COLUMBUS, Miss. (CMSD) – Education is constantly evolving and tracking students.
Kandra Wilkins has seen it from a Columbus High School Algebra classroom and now as the Columbus Municipal School District’s Assessment, Curriculum, and Professional Development Coordinator. She is keeping track of those changes in MTSS, or multi-tier system of support.
“You’re dealing with students who really need that extra push and ensuring that they get that academic support they need, to kind of bridge those gaps for them. The department of education has an early warning system, which is set up to start in kindergarten. Most people would ask why kindergarten? It’s because it’s for graduation. Many people would not be thinking about graduating in kindergarten. However, that early warning system is put into place to track students who may not graduate. So, with MTSS, we start looking at students as soon as they enter our school. The three things we look at is behavior, attendance, and academic performance,” explained Wilkins.
Wilkins has worked 18 years in education on the state and local level. She was hired by CMSD in July 2025 for her role.
There are different parts of the intervention MTSS, but they all work together to help students. Statistics have shown it, and Wilkins sincerely believes a student’s attendance directly relates to their academic success.
“We want to intervene rather than must remediate. So, we want to be proactive instead of being reactive and especially look at the attendance report. That’s going to be a huge, huge factor. Attendance is an issue. According to state guidelines, if you miss five days in nine weeks those students should be placed on tier 3. This means they should get the most intensive interventions. If you think about it, missing that many days out of nine weeks, which is 45 days, then that’s an issue because most likely you’re not getting what you need academically to be able to perform and be successful in classes,” said Wilkins.
Wilkins was first fascinated by the assessments portion of her job. Now, interventions are becoming a favorite part of her role.
“Without that we can’t perform on assessments, which in turn affects the type of curriculum that we’re providing. So, it is to make sure we provide our teachers and students with those high-quality materials they need and intervene before it is too late. In turn, we can get higher performance on our assessment and hopefully one day become an “A” rated school district,” said Wilkins.