Meet Cindy Knight Meisner
Cindy Knight Meisner, MS, SSP, is a network capacity coach in the Central Region. She has experience as a school psychologist, department supervisor, and director of special education. She provides coaching and technical assistance to help districts establish a continuum of practices and supports based on their needs. Cindy specializes in administration of special education and prevention programs with particular attention devoted to strengthening relationships between general education, special education and alternative/at-risk student programs and building equitable, inclusive practices at all levels.
We spoke to Cindy to learn more about her approach to coaching.
Can you share a little bit about your background?
Prior to joining the IL MTSS network, I worked as a school psychologist, a student supports program supervisor and a Director of Special Education in central Illinois. In all those roles, I’ve always bridged prevention, supports and inclusion for all students. I’ve always been a systems thinker and I knew that, being just one person, the needs would always stretch beyond what I could do individually, especially for lasting improvements. I think, in every school setting, this scenario is all too real. So I knew there would be great value in building capacity and a multi-faceted system of supports for all students.
Why did you choose to become a Network Capacity Coach?
I chose to become a Network Capacity Coach because I knew it was an effective avenue for reaching more adults so, in turn, we could effectively reach more students. Building the capacity of adults and supporting them in prioritizing the best, most effective practices is how we can reach sustainable improvements.
What’s your top advice for schools looking to implement or improve MTSS?
Whether we’re relatively new to the field or whether we’ve been working in education for a long time, it’s impossible to have learned everything we need to know today to best serve our students and help them find successful outcomes. So, when we’re working on implementing or improving MTSS, we adults have to first agree that our learning needs to continue!
What we did a few years ago or when we first entered the field often needs to be different today. MTSS is built on high quality, job-embedded professional learning paired with coaching for implementing that new learning as a system. An MTSS Capacity Coach can help you organize this important work into a system that is headed toward better outcomes for your students while also tuning in to the needs and hopes of staff, so they know their efforts are really making a difference.
Do you have anything you’d like to share about the relationship between general education, special education and at-risk student programs?
Coming into my MTSS role from a special education perspective has deepened my belief that having interconnected systems of adults is the best way to help students. When the relationship is strong between general education, special education and programs for students who may be at risk for poor outcomes, the results are better for everyone. We need a system of supports and interventions that are based on the realities our schools are facing and shares that incredible responsibility among more than just a few staff who work in a specific area. We need to lift all programs and specialists in an equitable manner that really values and multiplies the efforts and expertise from all angles. We really are better together.
What’s your advice for schools working to improve attendance?
First, it’s important to approach the challenge of improving attendance by using a framework that includes several layers of action. That includes promotion of school attendance as an ongoing foundational piece of the work, early prevention when we see warning signs that attendance could be slipping and, then, specifically tiered responses for intervening with different levels of intensity and individualization when that’s needed.
It’s not a one-size-fits-all situation because each setting or community may have slightly different historical context, needs and assets to wrestle with. But there are evidence-based frameworks such as a multi-tiered system of supports (MTSS) that can provide the structure, analysis and problem solving for systematically working on this challenge. I encourage schools to consider this as a significant area of work that can underpin their work in several other areas of both academic outcomes and social-emotional outcomes. Attendance is so important that when we say that our plates are already too full with these other priorities, it could be that attendance and school engagement is actually the universal “plate” that these other priorities and goals should be built on.
