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Welcome to the Exceptional Educators Podcast by FrenalyticsEDU — where innovation meets inclusion in education!
Each episode features candid conversations with district leaders, school leaders, classroom changemakers, EdTech founders, and executives — all dedicated to transforming learning for each student, especially our learners with unique abilities.
With a focus on extraordinary educators and the exceptional students they serve, we explore the latest in special education, accessible technology, and inclusive leadership. Whether you’re shaping special education policy, pioneering new EdTech tools, or looking to grow your impact in the classroom, this podcast is your front-row seat to the future of inclusive education.
Listen. Learn. Lead. Be Exceptional. 🎙️
Welcome to the Exceptional Educators Podcast by FrenalyticsEDU, where innovation meets inclusion in education. I'm your co host Antonia Ellis.
Matt Giovanniello:And I'm Matt Giovanello, the CEO and co founder of Frenalytics. Frenalytics. At Frenalytics, we put special education and English language learners front and center. Our award winning FrenalyticsEDU platform helps streamline progress monitoring, improve communication and compliance, and offers truly personalized learning to your students' avowlability.
Antonayah Ellis:Each episode of our podcast features candid conversations with district and school leaders, classroom changemakers, ed tech founders, and industry executives, all dedicated to transforming learning for each student, especially our learners with unique abilities. With a focus on extraordinary educators and the exceptional students they serve, we explore the latest in special education, accessible technology, and inclusive leadership. In this episode, Exceptional Educators is exceptionally thrilled to welcome Rebecca Burton, Deputy Superintendent for Special Education and Student Services at Lemon Grove School District in California. She has built inclusive learning systems, guided MTSS implementation across multiple contexts, and works to ensure vulnerable students and families are seen, heard, and supported. Rebecca brings a passion for equity systems, thinking, and student voice to every decision.
Antonayah Ellis:Welcome to the podcast, Rebecca. We're so happy to have you here.
Rebecca Burton:Thank you so much. The introduction makes me sound awesome.
Antonayah Ellis:I know, right?
Matt Giovanniello:As it should. So
Antonayah Ellis:we start off the podcast asking, what is your why? What brings you to education? And what keeps you in this setting?
Rebecca Burton:The why that I have with education is very personal. I think the way each of us grows up has a big impact on the passion and the work we do as adults. And I think the feeling of being seen and expected and wanted is something that I deeply desired as a child. And so a lot of the world that I see now is people on the margins and how they're asking to be a part of what we expect, what we want, and what we plan for. And I think I see it more in education than anywhere else.
Rebecca Burton:So the work that I do in education, first of all, is because I love kids. I think kids are awesome and hilarious and the best people to work with in the planet. But, also, I feel like we have so much opportunity to do so much good with our children. And so education is where I feel like doing the work of building new systems and infrastructures to see them, to expect them no matter who they are, what they are, from their race, their language, their income, etcetera, that we have a place at the table for them. So that's my why.
Rebecca Burton:And I think we have a long ways to go as an education system, but it's definitely something that gets me up in the morning.
Matt Giovanniello:We do, but it's really inspiring to think about your why and to be looking towards those margins as you described them. In our world of ed tech, there is a nonprofit called Digital Promise that has put out a ton of research about the importance of designing and building ed tech solutions in consideration of the margins, because as we well know, Rebecca, there's no such thing as an average student anymore. There may not have ever been such a thing as an average student, but especially nowadays, that doesn't exist, and those margins are growing. As your role grows in consideration of not only supporting students with special education needs, but also in these MTSS structures, your multilingual learners, your responsibilities are growing to include all those margins as well. How do you juggle all of those?
Matt Giovanniello:You have a sizable student population, including those who fall into those subpopulation buckets. What is juggling and supporting all of those different diverse needs look like for you at your district?
Rebecca Burton:I think that data is insanely important because right now, we actually don't recognize or have as much pattern recognition of the students that we're serving every year. It's like we're surprised at how many students have the mental health needs that they do. We're surprised at how many students are unhoused. We're right? It's almost like we were expecting it to be a blip after COVID, and it wasn't a blip, and it keeps on increasing in those margins.
Rebecca Burton:And so I feel like data and understanding what we should be measuring, what we should be finding out about students, and how we do so in a at least somewhat dependable way is probably the most important factor for educators today in making sure that you can adapt and plan and meet the needs of those widening margins. And I think part of the challenge is we don't have as much infrastructure for time built in the day to look at data, to gather data, to make sure that it is used and implemented effectively, but the margins are in fact growing at a pace that I don't know the general public understands or sees. And the challenges that our educators working day to day with students have are unlike anything I've ever seen before. And I've been working in education for a minute now. So understanding what the margins even are, having the fingers around it to see where where are the lines beginning and ending is where we have to start.
Rebecca Burton:And I'm not sure that we even have that fully down pat.
Matt Giovanniello:I don't think so. I think at your district, do. Lemon Grove absolutely does. And even before we started recording this podcast, you were telling us about your passion and quite honestly your expertise around MTSS, but for a lot of districts, they don't have that shared mutual understanding, one of definitions, and if we don't have that mutual understanding of definitions, how are you going to implement that with fidelity? So I'd like to back up a little bit and dig a little bit more into your world of expertise around MTSS, because data based decision making is a pillar of it, but yet it's also only one component of it.
Matt Giovanniello:So as you look around the landscape of your 3,000 ish student district at Lemongrove and what MTSS looks like all the way from TK to 12, how does MTSS get implemented through its tier structures? How are you offering interventions and services? And from when you first entered this role at the beginning of your tenure at least at Lemongrove, how has that changed over time? I know that's a big question, but let's pull back the curtain on what MTSS looks like in your realm.
Rebecca Burton:So I started at Lemongrove School District 07/01/2020, so right in the middle of COVID. When I started, there was an RTI structure in place, and there was no formal MTSS structure. So it was definitely one that was building from the ground up. That first year, I like to refer to it as, like, a prelaunch year. So you don't jump into MTSS with no prelaunch year.
Rebecca Burton:Like, that's gonna be the worst thing ever. And that's partially because what you touched upon that were definitions. You need to have an understanding from all of the stakeholders of what is multi tiered systems of support, what are the terms that we are gonna use in our district because that will vary. There isn't one set definition or glossary. And you also need to all have a common why.
Rebecca Burton:What is our organization why? What is it that we as a whole group are doing this for? And so for Lemongrub School District, in the time that we have worked on MTSS, it went from really just focusing on creating an infrastructure for MTSS and identifying technology that we would be using. So we use Panorama Education for our whole child student success dashboard. It's like our data dashboard, but also where we document our student interventions, run reports.
Rebecca Burton:So we're now in year five of our MTSS framework, and the services that we provide, I'm incredibly proud of. So for all of our school sites, we have a full time social worker. Some of them have more. We have seven full time school psychologists, and we have intervention teachers at each of our schools as well. And through those personnel in particular, we're able to provide targeted tier two reading math interventions for our students As we do our benchmark testing and gather data, there's a referral system for students to get those tier two and tier three academic interventions.
Rebecca Burton:And there's also a a referral system that we use for students to receive their tier two social skills and behavioral groups to build skills in those areas for tier two and tier three. And then, of course, we have our individualized tier three mental health support and services. Beyond that, we actually have a contract with an outside community agency who will come who provides therapy on-site. They don't need to worry about transportation, don't need to worry about paying for it or having insurance cover for it. But every year, we get better and better at refining what that looks like, what the criteria of what a tier two versus tier one looks like.
Rebecca Burton:And most importantly, people get very excited about the idea of tier two, tier three, but I will say until I'm blue in the face, you have to have the most incredible tier one. What you do there matters more than anything else. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, you know? So yes, you might have students who have very escalated behaviors, but if your tier one is not doing what it needs to do, you could have a thousand hours of support in tier three that will go right down the drain.
Antonayah Ellis:I mean, I I'm super interested. When I was teaching, I taught fifth grade for a few years. I was at a school where they were just rolling out their MTSS system and I was a super confused teacher. I didn't know what it meant. I didn't know why it was a pain.
Antonayah Ellis:But now being out of the classroom, I feel like I've kind of been able to dive deep more into this is what the support system is supposed to look like. This is kind of what the difference between tier two and tier three are. What does good tier one instruction look like? What are some good things or just some things that you look for in a classroom for that excellent tier one instruction?
Rebecca Burton:The thing that I look for is participation from the students in the room. Not only are they participating, but what does that participation look like and who is doing the cognitive lifting in the room. Right? That there's a teacher who's up in front working their butt off to, you know, do the song and dance, or are they sitting back and the students really filling that space with their own thinking, their own discussion? And is there multiple ways for them to participate?
Rebecca Burton:Because we, again, talking about those margins, there's going to be different modalities, different language needs, different output input, like, what kind of universal design is there in the content. But do we have students who know what's up? Do they know the classroom, and are they running it themselves? Is there agency, or is it very much where they have to be told what to do all the time? Because if so, their full learning brain is not activated.
Rebecca Burton:Their highest level of learning is not being integrated into that into that learning space. Before we get there, honestly, those are all indicators of of emotional safety, of physical safety, of basic needs being met. And that really comes that's not a given. It's not a given, and it's not always something that a classroom teacher can meet on their own either. So I think tier one is having an opportunity to ensure students have all their basic needs met from if they needed sleep, if they needed food, if they needed any new pair of shoes.
Rebecca Burton:So that to me is part of tier one or maybe pre tier one if we wanna call it that. But honestly, that's that's really, really important. Hungry kids can't learn. So walking into a classroom, you will know if those happened or not, but you're not gonna see them happening in the classroom. Right?
Rebecca Burton:And that means it's a whole system. All of them working together to understand and see what good tier one looks like is not just curriculum. It's not just pedagogy. It is that whole human being being taken care of well enough to be able to be in their learning state, to be able to learn and grow and feel safe enough to do that.
Matt Giovanniello:You make really good points, Rebecca, because you're exactly right. Curriculum and instructional changes at the tier one level will make or break the effectiveness of tier one as a part of MTSS, but it is not the only piece to that puzzle as we're learning, especially when you're leading very diverse district student enrollment populations and community and parent and teacher diversity in those districts as well. So it's awesome to hear how Lemon Grove is prioritizing needs all around of those students, not just academically, but socially, emotionally, financially, and everything in between, because we talk a lot for a podcast that's about special ed and for multilingual learners about the needs of students and prioritizing their mental health. And so meeting their needs in those regards is critical to unlocking the efficacy of a tier one, knowing that the academic and behavioral pieces are salient there. And as we know from your state accountability reports, everything's trending up, like your ELA outcomes, your math outcomes, especially your outcomes as it relates to English language learners.
Matt Giovanniello:So something's going right starting at tier one, but also as we transition a little bit into tier two, tier three in special ed, there's a data component happening at Lemongrove that's allowing you to understand ahead of those state accountability reports, are we doing our jobs right? Are we meeting the diverse needs of our students or not? And what do we do throughout the course of the school year to change that? What's going on data wise that's helping you understand what's going right and what needs to change?
Rebecca Burton:So in data for academics, we use iReady benchmarks across all grade levels in ELA and math to help monitor and track student growth. And we monitor in particular not just the proficiency levels, but also whether they're meeting growth, which I said to that. If they make one year's worth of growth, that's like what you would expect a student to be able to do. Right? So we're monitoring whether students meet their growth goal, and then we also have stretch growth goals.
Rebecca Burton:So I Ready is definitely a deep component of how academic monitoring looks, but we also have implemented DIBELS. And so that's the way that we are approaching doing screening for dyslexia. But it's also a great monitoring tool, a data tool for reading levels for students that not the same as what I Ready would be monitoring for. And so the tier two and tier three, what's really special about the academic component is that it is really mostly looking at reading. So providing small group instruction for students at their level around what they need to build those reading skill gaps for the rest of the day when they're with the whole group.
Rebecca Burton:There's also math intervention groups that are formed very similarly. So it's a small group instruction where the students go with the intervention teacher for that small group time, and it follows the same curriculum as what they have during their regular school day, which is really important. That's something that special ed also needs to be aware of. So taking what is learned in a small group and being able to apply it when you get back to that classroom. And so there is the deep alignment between intervention teachers and the regular school day.
Rebecca Burton:They get all the same trainings and curriculum. And so it's meant to just offer that small group intensive support. And when it comes to the what I am more involved in, which is the social worker support and school psychologist support, they are providing skill groups based on the needs of the students that are made. So referrals will indicate whether this is potentially a social skills gap deficit or whether it's emotional regulation needs, what have you. And so they develop a skills group of some kind, whether it's anger management, emotional regulation, social skills.
Rebecca Burton:They pull the students in for that small group intervention and they create an intervention plan into our data system. And so we now have all of our students who have ever received interventions, whether it's tier two, tier three, academics, behavior, we have all of that data in our interface. So if that student also leaves one school and goes to another school, you can now log in and you see all the interventions that were provided to that student beforehand as well as the outcomes of that data. So it helps with the child find process if you are looking for students who may have a disability, but it also helps with identifying what is the core need and what will work or not work for that student and being able to not repeat the same thing hoping for a different outcome.
Antonayah Ellis:Honestly, I really did not even think of all of the other attributes that contributed to tier one. And so I'm curious, it was already hard enough to deliver this information to parents about only academics. How or what are some strategies where you guys are communicating with families, letting them know what's going on, getting permissions to do the small group instruction? Is there a number that you guys can't go over? Is it just three to six?
Antonayah Ellis:What does that- all of that look like with the
Rebecca Burton:parents, with the other students? Yeah. For our families, one of the departments that I oversaw and and developed was our family and community engagement department for Lemon Grove. So family engagement and understanding of what the program is working to do and why is essential for us to be able to get students what they need. One of the things that we had in place before starting MTSS formally was we also, through Panorama Education, got the student SEL survey.
Rebecca Burton:We're one of the districts in San Diego County, one of the first districts to have social workers at all, school social workers, but also to have one at every school site. So there was a lot of buy in already from our community around the needs of having a social worker support their students and provide on-site counseling. So that wasn't entirely new. SEL curriculum, social emotional learning curriculum, was also something that was already in place, but it wasn't the same curriculum. There wasn't expectations on how often to teach it or what the point was.
Rebecca Burton:It was a little bit all over the place. So one of the key focus areas was having an SEL survey where students would both self report from third grade to eighth grade on SEL skills and well-being indicators. And then for our preschool through second grade, it would be teacher reported. And so this data was also one where parents could opt out of it. We needed to explain what it was in the first place.
Rebecca Burton:So we had a huge focus on social emotional well-being both for our educators as well as for students and families, which led very nicely into the work of MTSS whole child and having more interventions available for students. Right? So it was kind of building what the context and knowledge of those things was across all stakeholders before getting right into those interventions and what MTSS is. Whenever you
Antonayah Ellis:guys do the small groups, are is there a certain number of students that are within the groups? Is it like a two to four per tiered before you get to the one to one? What does that tier two small group instruction look like?
Rebecca Burton:It is very much the provider's expertise and decision on how many students they wanna pull at once because also those students are not all the same. So while it might normally be three to four with Tony, it might be two. You know what I mean? Because Tony might be a little extra spicy, and that's okay. So then we can also have a group that's up to seven kids because they are working great together and actually works great.
Rebecca Burton:So in terms of the number of students that are pulled at once, that's something that I like to allow the providers to make a decision on. However, there is sort of that general guidance as a whole district and as a whole site that your tier one needs to be effective for roughly 80% of kids. So in order to make this something that is achievable but also sustainable, having a tier one program that keeps in mind who your students are and what they need to be effective effectively growing and achieving, you need to have a tier one program that's about 8%. So roughly 15% of your students are gonna be in tier two at any given point for any given area, and then roughly 5% of your students are gonna be in a tier two programming, again, for any amount of time for any given area. So I think that's where it's a delicate balance of creating a structure.
Rebecca Burton:But what is so important about MTSS is this must be an agile structure. It must be one that can move and flow and not break based on those adjustments. In fact, it it must be moved in order for it to be doing its job. Because if you're serving kids the same way in five years, you're not doing MTSS. You're doing adult behavior to kids without actually looking at what they are needing and requiring to be successful.
Matt Giovanniello:I think the flexible nature and the agile nature of your MTSS structure, in part, Rebecca, speaks to why it's so successful. But, you know, on the other hand, to your point also, there needs to be some hard lines. Tell us a little bit more about what special education looks like and how your data collection processes differ when a student is referred.
Rebecca Burton:For special education assessment and child find, the federal case law has made it pretty clear that you really need to assess a child as soon as you have a suspected disability. And there also continues to be quite a lot more examples of students qualifying under mental health disabilities and behavioral like, having behavior needs as a core content. On the other hand, you have this financial and personnel burden where there's always a difficult time in getting all the special educators that you need and service providers that you need. And so you have this this push and pull between a legal need to assess and identify students as soon as there's a suspected disability, but also not overqualify students too soon? And the answer to that really is multi tiered systems of support, but even more specifically, really effective tier one programming.
Rebecca Burton:So that's really what whole child education means to me is teaching skills of social emotional nature, of a behavioral nature, and academic one. And that is how we ensure that students are not overqualified to special education because without multi tiered systems of support, the only way you can get the accommodations or differentiation or a extra support that a child needs is through special ed. So that's why MTSS to me is so critical and why it's so critical for special education. Because if you don't have an answer for anyone having any different needs other than special education, you will have every single student with any kind of extra need getting put there, and that's where you see special ed population percentages ballooning. And then you have real school budget problems.
Rebecca Burton:That's where you have issues across the board. So when it comes to the assessment process, I would say it's always a tight roadblock, and you gotta take it on a case by case basis for every single child when it comes to do we need to evaluate or do we put them through MTSS referral process? You have to look at every single student and identify, is this a student who truly needs to be assessed right now, or is this a student who really they need six weeks of reading intervention. Right? Just because you go through tier one, tier two, tier three with the child does not mean that then it's, boop, it's time to do special ed assessment.
Rebecca Burton:Right? Like, that's not the process either. And so then you are still ballooning the special ed population. You're just creating a pipeline. And so so that's where there is a delicate balance.
Rebecca Burton:I think that the other key part around multi tiered system of support is for students who are multi language learners, for students who have five zero four plans, have IEPs, who are unhoused. They're not all tier three. What they are is they're a part of the all the tiers. And a student just because they are getting tier three services of some kind, they still are getting tier one and potentially tier two as well. It's never picking what tier they're in.
Rebecca Burton:It's picking how many they're in. Because as soon as they go into a more intensive one, they're still needing every ounce of what the tier one offers them and any other elements that they're required to have. But one thing I'm really proud of is that our special ed population boom has been capped. We have not continued to grow immensely after COVID because our MTSS is really doing what it needs to do, and we are able to continue to provide more differentiated support systems with IEPs outside of their time with special educators. I think that was one indicator I previously wouldn't have cared as much about pre COVID, but now I'm like, well, at least we don't have a thirty percent special ed population.
Rebecca Burton:You know what I mean? Like, those kind of things that that do matter for the overall the overall picture.
Matt Giovanniello:Totally. Rebecca, you made so many important and good points. The first, I think, is exactly that. It's this is not a pipeline where if a student doesn't do well in tier one, then put them in tier two, then put them in tier three, and wait and see, and, Oh my God, now they have a disability, let's refer them for special education. No, they more often than not had a disability to start with that did not get properly identified at the beginning, and if they need an IEP to service that disability, then go there.
Matt Giovanniello:Waiting two or three years to help them get further behind grade level is not going to actually help anybody, and so I think properly evaluating a student as early as possible is a really important piece to this overall process that easier said than done. And I think also in some of the professional development work that my team and I do around MTSS, you got it exactly right. You should be training MTSS if you are not already, because you know inside and out, left writing backwards on tier one, tier two, tier three, how it really is a fluid structure, and how a student who might need tier two or tier three supports in math could return to tier one, and similarly, they may not even need any additional supports around reading or around behavioral or SEL, whatever it might be. Or the reverse could be true. They're doing very well academically, but behaviorally they need more supports in an MTSS structure around SEL needs or around housing needs, whatever it might be.
Matt Giovanniello:So I think that you made some really, really good points there. That brings me to a very related question as we look towards the end of this episode, which has flown by the way, Rebecca. A little bit of a spicy question for you, building exactly off of what you just described as the difference in your world and how things overlap between MTSS and special ed. What are, from your perspective, common misconceptions about special education that you wish fellow district leaders in other parts of the country knew or understood better?
Rebecca Burton:Oh, that's easy. We don't have a magic wand. There's nothing magic happening in special ed. There's no met everyone's like, well, you were trained as no. I wasn't.
Rebecca Burton:I was thrown in the deep end and I figured it out. I was not prepared. I was not prepared to do the thing that I was asked to do and no one is. And I think what is so critical for everyone to understand is the way that we treat special education as a whole. This is as a whole everywhere.
Rebecca Burton:We treat it like the garage in the house. I don't know where to put this weird vase that doesn't look the way I thought it would look. I'm just gonna stick it in the garage. Right? That is why inclusion matters.
Rebecca Burton:That's why planning for variability matters. That's why understanding that the general education structure cannot pretend that students with disabilities are handled by a different place anymore. That is not something that is sustainable for the general education teacher, but it's also not sustainable for the special education program to be the only ones who are expected to do anything about that. And that again, somehow they have a magic wand to do anything about that. The point is the system was built only for neurotypical people.
Rebecca Burton:Neurotypical white people, actually, if we're being totally honest. So then we have to understand that what happened before whenever anyone was tricky, talked back, or even just in a wheelchair but perfectly smart, guess what? They didn't have to come. They were kicked out of the school, and there was nothing done about it. And now the system, the only real infrastructure that changed you asked a spicy question.
Rebecca Burton:I won't give you a spicy answer. The only infrastructure that changed is that, okay. Now you can come in. That's the only thing that changed. The federal government gives very little funding to support special education.
Rebecca Burton:And so now everyone was just hoping, okay, we give you a trailer in the back, can you just take care of that for us? And then, you know, a couple decades later, you know, the law came out and said, no. You really gotta try and put them in the classrooms as, you know, as much as you can if possible. And then it wasn't until 2017 where you said, you know what? Let's try and have them benefit a little bit from public education.
Rebecca Burton:Could we do that? But it still have credentialing programs really been updated tremendously to incorporate the idea that all educators are special educators? No. Has a board policy or bargaining agreements or any of the key foundational infrastructures of public education adapted to understand that all students are expected and we need to plan for? No.
Rebecca Burton:They have not. And so we in in the actual work of school districts, the employees, the staff members are really inheriting a structure that does not work to do these things, but we're trying our best to figure it out. And is it it's a tremendous challenge. So I think that around special education, what people have misconceptions about it, again, is that we have a structure that works. We don't.
Rebecca Burton:That we have credentialing programs at work. We don't. That we have collaboration systems that are clear around who does what to support students with special needs. We don't. Right?
Rebecca Burton:And and so no matter what, we have a lot of work to do from a lawmaker standpoint to a graduate school system, credentialing program standpoint, and how to build an actual infrastructure of a school district from the ground up that names and and plans for the thing that we are actually asked to do. So that would be, again, probably more than you asked for, but that's my real opinion on on what might be misconceptions about special ed.
Matt Giovanniello:I'm glad you're real about it. We need to call it out. If you don't call it out, nothing's ever going to get solved, and we're still paying the price of that from decades of not being as upfront or honest about the diverse nature of our students as we could. For some background, Rebecca, my uncle is pretty severely autistic. He's in his late 50s now, but he was a product of a child going through public education in the 1970s, and it went exactly as you would suspect it did.
Matt Giovanniello:And you hinted at it before, he didn't finish elementary school and did not benefit from a free and appropriate public education. While unfortunate that those laws are on the books, we have a very, very long way to go. To your point, I think that people who are as committed to advancing this work, such as you, we're really grateful for, but we need more of you. So the more that people speak out about it and help us face the realities of the existing infrastructure of public education, especially as it relates to serving students through a special education lens, the better off we'll be in the long run, but that's only part of it. Just calling out the current state of affairs is among the first and most important pieces.
Matt Giovanniello:Thank you for helping us with that. Now the hard work comes of retrofitting, to paraphrase, the work around the infrastructure that public education so desperately needs to renovate in order to better support our students and put them first, because for far too long, as you pointed out, they've been a little bit of an afterthought. I appreciate your spicy answer to that. It's real, it's raw, it's authentic, and I'm really grateful that we got a chance to hear that directly from you today.
Antonayah Ellis:Kudos for you just being able to identify these things every day. And again, that whole child theology, I heard about it in school, but to hear somebody actually doing it every day for work and teaching others how to do it. I mean, I am in awe. It is awesome to hear, seriously.
Matt Giovanniello:And I think Rebecca, the visuals that you give us, the garage example, I think is very easily understood and relatable, and that's what it comes down to also, non professionals, non experts in this space understand the state of affairs and why it's so important to promote inclusion. Those examples help us and the broader public get there. So I'm just grateful. That's going sit with me, as I imagine it does with you too, Antonella. Thank you.
Matt Giovanniello:Rebecca, as we wrap up our episode, I have one final question for you that we love to ask each of our guests. That question is, what does being an exceptional educator or being an exceptional leader mean to you?
Rebecca Burton:Being an exceptional leader to me means finding out how to build systems for exceptional educators to thrive and removing obstacles, troubleshooting, taking on that work, but ultimately finding ways to let them lead and say what needs to happen to do the work. And occasionally sitting in spaces where people are upset and holding that for them because the work is extremely difficult. It is extremely personal. And if you are willing to do those things and set aside your own vision or ideas or needs in order to facilitate that, the best work really will happen. When it's a multitude of people coming up with a plan instead of just yours, it will go much further and much longer.
Rebecca Burton:And I think for all school, district, any leader, teacher leaders, finding skills and conferences and books, whatever it is that you need to do in order to do that, that is still authentically you, that is what our public education needs more
Matt Giovanniello:Yes, do. Authentically you is exactly what you embody and what we need more of in this world. I think for the MTSS story and journey that you brought us on today during your six year tenure at Lemon Grove, it's fascinating to see just how far you've come, and I'm hoping it serves as an example of within this few year span, what you were successful and capable of doing is something that other district leaders who are inspired by your work are also capable of achieving as well. Thank you for bringing us on the journey. You are exceptional as a leader.
Matt Giovanniello:You inspire exceptional educators, not only at your district, but now everywhere, thanks to your participation in this podcast and all of the conferences that you attend. Rebecca, thank you for joining us today.
Rebecca Burton:Thank you.
Matt Giovanniello:It was such a pleasure. Antonia, thank you for leading today's conversation. For all of us listening to today's episode of the Exceptional Educators Podcast, thank you for joining us, and we look forward to seeing you at the next one.