On Whole Child: Personalized Tiered Supports, host Naren Balasubramaniam sits down with Scott Drue, Director of Student Services at Salem-Keizer Public Schools, for a deeply personal and systems-level conversation about what it truly means to support the whole child.

Scott shares how his own experience growing up with dyslexia shaped his career in education, and how those early challenges now inform his work redesigning systems of support across one of Oregon’s largest school districts. From early literacy and data alignment to over-identification in special education and post-pandemic shifts in student needs, this episode explores how districts can move from fragmented interventions to coherent, student-centered systems.

Listeners will hear why Tier 1 instruction is the foundation of everything, how schools, not districts are the real unit of change, and what it takes to rethink long-standing structures that unintentionally create inequity. Scott also unpacks how culturally responsive practices, early 
intervention, and smarter use of limited resources can dramatically change student trajectories.

Key Moments

05:41 "Building Strong Foundations for Students"

08:43 "Unified Data for Student Success"

10:03 Smarter Resource Use in Education

15:48 "Optimizing Time for Student Success"

17:32 Rethinking Traditional School Structure

22:35 Student Struggles & Data Focus

24:59 "University Partnership for Teacher Training"

Why You’ll Love This Episode

This episode offers a rare blend of vulnerability and systems thinking. Scott brings a practitioner’s lens shaped by decades in classrooms, principalships, and district leadership, grounded in lived experience and hard realities like funding constraints and staffing shortages. If you’re wrestling with MTSS coherence, early literacy strategy, special education identification, or post-pandemic student needs, this conversation provides both clarity and challenge.

Connect with Our Guest

Scott Drue
Director of Student Services, Salem-Keizer Public Schools
District Website: https://salkeiz.k12.or.us/ 

Connect with Host & Metamorphix

Host: Naren Balasubramaniam
Founder & CEO, Metamorphix, Inc.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/narenbalasubramaniam/

Metamorphix, Inc.
Website: https://www.metamorphix.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/metamorphix-inc./

About Whole Child: Personalized Tiered Supports

Whole Child: Personalized Tiered Supports is the podcast where district leaders, school teams, and practitioners share how they are personalizing MTSS to support every learner. Hosted by Naren Balasubramaniam of Metamorphix, Inc., each episode dives into real systems, stories, and strategies for delivering the right academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports at the right time—so all students can thrive.