Serving more than 12,000 students in Harrisburg, PA, educators in Central Dauphin School District knew what a strong MTSS required, but fragmented data and inconsistent processes made it hard to put into practice.
What started with reading interventions grew into a more streamlined approach to MTSS, helping educators simplify referrals, improve consistency across buildings, and spend more time supporting students.
Challenges
- Student data at Central Dauphin lived across fragmented systems, creating fidelity gaps and inconsistent documentation building to building.
- When students transferred between schools, getting their data to follow them was a timely process that required physically delivering paperwork.
- Interventions were tracked inconsistently across educators and schools, which was especially challenging in schools with more students with high-intensity needs.
- Educators spent hours writing reports, prepping for meetings, and participating in meetings:
- Psychologists spent 1–2 hours writing manual data reports
- Principals spent 2–3 hours prepping for advanced tiers meetings.
- With heavy workloads, teachers were resistant to attend more meetings.
- Referring students for Tier 2 or 3 support was a slow, manual process that took weeks or months, delaying students from receiving the help they needed.
Solution
Results
- With a district-wide MTSS view, educators could see attendance, behavior, academics, and intervention data all in one place, allowing them to better understand student needs.
- Panorama data followed students anywhere within the district, so educators could access transfer students’ records and interventions instantly instead of waiting days or a week for a physical folder.
- Central Dauphin educators built AI tools that standardized and templatized complex processes, saving time and improving quality and consistency.
- Time saved with Panorama was redirected into educator collaboration, instruction planning, and supporting individual students.
- School psychologists’ reporting time dropped from 1–2 hours to 30 minutes or less.
- Advanced tiers meeting prep dropped from 2–3 hours to mere minutes per student/small group.
- Goal-setting meetings dropped from 25 minutes to 10 minutes per group.
- The volume of meetings to support individual students decreased because educators could add notes into a student’s profile that were visible to the whole team.
Challenges
Across Central Dauphin’s 13 elementary schools, effective MTSS required educators to bring together information from multiple sources. “But it was hard because every data piece was in a different spot,” said Chambers Hill Elementary's principal. Attendance, behavior, academic, assessment, and intervention data lived in different systems.
Staff couldn’t quickly see the full picture of a student’s needs and had to move between multiple systems before making a decision. That fragmentation added significant administrative work and manual reporting before student and small-group meetings. School psychologists were spending one to two hours creating a data report for a student.
Intervention tracking presented another challenge. Buildings used different versions of intervention timelines, sometimes maintained in physical student folders or Word documents. Inconsistency across buildings meant that intervention fidelity was weak and student progress was hard to measure. When a student transferred within the district, staff could wait days or sometimes longer for a physical data folder to arrive before understanding what interventions had already been tried.
The student referral process could be even more cumbersome. At one school, referrals were submitted via “green form,” a physical sheet of green paper, before eventually moving to a Google Form. Convening the right staff around those referrals could take weeks or even months. When referrals inevitably piled up, reading specialists had to cancel intervention groups just to work through pending meetings.
Solution
Central Dauphin had used Panorama since 2018, and the partnership evolved gradually as two reading specialists experimented with Panorama themselves.
“We explored it on our own a lot,” one said. “We spent a lot of time diving into it and seeing how we could best support our teachers by teaching them how to use it.”
The reading specialists started small by creating their own Tier 3 intervention groups in Panorama and learning how to use progress monitoring tools. Then they began bringing teachers into the process. At first, theycreated intervention groups for teachers and showed them how the process worked. Later, they sat alongside teachers as they created groups and set goals themselves. Eventually, teachers were able to manage more of the process independently.
With Panorama Student Success, teams could now bring attendance, behavior, academic, assessment, and intervention information together when discussing a student. “If we're looking at a specific student or small group of students, we'll look at their data in Panorama because it shows us the whole picture instead of just one data point at a time,” one reading specialist said.
Historical intervention information stayed connected to the student in Panorama, giving educators greater visibility into what previous teachers had tried and whether those approaches had worked. Central Dauphin used Panorama to standardize how interventions were documented across K–5. For students moving between district schools, staff could immediately see previous interventions instead of waiting for a physical folder to arrive.
One of the reading specialists' proudest achievements with Panorama was redesigning the school’s student referral process. Referring a student for Tier 2 or 3 support used to require multiple forms, meetings, and follow-ups that could be spread out across months. Now teachers could submit a referral directly from a student’s profile, triggering notifications to the MTSS team. The team could review the referral, identify the right specialists to involve, and take next steps, all without needing another meeting.
The team also built custom AI tools in Panorama Solara to reduce other points of friction. They built an “uncovering insights” tool to surface information about student needs. They also developed tools to produce family communication templates when a student is referred for support, with drafts for emails, phone call scripts, or Dojo messages. This custom AI tool made it easier for teachers to explain interventions in clear, growth-oriented language focused on a student’s individual progress.
Once student data uncovered gaps, Central Dauphin educators used strategies from Panorama Playbook to address students’ academic, behavioral, and emotional needs. Playbook was a shared starting point that helped all teachers, but especially new ones, find practical resources and begin supporting students.
Results
With student information and intervention history in one place, Central Dauphin educators could more quickly understand what students needed, monitor whether support was working, and adjust when it wasn’t.
One of the biggest improvements was stronger fidelity within the MTSS process. Panorama wasn’t necessarily helping the team identify more students, a reading specialist explained. It was helping educators get more specific about students’ needs, and determine whether to continue an approach or try something different.
That visibility also helped teams respond sooner. Leaders at Chambers Hill began reviewing attendance weekly rather than for report cards at trimester intervals. Staff could notice when absences were accumulating, investigate what was happening, and determine whether an intervention was needed.
For students moving between Central Dauphin schools, support could also continue with less disruption. Educators could immediately see previous interventions and historical information instead of waiting up to a week for physical records to arrive.
Students themselves became more active participants in the intervention process. One educator recalled showing students their Panorama progress monitoring graphs as they worked toward reading goals. Students could see where they started, where they were now, and where they were headed. The visual helped reinforce the purpose of the intervention and demonstrate how it was helping students grow.
Improvements for students were supported by significant efficiency gains for the educators serving them. School psychologists’ data reports that once took one to two hours could be completed in 30 minutes or less. Data that previously took an hour or more to assemble for an individual student or small group could now be accessed immediately.
“It’s been a huge timesaver. Having all the data available to see the whole child at one time has been huge to help make decisions and be proactive instead of reactive,” Chambers Hill's principal said.
The district's reading specialists saw similar gains in their work with teachers. Goal-setting for an intervention group, which had previously taken 20 to 25 minutes, dropped to 10 minutes as teachers learned to create plans in Panorama. Reviewing a group’s progress at the beginning of a meeting could take roughly two minutes instead of 10 to 12.
That efficiency ultimately meant educators could reinvest their time where it matters most: “That’s time that we’re able to spend more with students and giving instruction,” Chambers Hill's principal said. By making monthly data meetings more efficient with Panorama, educators gained time back to devote 25 to 30 minutes to individual students. Teachers also regained planning time because some conversations no longer required separate meetings, thanks to note-taking tools in Panorama.
For Central Dauphin, the evolution of their use of Panorama illustrates what can happen when practitioners have both a shared system and the freedom to make it work for their community. What started with reading specialists exploring the platform became a way to streamline processes and turn fragmented student information into actionable support.
