Developed by Neag researchers, the ESSY Whole Child Screener helps schools look at students holistically
Neag School of Education faculty members Sandy Chafouleas and Jessica Koslouski present the ESSY Whole Child Screener at the 2026 European Network for Social and Emotional Competences Conference (Porto, Portugal) (Contributed photo).
Researchers in the Neag School of Education are bringing whole child screening assessment to a company that provides schools with connected set of solutions that turn every student signal into timely, equitable, coordinated, and measurable tools to track and manage supports.
UConn's Technology Commercialization Services (TCS) facilitated the connection, as the University has licensed the ESSY Whole Child Screener to Metamorphix. The latter will incorporate the screening program into Cascades, a multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) Whole Child platform.
"We are excited to be able to put our ESSY Whole Child Screener into the hands of school staff so quickly," says Sandra Chafouleas, a UConn Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor, Neag professor of school psychology, and one of the developers of the ESSY Whole Child Screener. "The goal of screening is to get students well-matched supports sooner to help them thrive."
The ESSY (Expanding Screening to Support Youth) Whole Child Screener was developed through a United States Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences grant. In addition to Chafouleas, other co-principal investigators on the project include Amy Briesch, MA '05, PhD '09, professor of applied psychology at Northeastern University, and two other Neag faculty: Jackie Caemmerer, associate professor of school psychology, and Jessica Koslouski, assistant research professor in Educational Psychology.
Through the grant, the Project ESSY team sought to develop a comprehensive and strengths-based screener to improve schools' understanding and responses to student challenges.
"Consider a student who is having behavior challenges every morning. The typical response would be to create a behavior plan or incentive system with the child, but maybe that doesn't address the reason," Koslouski says. "For example, what if the child is experiencing food insecurity and arriving to school hungry each morning? Access to breakfast through the school meals program would likely be the better intervention. By screening across domains, the ESSY Screener helps schools to recognize these varied influences on student development."
As part of the development of the screener, the Project ESSY team gathered multiple rounds of feedback from school administrators, teachers, parents, students, and advisory boards to establish feasibility of the assessment. Then, they conducted a large pilot test to validate it and learn how schools used it to guide decision making.
"School leaders expressed appreciation for the holistic view it gave them about their students. They shared that it aligned with their philosophies about child development and they hadn't yet seen a tool that was so well-rounded," Koslouski says.
Once the ESSY Screener was developed, the UConn team began looking for an educational technology company to make the screener more widely available. That led the team to Metamorphix, which had created a whole child platform ("Cascades") to help school staff review data and connect students to well-matched interventions. The Cascades platform was already in use in many schools but was looking to expand their screening options with a whole child focus.
After making the connection with Metamorphix, the ESSY research team approached TCS, an arm of UConn's Office of the Vice President for Research dedicated to tech translation and commercialization.
"We help UConn researchers negotiate agreements that put the products of their research into the hands of the companies that are equipped to bring them to the intended user," says Christopher Conners, TCS director of licensing. "We were happy to facilitate the partnership with Metamorphix."
The researchers are excited to see the partnership move forward so quickly, and Chafouleas credited the collaboration between the University and the company.
"This partnership between UConn and Metamorphix was really key to putting together a complete system," Chafouleas says. "We were missing a way to get our screener to schools quickly and in a usable format. The Metamorphix Cascades platform had everything but their own screener. By combining our forces, we can help schools assess what a child needs to develop appropriate interventions through those multi-tiered systems of support. The Cascades platform is user-friendly and can incorporate the feedback that we received about how to present data."
Naren Balasubramaniam, co-founder and CEO of Metamorphix, is also thrilled with the agreement.
"Metamorphix is proud to partner with the University of Connecticut to advance our mission," Balasubramaniam says. "By pairing ESSY's rigorous, strengths-based whole child screener with Cascades, we are pursuing a cross-sector collaboration that gives educators a more complete picture of each student's needs and context. We aim to turn whole child insights into timely action-and to accelerate our vision to help close the gap between when children's needs emerge and when they receive effective support."
