Walk into a preschool classroom and it can look like all the children are fine. But to understand how children are doing and how they are doing over time, it’s crucial to use developmental screenings.

A recently released webinar and issue brief from the United Way of Massachusetts Bay and Merrimack Valley drives this point home.

As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention explains on its website, developmental screenings help early educators and parents monitor whether children are meeting “the typical developmental milestones in playing, learning, speaking, behaving, and moving.”

In its brief, the United Way points to the need to act now:

“Emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, developmental screening will be more important than ever to support mitigation of long-lasting developmental delays and social emotional concerns for young children.”

“Early research out of Brown University and New York city indicates developmental impacts on babies under six months of age who were born during the pandemic, specifically on fine motor, personal social and cognitive skills.”

The brief draws on the United Way’s developmental screening initiative, called DRIVE (short for Data & Resources Investing in Vital Early Education), which grew out of a partnership with the city of Boston.

 The United Way took over the screening project because it saw a community need “to fill the gap where there was little aggregate data from when children left the hospital to when they started kindergarten,” Carla Therriault, the United Way’s director of Community Impact, says in the webinar.

“Even before the pandemic,” the brief adds, “United Health Foundation reported that Massachusetts was screening 52% of children ages 9-36 months, which though second best in the country, left nearly half of young children potentially missing connections to developmental resources. If the needs of children are unknown, they cannot be met.”

Once children have been screened, they can be referred to services. In addition to noting the importance of referrals to appropriate services, the brief calls for better tracking of referral data as well as rescreening children to understand how they are doing.

To help make its case, the United Way’s webinar also included a panel discussion of early educators, including Huong Vu, who is a DRIVE fellow as well as a family engagement counselor at the Boys and Girls Club of Dorchester and a member of Strategies for Children’s Advocacy Network.

Sharing some of the history of DRIVE, Vu explains, “This program hired and trained a lot of parents to become screeners, so that they could support other parents in screening their children’s healthy development by using the Ages and Stages questionnaire in neighborhood-based settings.”

“I’m so proud to be one of the original parent screeners.” 

Parent screeners are crucial, Vu says, because many of them speak different languages, and they can help reach more isolated families and reach children who are not enrolled in formal child care settings.

Lillian Romero, the chief program officer of LEO, Inc., a nonprofit organization that works to “strengthen the Greater Lynn community,” shared the story of how one young boy was impacted by the pandemic. He started at LEO a year ago when he was three. But when he recently returned to the program, “He was a whole different person. He was withdrawn. He didn’t want to play with others. He had a really hard time when we first starting wearing masks. That was really frustrating for him because he couldn’t see his teachers’ emotions because they also had masks.”

The boy and his family needed a lot of support. But he wasn’t the only one, Romero says, adding that she sees many children with social-emotional delays. Thanks to its use of developmental screenings, LEO helps by bringing in early intervention services and deploying family service workers to help parents at home.

Based on children’s unmet developmental needs, “United Way urges leaders to include universally accessible developmental screening in early childhood policy and investment priorities to ensure that young children’s development is included in post-pandemic recovery planning, and to incorporate developmental screening as a best practice in programming supporting young children,” the brief says, calling for:

• the creation of a “network of screening champions”

• “In-depth research and evaluation of the DRIVE model”

• “cross-sector partnerships to explore alignment of best practices among entities requiring screening”

• using technology such as a developmental screening search engine to raise parents’ awareness, and

• investing in more screenings

“Action on these five recommendations would amplify the impact of initiatives like DRIVE to build a system of universally accessible developmental screening,” the report concludes. “For children and families, these actions would ensure that all children have access to development screening and early connection to resources, and all parents are empowered to engage in their child’s development.”

To learn more, please read the brief and check out the webinar.