Proven Tier 1, 2 and 3 Mental Health Solutions Every School Needs Now
- Robyn Hussa
- Apr 17
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 18
Resiliency Technologies had the honor of presenting for the 6th year at the Southeastern School Behavioral Health conference in Myrtle Beach this week and wanted to share important highlights. Download the entire presentation here:
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We started working in the schools in the early 2000's where we saw the great need to address stigma, improve knowledge and comfort in addressing mental health and provide evidence-based prevention (Tier 1) tools that could support all kids.

To be successful, it required us to digitize the ecological model whereby a child at the individual level would be surrounded by support. This meant:
Professionals needed to receive gold-standard training in best practices in mental health and suicide prevention
Clinicians needed access to evidence-based screening and scalable interventions to support all tiers of youth being served in the schools
Families needed mental health literacy tools to decrease stigma and enhance personal wellness
Children needed age-appropriate wellness tools at scale

Early Implementation (2006-2020)
We collaborated with over 40 partners to provide powerpoint and live trainings. These were mostly professional development trainings that required collaboration with:
○ K12 schools and districts
○ Community organizations
○ Health departments
○ Social service agencies
We learned through thousands of feedback surveys and developed films based on the 160 most commonly asked questions.
Our team collaborated to create content and review data in an effort to continuously improve:
Ultimately deployed custom toolkits to various audiences in the social ecological model
Training programs for clinicians, physicians and school professionals
Health literacy for parents and community leaders
Tier 1-2 trainings for youth, parents, educators, school professionals

Early / live trainings were evaluated through pre-post and showed increased confidence / competence in addressing mental illness in schools
Increased connection to treatment
10% of adults / participants came forward to seek help due to considerable decreases in stigma (Anderson et al, 2017)

Taking all of our data, research and findings, we knew:
It was not scalable to reach everyone in the social ecological model by doing live trainings and workshops
To reach across all systems, we needed to digitize and scale our models
Created a cardboard prototpe (shown above)
Shopped it around in 2014 and ultimately created the Sharpen technology platform to deploy specific wellness apps for various audience groups: veterans, parents, youth, educators and professionals through inter-disciplinary collaborations that evolved a library of over 4,000 films and 700 modules.
Platform went live 2014-2019

What we learned over the last 6 years implementing over 40 programs to every audience group in the ecological model:
The data showed us what modules resonated most with each audience member
Deploying the entire NY public library of mental health was overwhelming yet having a full library of modules was also protective
Took the most popular modules and further refined our implementation strategy
created very specific courses
met administrators where they are
partnered to increase reach and scientific research
Our partners that make prevention possible:

The Sharpen system has successfully facilitated dissemination and implementation of community-based participatory research, constant modification based on feedback, rigorous data collection and analysis with research partners and intense collaboration.
Over the years, we have designed and implemented thousands of programs,
interventions and courses with youth from pre-K thru graduate school. We revisited the priority of digitizing solutions following the social ecological model and ultimately honed in on the provider – to meet them where they are in supporting children & adolescents. This led to developing our game-changing digital therapeutic - integrating directly into electronic health record so providers can deploy Tier 3 interventions to children and adolescents along with gold-standard screening tools and digital safety plans.
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