Project Summary
Disparities in mental health service utilization are more pronounced for children from diverse backgrounds with
disproportionately fewer Black and Latino children benefitting from mental health supports and services. Schools
are key to addressing these racial and ethnic disparities in mental health service utilization given they are an
important point of access and offer children an environment in which evidence-based interventions can be
embedded within everyday classroom routines and experiences. First Step Next (FSN) is an evidence-based
intervention for young, high-need students who are struggling to develop the vital social-emotional and
behavioral skills necessary for success in Pre-K and early elementary classroom settings. The FSN program
has been successfully applied with over 2,000 K-3 students in the past decade and a half. The purpose of the
proposed project is to develop, implement, and evaluate a mobile-web online training and technical support
system to promote sustainability and enable scalability of FSN. This project will leverage existing resources
and competencies to create a commercially viable technology-based training tool. In this SBIR Phase I research,
we will (a) develop and evaluate a prototype interactive web browser and mobile app multimedia training tool to
enable para-professionals to deliver FSN to young children, and (b) identify additional training materials needed
to address training gaps. The proposed technology-based training tool should be highly sustainable, because it
(a) relies on “endogenous” providers in the school setting (e.g., classroom aides, assistant teachers and family
support workers) as coaches-in-training, (b) is likely to prove cost-effective since we will utilize a technology that
can deliver training at scale, and (c) will improve fidelity both by leveraging technology to provide consistent
training experiences to para-professionals and by including a recorded observation of implementation that will
be reviewed and graded by an expert trainer to increase the likelihood of intervention implementation fidelity.
We will assess the feasibility and usability of the FSN technology platform with end users implementing the
program within an authentic educational setting.
