Session: Family-Centered, School-Based Intervention for Young Children in Low-Income, Urban Neighborhoods: Moving Toward Scaling up (Society for Prevention Research 23rd Annual Meeting)

Nationally, there is growing commitment to high-quality pre-kindergarten as a vital step toward closing opportunity and achievement gaps. There is great demand for evidence-based interventions to enhance Pre-K programs, especially interventions that meet the needs of schools serving culturally-diverse, low-income populations. Robust literatures indicate that children’s academic success depends on high-quality learning environments in and outside the classroom and that children without adequate self-regulation skills are at especially high risk for problems at school, as well as poor mental and physical health.

ParentCorps is a family-centered, school-based preventive intervention for Pre-K students that promotes high-quality learning environments at home and school. ParentCorps is implemented as a universal intervention – for all children – in Pre-K in schools and community-based early childhood centers serving disadvantaged communities. The school-based delivery model and intervention content and process were developed to be relevant and engaging for all families as children enter school, with recognition of the full breadth of diversity found in urban areas (e.g., immigrant status, cultural identity).

Replicated findings from two RCTs show that the intervention results in meaningful educational and health benefits for all children, especially those who are behaviorally dysregulated at entry to Pre-K. Focusing on the second, larger RCT in schools serving primarily low-income Black and Latino families, the first paper presents impact on child outcomes from Pre-K to second grade. The second paper utilizes the control condition to examine risk factors for underachievement among Black children from immigrant and non-immigrant families and the considers immigrant status as a moderator of intervention impact on academic outcomes. The third paper describes our work in the 5 years since the trials to move toward scaling up; we have refined our approach to implementation and developed new tools to support implementation with fidelity, based on experiences within and outside of the trials, recent implementation research and advances in adult learning.