About Dr. Gail Angus

Dr. Gail Angus pioneered the implementation of PBIS across California, working directly with thought leaders Rob Horner, Jeff Sprague, and George Sugai to bring evidence-based practices to schools statewide. Over two decades, she has guided hundreds of districts across California and the nation to successfully implement integrated MTSS frameworks, creating equitable learning environments where students and staff feel both safe and included.

Dr. Gail Angus blends her doctoral research on PBIS implementation and school violence with 30+ years in education—eight years in the classroom as a credentialed general and special education teacher, 14 years in district and county-level leadership (including 10 years as Assistant Director at Riverside County SELPA), and more than a decade as a national consultant. She has taken the knowledge she gained as a teacher working with students who struggled with extreme behavior issues, combined it with the skills she developed implementing large-scale initiatives at both county and state levels, and distilled it into practical frameworks that drive systemic change. Through her learning, she identified the barriers to implementation and shares this knowledge with educators through her frameworks and weekly podcast, System Shift: Leading Change so Student Thrive. Her focus is on helping districts move from theory to action, from aspiration to sustainable integration.

Driven by her commitment to safety and inclusion, Dr. Gail Angus created the proprietary BRIDGE Framework (Building Responsive Integrated District Governance for Excellence), a comprehensive system that integrates leadership strategies with MTSS, PBIS, SEL, restorative practices, UDL, and threat assessment. The BRIDGE Framework uniquely melds school-based Best Practices with recommendations from the National Threat Assessment Center, FBI, and Secret Service. Her proprietary frameworks and assessment tools support districts not just with implementation, but with building resilient systems that withstand leadership transitions and budget cuts and more critically, enable rapid crisis response while providing targeted interventions for students, staff, and the broader school community.

In a recent engagement, Dr. Gail Angus supported a district who serves approximately 42,000 students, implement MTSS across all campuses. Results were substantial: by year two, the district cut suspensions in half, increased attendance rates, elevated the sense of safety across all campuses, and saw academic scores rise across the board demonstrating the direct connection between systems-level behavioral support and student achievement.

Preventing mass shootings and school violence drives every aspect of Dr. Gail Angus's work. She partners with districts to create inclusive, responsive learning environments where prevention, early intervention, and crisis response are woven into daily operations not bolted on as afterthoughts. Her approach ensures that when students rise to the level of threat assessment, they are connected back to the tier support team to determine the appropriate intervention and progress monitoring, closing the critical gap between identification and support. This integration of threat assessment with tiered intervention systems represents a significant evolution in how schools approach both safety and student wellbeing.