Parlier Unified School District serves 3,130 students across seven schools in California’s rural Central Valley and has partnered with Panorama since 2023. Alongside its three district goals of Accomplished Students, Supportive Environment, and Empowered Community, Parlier has adopted California’s Community Schools framework, which brings school and community resources together to support students and families. As Parlier continued building its MTSS and Community Schools work, leaders needed a more consistent districtwide approach to student support.
- Challenges
- Parlier needed to align its MTSS and Community Schools work without making it feel like one more initiative for staff.
- MTSS meetings varied across schools, and teams spent too much meeting time gathering data instead of planning interventions.
- Parlier needed a clearer way to identify student needs and disparities among student groups, then coordinate support.
- Results
- Parlier aligned Community Schools with shared district goals and existing MTSS structures, which improved staff buy-in and follow-through.
- A shared MTSS agenda and pre-meeting data review helped teams spend more meeting time planning interventions.
- Teams gained clearer visibility into student needs and group disparities. Suspensions dropped 56%, major office discipline referrals fell 40%, and Parlier exited California Differentiated Assistance.
- Each administrator saved 10-13 hours per week on data-heavy tasks.
Challenges
Parlier had been building its MTSS work for years when it began implementing California’s Community Schools framework. Leaders wanted Community Schools to build on the systems already in place rather than become a separate program for staff to manage. If the framework was going to expand from the secondary level to elementary schools, Parlier needed a way to fold it into the MTSS structures staff were already using.
Consistency across school sites was another challenge. For Parlier, MTSS practices had too much variation from campus to campus. Teams also only had about 50 minutes for an MTSS meeting, and much of that time was spent gathering data.
“MTSS looked different at every single school site. Their agendas were different, the way they ran their meetings was different, and even who was present at the meetings was different,” said Lydia Martinez, Prevention and Intervention Coordinator. “By the time the data analysis was done and you tried to get into identifying what to do about an issue, people would be starting to look at their watches.”
Parlier also needed a clearer way to identify student needs and match them with the right support. Discipline was one example. Parlier was working to address frequent suspensions—a factor that had placed the district in California Differentiated Assistance—and to understand whether some student groups were being disciplined at disproportionate rates. The manual process of compiling and analyzing data made it hard to quickly spot patterns and respond with targeted support.
Solution
Parlier started by mapping its initiatives back to the district’s three goals: Accomplished Students, Supportive Environment, and Empowered Community. Veronica Caufield, Director of State and Federal Programming and Compliance, then looked at where MTSS, special education, and Community Schools overlapped rather than treating each as separate work.
“Once you start breaking down what all of those initiatives have in common, it was really easy to see how we were able to braid what we were doing,” said Caufield.
Community Schools initially had its own meeting and agenda, but leaders quickly realized it duplicated work already happening through MTSS. The district then standardized how MTSS teams prepared and met. Every school began using the same agenda, with a shared district calendar and intentional data collection prior to meetings. Panorama Student Success brought attendance, academic, and behavior data into that preparation, while Panorama Surveys added information on student well-being and school climate.
That same MTSS structure helped Parlier coordinate support beyond the classroom. Through Care Coordination Huddles, teams reviewed the data in Panorama and looked for the root causes behind student needs. When an issue extended beyond school, community health workers could call families, make home visits, and connect them with other services. As Caufield explained, “Sometimes it's not an in-school problem, it's an outside factor, and we try to hone in on that.”
Parlier later added Panorama Solara as an AI layer to support its MTSS workflows, making data analysis and planning more efficient. With this tool, district leaders could upload reports and quickly pull the specific information they needed for MTSS preparation and other data-heavy tasks. As Martinez shared, “I can’t say enough how much this has helped us.”
Results
The standardized MTSS process also changed how teams used their meeting time. Using Panorama Student Success, district leaders completed a 30-minute data drill-down before MTSS meetings so teams could arrive with the data already reviewed, assign actions and owners, and return to those actions in later meetings to monitor progress. Martinez explained, “When we go into the MTSS meeting, we're ready to look at the interventions we are going to put in place. We go in with all that data, and Panorama helps us do that.”
Panorama Solara saved each administrator 10 to 13 hours per week on tasks across MTSS preparation, SST forms, and CalPADS data synthesis. This reclaimed time can be reinvested into student support, further strengthening the district’s capacity to respond to student needs.
Teams also gained clearer visibility into student needs through Panorama Surveys. The survey data helped identify students who might otherwise go unnoticed, including students whose academic and attendance data looked strong but whose responses pointed to needs related to well-being.
“MTSS has taught us that every student's success starts with truly seeing them, not just their academics, but their whole story. The drastic drop we've seen in suspension rates reflects students who stayed in the classroom, stayed connected, and stayed on a path toward their future. That's the promise of Community Schools and MTSS and our entire team, and it's a promise Parlier Unified School District is proud to keep.”
Behavior data also gave Parlier a faster way to examine discipline patterns by student group. Martinez pointed to a disparity the district identified, in which students receiving special education services had been suspended at roughly twice the rate of general education students. With this level of visibility, Parlier can more quickly identify where students need additional support and respond through the MTSS process.
Discipline also improved. Suspensions dropped 56%, major office discipline referrals fell from 353 to 211 between 2023 and 2026, and the district exited California Differentiated Assistance. Martinez connected the broader discipline improvement to the district’s student supports: “We're providing more support, we're providing more mentoring, our suspensions are decreasing.”
Next Steps
The district will continue to use Panorama data to guide school improvement efforts and track progress. Caufield gave an example: “Each site had a goal based on their results from the Panorama climate survey. They’ll have six to eight weeks to implement changes, and then they’ll present what they changed—and the results—to the community.”
Parlier also plans to continue expanding its Care Coordination Huddles to an additional grade level every year—an MTSS routine that will help teams more closely review student needs, identify root causes, and coordinate interventions.
