Recognition reinforces Branching Minds’ commitment to integrated safety insights and holistic student support under MTSS.
NEW YORK, NY, UNITED STATES, January 21, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ — Branching Minds, a leading K–12 education technology company that helps districts streamline and scale best practices in Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS), today announced that its Canopy Case Management platform was named a finalist for the 2026 Top EdTech Products of the Year Awards in the category of Safety and Security Technology.
The recognition was announced last week at the 2026 Future of Education Technology® Conference (FETC®) in Orlando, FL, where thousands of educators, district leaders, and edtech innovators gathered to explore the latest solutions advancing teaching, leadership, and student well-being.
These annual awards honor the most innovative and impactful education technology solutions that help school and district leaders meet today’s most pressing challenges. Canopy was selected as a finalist for its unique approach to student safety, bringing threat assessment and suicide risk screening into a single, integrated platform that connects directly to the Branching Minds MTSS ecosystem.
“We are honored and humbled to be recognized among an exceptional field of innovative education technology solutions,” said Maya Gat, Co-Founder and CEO of Branching Minds. “In an era when student safety is top of mind for districts, this recognition underscores Canopy’s role in uniting safety and support through a proactive, holistic, and student-centered framework.”
Bringing Safety Under the Umbrella of MTSS
Canopy Case Management centralizes suicide risk screening, threat assessment, and safety documentation into a single platform, using embedded evidence-based protocols like the Columbia-Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS) and Comprehensive School Threat Assessment Guidelines (C-STAG). This approach replaces fragmented and paper-based processes, helping educators standardize practices, centralize critical documentation, and identify early warning signs of self-harm, violence, and mental health distress before they escalate.
When used alongside the Branching Minds MTSS platform, Canopy connects safety insights with academic, attendance, behavioral, and social-emotional data, giving educators a holistic view of each student’s needs. This integration ensures that students flagged for safety concerns receive timely, targeted, and ongoing support aligned with MTSS best practices.
“Most safety tools focus on documentation after something has already happened,” Gat added. “Canopy transforms safety from a siloed, reactive task into a proactive, student-centered process. It helps teams identify early warning signs, coordinate follow-up across roles, and address the underlying needs that drive concerning behavior.”
Innovation with Real-World Impact
Since its launch, Canopy has been adopted by districts seeking a more coherent approach to student safety and behavioral support. Educators report that the platform’s intuitive design and built-in best-practice workflows improve visibility, collaboration, and data security while reducing the administrative burden associated with managing critical safety events.
“Canopy is doing for us in school safety what the Branching Minds MTSS platform did for us years ago,” said Katie Ahsell, Assistant Superintendent of Student Services and Support in Community Consolidated School District 59 in Illinois. “It allows us to view safety data alongside behavior details, giving us a more complete picture of student need. By centralizing threat and suicide risk assessments and making follow-up actions visible, we are able to evaluate risk holistically and respond more proactively across the entire district.”
Canopy can be used as a standalone solution or as an add-on to the Branching Minds MTSS platform, where it extends a system already used by hundreds of districts nationwide to support millions of students through evidence-based MTSS practices.
About Branching Minds
Branching Minds partners with K–12 schools and districts to help educators streamline differentiated instruction and personalize learning through a comprehensive MTSS solution. By bringing academics, behavior, attendance, social-emotional learning, and safety into one unified system, Branching Minds helps teams act earlier, collaborate more effectively, and support every student holistically. Since 2013, the company has collaborated with nearly 300,000 educators in more than 500 districts across 38 states, improving outcomes for over 2 million students. Learn more at www.branchingminds.com.
Maureen Halton
Branching Minds
413-454-4396
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