records organizational practices, staff roles, and schedules. Filled-in copies contain staff names and school-specific operational details and should be handled according to your district's document-retention policies. Team structure and expectations vary with a building's size and staffing — adapt the sections to your own context.