For the past five years, Foundations for Success has worked with the publishers and authors of the Ages and Stages Questionnaire: Social Emotional to develop culturally appropriate versions of the tool in Hmong and Somali, two large immigrant populations in Ramsey County, Minnesota.

Thus far, we have translated the tool using a front and back translation and then reviewed the translations using committees of native Hmong and Somali speakers. During this process, we updated some of the direct translations to be more culturally relevant and created audio versions of the tools for families who do not read their native Hmong or Somali languages.

As a result of these changes, we want to expand our pilot to further assess the reliability and validity of the tool.

We are interested in expanding our work from Ramsey County, Minnesota, to other geographic areas throughout the United States who serve large populations of Hmong and Somali families with children ages 0 to 5.

Partner agencies will help to test and ensure that:

• the questions within the tools are culturally relevant for Hmong and Somali families.
• the tools are correctly identifying Hmong and Somali children ages 0 to 5 with social emotional concerns.
• the audio/electronic administration of the tools is easily understood by families.
• the audio/electronic administration of the tools is useful and convenient for screeners.

The pilot is expected to last from May 1, 2009, to September 30, 2009.

Agencies who are interested should contact Catherine Wright at cwright@caprw.org.

The grant was awarded by the Children’s Mental Health Division of the Minnesota Department of Human Service. Funding will begin on July 1, 2009, and over the next two years will:

• Support in-home mental health therapy for uninsured and under-insured children ages birth to 5 in Ramsey County through Lifetrack Resources and Family Innovations.

• Support the Incredible Years Children’s Therapy Groups for uninsured and under-insured children ages 3 to 5 in Ramsey County through the Wilder Foundation.

• Support the the Incredible Years Parenting Groups for parents of children ages birth to 5 in Ramsey County (the groups include an infant group, toddler group and preschool aged parenting group).

• Support community training in the Incredible Years Infant/Toddler Curriculum.

• Support the Infant Mental Health Endorsement Process of eight early childhood professionals from Resources for Child Caring, St. Paul Schools, Roseville Schools, Mounds View Schools, North St. Paul, Maplewood and Oakdale Schools and White Bear Lake Schools.

We are very thankful for the opportunity to continue to serve young children and families in Ramsey County through this collaboration with the Minnesota Department of Human Services!

The presentation included a discussion of our group’s history, goals, and structure. We also talked about how we have worked to coordinate our efforts with other statewide early childhood initiatives, make our innovations sustainable, track outcomes through research, and impact systems through projects like standardizing culture-specific screening tools.

About 60 professionals and parents attended our session. More than a third of the attendees asked for copies of our presentation, so here are the slides and handouts:

The representatives leading our presentation were Catherine Wright (coordinator of Foundations for Success), Polly Talen (program director of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation), Cheryl Holm-Hansen (research scientist at Wilder and evaluation chair of Foundations for Success), and Dr. Glenace Edwall (director of children’s mental health at Minnesota Department of Human Services).

The grant also will help us create audio versions of the tool in English, Hmong, Spanish and Somali.

We now are able to offer audio and paper versions of mental health screenings to families with children ages 0 to 17 in four languages.

Thank you to the Minnesota Department of Education, the authors of the Pediatric Symptom Checklist, the authors and publishers of the Ages and Stages Questionnare, and Colorado-based software company Patient Tools Inc. for helping us reach this milestone!

Hosted by the National Academy for State Health Policy (NASHP), the videoconference focused on the use of electronic methods for providing mental health screening in primary care settings.

Catherine Wright, coordinator of Foundations for Success, shared the research we have gathered over the past three years on the numbers of children screened in Ramsey County, the cultural considerations for administering standardized tools, and the need for more training of screeners.

View slides from the videoconference here »

Thanks to the Wilder Research Perspectives Breakfast for featuring us during the event on February 26, 2008!

You can download a summary of the presentation at www.wilder.org/download.0.html?report=2053

February 26, 2008

The Foundations for Success screening efforts will be highlighted on the February 26th Wilder Perspectives Breakfast. The breakfast will be from 7:45 to 10:15 am, and it will be held at the St. Paul campus of the University of Minnesota. The event will focus on the importance of early identification of mental health disorders in children zero to five years old. It will consist of a short presentation by Dr. L. Read Sulik, MD, a national expert on early childhood mental health and primary care integration, highlights of the Foundations for Success screening research and a panel presentation.

The event is free, but you must pre-register at: www.wilder.org.

April 28, 2008

Foundations for Success team members will be presenting at the Minnesota Association for Children’s Mental Health (MACMH) Child and Adolescent Mental Health conference on April, 28th from 3:00 to 4:45 pm. The presentation is titled Developing and Sustaining an Early Childhood Mental Health Continuum of Care.

For more information, please consult the MACHM website at: www.machmh.org.

July 16 to 20, 2008

Catherine Wright (coordinator of Foundations for Success), Dr. Cheryl Holm-Hansen (senior scientist at the Wilder Research Center and evaluator for Foundations for Success), Dr. Glenace Edwall (Minnesota director of children’s mental health), and Polly Talen (program director for the Knight Foundation) will be presenting at the Georgetown Technical Institute for Children’s Mental Health Conference on July 16, 2008 to July 20, 2008. The conference will focus on our screening, assessment and treatment efforts. In addition, we will discuss how we are partnering with the Minnesota Department of Human Services’ Children’s Mental Health unit to grow our efforts statewide.

For more information, visit the Georgetown Training Institute website at: http://gucchd.georgetown.edu

The ASQ®:SE is a social emotional screening tool for children ages 3 months to 60 months that is completed by the children’s parents or caregivers. It is a screening tool with exceptional validity and reliability and assists parents or caregivers in identifying both social-emotional and developmental concerns they may have about their children.

Currently, the ASQ®:SE is used to screen about 7,500 children each year through the Foundations for Success partnership. The ability to have an electronic audio version in four languages will greatly support our efforts in assisting families in identifying possible early childhood developmental or mental health concerns and addressing those concerns.

The grant will focus on developing a state-wide early childhood mental health continuum of care modeled after core elements of the Foundations for Success continuum.

The grant is due on February 1, 2008. In addition to the Foundations for Success members helping develop the logic model, Polly Talen, the Knight Foundation’s program director for St. Paul and Duluth, has offered to financially support the grant writing project.

We are very exicted about helping others expand the Foundations for Success model statewide!

Catherine Wright, coordinator of Foundations for Success, and Polly Talen, program director of the Knight Foundation for St. Paul and Duluth, were invited to meet with the early childhood mental health community in Wichita, Kansas on November 30, 2007. The Knight Foundation Director of Wichita, Anne Corriston, invited Catherine and Polly to Wichita to share our early childhood mental health continuum of care with Wichita’s early childhood community.

Over 30 early childhood mental health and developmental professionals attended. The presentation was a huge success and may lead to additional follow-up trips to Wichita.