Health and Mental Health Programs

The Need

Positive social-emotional support at a young age provides a strong foundation for learning during the K-12 school years and beyond. Training programs that promote teachers’ understanding of social-emotional development and provide tools for preventing and addressing challenging behaviors were popular before the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, and interest grew as teachers and children experienced increased stress and anxiety.

The Strategy

The goal of this work is to equip educators with the skills to prevent and respond to young children's behavioral challenges and support their school readiness and social, emotional and academic development. 

The Incredible Years® is a suite of prevention programs designed to increase a child’s success at school and at home by promoting positive parent, teacher and child relationships. This funding supports Teacher Classroom Management and Dinosaur School, as well as the training and coaching of local peer coaches. 

Pyramid Colorado is a collaborative professional development system that fosters and sustains evidenced-based practices to support the social-emotional development and inclusion of children. The Pyramid Model builds upon a tiered public health approach to providing universal support to all children to promote wellness, targeted services to those who need more support, and intensive services to those who need them. 

Conscious Discipline® is a comprehensive classroom management program and a social-emotional curriculum. It is based on current brain research, child development information and developmentally appropriate practices. Conscious Discipline® has been designed specifically to make changes in the lives of adults first. 

Key Outcomes and Learnings

Impact

Incredible Years

• 34 child care centers with 65 classrooms received supports

Pyramid Colorado

• 25 Pyramid Model trainings were provided to 534 early educators who directly serve 6,729 children across 32 counties.
• Pyramid Model coaching and implementation support was provided to 51 learning environments across 18 counties, reaching 780 preschool-age children and 120 infants and toddlers (900 children total).
• $120,000 in scholarships were awarded to 20 professionals for Pyramid Model Facilitator Certification, representing 8 counties. 

Conscious Discipline

• 40 child care centers/homes have participated in Conscious Discipline training. 
  • 8 provided training to their entire staff
  • 32 had between 1 and 3 participants. 

Learning

The variety of available options for supporting social-emotional learning was well received by child care providers. 

The Incredible Years and Pyramid Colorado each has a Colorado nonprofit organization with a team focused on program implementation. It was much easier to scale program delivery for both of these programs. Conscious Discipline funding went to interested early childhood councils, and implementation was based on their level of familiarity. While delivering all three programs was valuable, it was easier to support the Incredible Years and Pyramid Colorado.