Helping Kids at Risk: How a Vision Became a Startup Tech Solution that Reaches Millions

Schools provide help and resources to students who they know are suffering from stress, abuse, and mental health concerns, but a lot of children's issues go undetected. To prevent children from falling through the cracks and missing out on needed support, Terrace Metrics was founded in response to schools wanting to understand the behavioral-health status of their students, identify at-risk kids early on, and intervene to change the course of their lives.

Utilizing proprietary algorithms, Terrace Metrics created a behavioral health tool that allowed schools to assess the mental health and well-being of their students in a non-threatening, non-invasive way. that established a comprehensive, non-threatening way to assess the mental well-being of students. Schools adopted this tool rapidly, and Terrace Metrics realized that the tool's reliance on multiple third-party tools and manual steps prevented it from scaling with the pace of demand. 

While their main challenge was an inability to scale with demand, the startup tech solution also needed to address the following needs:

• Automate manual processes
• Implement strong security features
• Automate report generation and distribution
• Provide schools with access to administrative tools to manage information
• Create scalability to handle increased usage and thousands of simultaneous assessment submissions
• Allow the addition of new features such as text to speech
• Ensure a low operating cost

Creating a Roadmap to Success

We worked with Terrace Metrics to understand their processes, goals, long-term strategy, and market demand. It became clear that they needed a comprehensive technology solution that included: 

• Creating a code repository with continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) capabilities
• Development and testing capabilities
• Production, monitoring, and support
• Updating the user interface (UI) to focus more on user experience (UX) and ensure an easy, intuitive function for students, parents, teachers, and administrators

We built a comprehensive strategy to meet these objectives and revamp this startup tech solution. 

Cloud Application

First, our team developed a cloud-based web application using Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This eco-system offers the tools and services needed to overcome current challenges and future functionality, including:

• Cognito for secure user authentication
• Lambda for managed serverless compute
• DynamoDB for scalable managed database
• Polly for text-to-speech.