Revolutionizing Pediatric Mental Health in Schools with Kenzie Butera Davis of Maro

acceleration to funding. Prior to founding Maro, Kenzie spent more than four years composing an academic thesis on the implementation of health education in the US while conducting customer discovery. Her current venture Maro is one of the leading companies in pediatric healthcare innovation as awarded by Oracle Cerner and Children's National Hospital. Kenzie Butera Davis, Welcome to EdTech insiders.

when founders are listening. You have such an interesting background, you've worked in different startups, you've written children's books, you have done all sorts of things in health. And in ed tech. Tell us a little bit about what brought you to your current venture Maro, which is about pediatric healthcare innovation? That's a great question. I don't have a traditional background really, in any sense, I've always just kind of followed

different areas of passion. And my career itself has been largely in and around startup companies. So from the time actually, before I graduated college, I've been working with startups, I worked for an accelerator program. So getting really early stage companies off the ground, from the earliest moments of that company being an idea to raising their first rounds of venture capital. That's the route they decided to

go for funding. And then I worked for two venture funds after that, and was investing in early stage women LED technology companies, specifically in geographies where we don't see a lot of venture capital, going toward companies in general, but especially toward women led companies. So always been excited about this stage of development, but specifically how I got into pediatric healthcare and mental health care that was a little bit more of a roundabout journey, to be

honest. So I wrote a thesis while I was in university, on the implementation of health education in the US, and was interviewing and sort of working with school counselors, with teachers, with parents, sometimes with health care professionals to understand the existing gaps when it comes to that overlap of health care and education. I was specifically focused on sex education at the time, because it's an incredibly controversial space. It's a space where I fundamentally believe there's lots of

education that's needed. And the data actually backs that the more education that you provide to kids or growing teens in the space, the more likely they are to make safe, healthy decisions. And you can actually decrease rates of rape and sexual assault, which was an area that I particularly was passionate about because of personal experience. That's something I've written about a lot actually worked with a rape crisis and domestic violence

shelter for a while. And I felt like it was a huge gap in innovation. No one was really going after that. And so that's where this thesis stemmed from, as I was hearing families and hearing schools and trying to understand what they would both be okay with how we could align on a common ground across the political spectrum. And then over time, as I became more refined in my skills around company building, I just sort of combined my passion area with my

professional skill set. You could sort of see it gradually turn in tomorrow and then I've said Inside Out an incredible clinical team that has helped shape the vision to where we are now. Yeah, it's a fascinating story. So you're putting together, you know, you've mentioned that Maro was going to be a nonprofit, at one point, you're really thinking about working with survivors and getting really,

really deep into that work. But you have this background with venture and accelerators, and you understand the startup world

really well. And it's really interesting to hear as well that, you know, the sex education angle, when you actually started talking to people with your accelerator background, trying to validate the idea, you realize this is a very loaded idea, there's going to be all sorts of, you know, push back, and maybe there's a really interesting way to make a huge difference in kids lives without it having to focus directly on that. So tell us about what Maro actually does. I'm sure many of our listeners

don't know. So it's a really interesting startup, explain how tomorrow works? Absolutely. So we sit at the intersection of families, schools and providers to facilitate early detection of mental illness. So little known fact is that there's actually an 11 year gap on average, between the first time a child shows a symptom, that they're struggling with their mental health to the first time that child receives any form of treatment or

intervention. And most mental illness starts really early, I should say exactly half, we see 50% of all mental illness starting before the age of 14, to this 11 year window is a huge opportunity to reach kids really early before, you know, whatever they're struggling with progresses to something that requires a medication that potentially has them in a crisis situation to now they're facing suicidal thoughts or suicidal

ideation. And so that's what Maro does is, we have built this sort of the analogy that we like to use as TurboTax, because we've taken something that is incredibly complex, which is universal mental health screening, and we've made it something that schools can do in a 10 minute time frame, and they can do it well, they can do it thoughtfully and effectively. And we've created this system of products that work together so that families are a part of that journey through our moral

families app. And so that whenever a child does need to connect with a provider, we are facilitating that data transfer of screening data and anything the parent wants that provider to know directly into the provider system.

right at the front end? And how do you work with other companies that support children's mental health and school mental health?

families. So you think little otter thread health, which actually does pediatrics, and is a partner of ours, manatee health, marker learning, incredible companies, and they're all sort of on that clinical side of the spectrum. And we thought, well, what are challenges that they're facing, where we could actually complement the work that they're doing, without being competitive for the workforce that they're

trying to recruit and pay. And so that's how we ultimately came up with this pre clinical piece of there's the kids that they're reaching, or they're seeing them are often already in crisis mode. Whereas if we could have sent them to manatee or little otter marker, whomever, five years before they got to this point, then that treatment could have potentially been way more effective could be shorter. And so how do we get those kids the right places at the right time?

So Mauro decided to focus on the preventative work and when you look at a lot of legislation, or you look at these groups, where their whole job is to brainstorm, you know, best practices for preventative health care, particularly one that comes to mind is the US Task Force on children's

preventative health care. And they say that screening is one of the best things that you can do and it's also one of the areas but you can decrease a lot of racism and sex bias that can occur when you look at kids in school who are being diagnosed with a variety of different mental health concerns.

workflow. I mean, you think about the day of a teacher, they've got hundreds of kids that they're seeing throughout the day, in most cases, they're probably being assigned lunch duty, pe duty, homeroom things that are outside of their normal scope. And so how do you fit something like this into their day? And not to mention mental health is still a controversial

topic? You know, I mentioned starting with sex ed, but mental health itself, there are a lot of people who believe that mental health does not belong in the classroom. And I'll answer your question directly. But what I would say is, you know, what we had to balance is how do we manage the fact that of 222,000 students who were just surveyed last year, we found that anxiety and depression are the number

one barriers to learning. So we know that they're impacting academic scores, expulsion rates, chronic absenteeism, but we also recognize the importance of not pulling time away from academic classes. So what we had to do is build a product that would actually increase the efficiency of the existing

workforce. And the way that we've done that as we've segmented the different responsibilities of users on our platform, so school counselors, for example, if you're a licensed mental health professional at the district, if you're a credential counselor, you have different features that enable you to screen students or initiate screenings and the actual teacher would have for

their classroom. For teachers, we're reducing their time by, you know, if you're now required to teach some sort of social emotional learning or mental health curriculum, you no longer have to do planning for that we're quite literally giving you a script and a recommended roadmap that's been signed off

by your school. So we're just looking at little ways to reduce the inefficiencies that currently exist in the way that mental health and preventative health strategies are implemented at the district level. And just using technology that to make people's jobs easier. Gotcha.

So it's sort of bringing the school ecosystem to bear you mentioned, you have a parents app that can bring you know, data and insights home to parents, you have professional development and bear and teaching materials for mental health for educators. And of course, you have screening tools for counselors, is that put it together in some way? Or am I missing something?

No, that's right. I think the best way to think about it is we're the only platform that is under one roof, one umbrella helping schools get to the forefront of preventative health

care. And so in reality, right now, what's happening is schools may be screening students, but they might be screening them once they recognize that child's externalizing, their behaviors are going, let's take 10 minutes, just like you would do any sort of standardized testing, throw barriers up, get on the laptop, have your students log in tomorrow, take their screeners, all of those results go directly back to the school counselor, they can pull out the kids who need support,

we're going to find the ones who you didn't know about and the ones that you probably didn't know about. And then we're going to refer those kids in a matter of two to three minutes per student to outside virtual or in person providers. And we're gonna make it really easy to track all the interventions like getting a release of information sign from a parent at the click of a button because they have the parent app because the school has covered the cost of it. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah,

have been done in schools. than a doctor's offices for many years, you know, eye exams, hearing exams, various things like that. And it strikes me that you know, mental health right now is an enormous crisis in schools. And it's also something that from everything I've read, younger people are much more comfortable talking about mental health and anxiety and depression than previous

generations. So this is something that it has sort of risen to the forefront in many ways for the younger generation, but hasn't necessarily risen to the forefront among the teacher generation and the principal generation and the counselor generation. So it's interesting to me that you're taking something that is so top of mind for students and elevating it, making it easy to elevate to top of mind for the whole school environment. Have you seen that kind of thing happening?

concerns. It's a brilliant, incredible thing that's happening amongst the younger generation. But that's where it's really important for teachers to recognize the value and importance of mental health education, because we have to shape and guide that information that kids are getting, just because someone is saying, I have anxiety, or I have depression on social media. And they're listing off sort of symptoms, like I get this in my feeds all the time, because it's

what I do for a living. I'm constantly getting ads for new products around anxiety, depression, etc. And I noticed that there's a lot of misinformation floating around, where because the symptoms of so many different forms of mental illness, overlap via an eating disorder, be it you know, suicidal ideation, there can be a lot of confusion around what's the actual root cause? And is it situational? Or is it chronic.

And you really do need a doctor and you need someone to kind of guide you through that process and the appropriate coping mechanisms because everyone's

different. And so that's where I think I'm so grateful that kids are starting to feel by and large, more competent, communicating that with the exception of there's still a lot of cultural stigma, too, we have to remember that mental health and showing this with your families or fear of punishment, and not being allowed to come back to school if you are forced to leave for mental health requirements. So lots of things

to think about. But I do think from a school administration or a teacher perspective, it's important to remember that these kids need some guidance to help critically think about the material that they're getting around mental health on social media. Yeah,

this a lot. It's like, you know, during the pandemic, we all sort of realized, Oh, the role of a school isn't just teaching, it's a community, it's mental health. It's nutrition. People needed free lunches, it's babysitting, you know, it's so students have something to do when their parents are at work. It's served

a lot of different purposes. And I think it's really interesting and powerful to consider mental health screening, mental health support, and sort of identifying possible issues as one of the core things that schools do in this time when young people are just suffering at enormous levels. How do you think about this idea of a mental health crisis for young people?

get your annual checkup. But they are a place where you have a large swath of students who need preventative health screening for their vision for scoliosis for all these things that we do physical health screenings for really important school plays a necessary role in that and that's why we think screening makes sense in schools. However, we don't believe that school is the place where all students need to get

therapy. Eat or, you know, more robust support that would really overburden our education system, which is already really struggling to staff, their schools with mental health professionals. So it's sort of this intermediary place where we figure out what's going on, we create modes of transparency and communication with providers. Where that is their only job is to provide therapy, medication and other levels of support for a student for whatever their needs are. That's a really nuanced

approach. But it makes a lot of sense, it's sort of the school can help you identify an issue. But you know, there's just not enough people. As you mentioned, there's not enough time in the day, there's not enough capacity, and training, in some cases to really address some of these incredibly diverse and complex problems. And then you add on that layer of social stigma, or, you know, parental approval, it just gets so

complex. But I mean, delving into it, and getting, you know, the traction you've already gotten is so powerful, because I think it really changes the conversation. One of the things that I found really interesting about your model is, you mentioned the professional development you do for teachers.

So, you know, there's work with counselors, but there's also work with classroom teachers that about helping understand mental health, identify it, you know, prevent it, in some cases, and you've discovered a format that's incredibly teacher friendly, which is audio based professional development. I have never heard that before. Maybe that speaks to my lack of knowledge of the PD field. But audio base PD sounds fascinating. Tell us about how you got to audio PD and how teachers react to it.

Well, we created audio PD, because teachers told us the form of media that they liked to listen to. I mean, I feel like I'm preaching to the choir here, Alex, because, you know, this is what you do. It's definitely your area of expertise. But what we heard from teachers is, Oh, we love NPR, or Oh, we love insert, whatever podcasts are listening to now or even music. And we heard that, and then we heard I've really busy

schedules. And we also heard from teachers that what they don't like about a lot of current professional development offerings is they feel kind of demeaning, sometimes, in a sense. And this is a very generalizing statement. I'm not pointing out any existing professional development. But you'll sit down and have this required PD, it locks you into a video and you have to answer five or 10 quiz questions after the content usually is fairly outdated. It hasn't been made

recently. And they just felt like, am I learning anything? I'm watching the same video every single year. And I feel like I still don't know how to support my child who's throwing their chair across the

classroom. And so we were thinking, Well, what if teachers had the option to choose from episodes that were relevant to what's going on in their classroom setting, and it was delivered in such a way that they were getting information from a clinician, that they can apply anecdotally to their classroom, and it's appropriate information for a teacher, it's not intended for that teacher to become a counselor, then, you know, and so we addresses behavioral issues we help you

think about, one of my favorite examples is we partnered with a company called equip, they are the absolute experts on eating disorders, and kids and teenagers. And we did a series of three episodes where we had survivors of eating disorders, parents of kids with eating disorders, and clinicians have opened conversations, but in a structured sort of PD type of way of how can a teacher impact a child with an eating disorder positively? And what are the things as a teacher I need to be

thinking about? And it's things like, I can still bring snacks to school and celebrate birthdays, and do all the things

I normally would. But how do I frame all of these activities through the lens of creating a healthy mindset around body positivity, and, you know, encouraging kids to develop healthy relationships with food and exercise, because sometimes teachers don't realize when they're, you know, accidentally creating I don't think he's ever malicious, but accidentally creating a negative framework

for those sorts of topics. And long story short, we just bring up a lot of different a variety of mental health topics in our audio base PD, and it's been so much fun to create. And I've actually learned a ton through that process.

Have you ever thought about taking any of those episodes and putting them on to the public?

you know, the events. It's like the Oscars for edtech. And so keep that in mind a lot when there were some really hard days. And I was just thinking man, I really, really want to make it I want to have the traction to earn that spot next year. And then when when we got up on stage, it was more about storytelling. Because I think, you know, I'm proud of our product, our product, I think is really interesting and solving

huge need. But what matters is telling the story of all these kids and all the teachers and kind of what they're experiencing, and why they actually need something like this and sort of getting buy in and advocacy from an audience. And so it was very different, it became far less about pitching a business model and a market size and so much more about just telling a story. And that's what I did. And I think that really resonated with the audience.

represented. But I think one thing that really stood out about your pitch, and I imagine this resonated with a lot of people was people don't realize the some of the statistics that you bring up about these long gaps, and how many sort of the enormous lack of support on the early side of mental health in schools. It's a topic that's

very specific. And I think most people don't know much about it, when you realize it's, you know, yet another crisis slash opportunity in this space where you know, this, this is happening so badly right now, you can really, really make a big difference. I think there was a lot of lights going off in the audience, and probably among the judges as well, it was really fascinating pitch. And as you said, the storytelling

brings it home. But just the whole topic is something I think that is not talked about that much. I mean, we're hearing more about teletherapy. And we're definitely hearing more about some kinds of sports. But this is a really different angle on it. So tell us what has happened since that big win, what were some of the results of that of winning that incredibly public and, you know, very visible pitch competition?

space and Uber. And so it's just been so phenomenal to be able to work with people who I revere, I think they're absolutely thought leaders. And, you know, to now have them both financially and sort of intellectually supporting the work that we're doing at Morrow has been huge. And then I would say the other benefit has been leveraging this from a growth standpoint. I mean, this really helped us build a lot of credibility with

schools. It's, as you know, running your own startup, it's very challenging to build credibility in the early days because rightfully so, teachers are wary and administrators and superintendents are wary of new products because they're being bombarded with 1000s of products every year and that number is no joke. I heard that in last year's ASU GSV from one of the consulting groups that was there as they're constantly bombarded.

So to build that early trust is really challenging and ASU GSV really accelerated that for us. One of the things that I think must be really interesting, I'd love to ask you about this when you go to talk to a school or district leader or Anybody who's working in this space, imagine that they don't think that much about this particular side of mental health, because if they did, they would have done something a

long time ago. And so you're sort of shining a light on a piece of the school environment that's particularly sort of unnoticed or broken in various ways. And I'm curious how people react to that, do people get

defensive about their work? Or are they sort of really incensed about it, I'm curious how people in your sales cycle sort of react to your particular problem that you're sort of telling them that they definitely have, even if they haven't thought about So they've definitely all thought about it, that is a it.

universal truth amongst our existing pipeline, at least, most of them have done some sort of universal screening, but it's been social emotional learning and school culture screening, which is very different, of course, than mental health screening, where you're assessing the symptoms of something like anxiety or depression, it's very, very different. But it's an important

foundation. Because it means that they're aware that in that they want to embed multi tiered systems of support and best practices for their schools to make sure that kids are feeling healthy and safe, and they have a good school climate. And this is sort of the next level, the

deeper level of that. All of that said, it definitely differs based on whether or not we're talking to a school that already has a lot of resources versus a school that sort of just exploring what new mental health resources and support they can add. So we get a lot of different perspectives there. Particularly when it comes to implementing a solution and concerns around parents being okay with that, and having buy

in. I talked to a school district yesterday that has 45,000 students, that is, in a county where they have a lot of mental health support, they have a partnership with their county health plan, they're sort of viewed as a county that is more on the forefront of adopting

mental health solutions. And they have a full time employee at almost every secondary school in their district and a part time employee at every elementary school that is dedicated, a dedicated mental health professional, and even they had parents who were in their classroom the day before, expressing concerns about mental health not having a role in school. And my perspective is, we really toe the line of we don't want to make this a

politically driven issue. And as an organization, we don't have a political view on this, all we say is that every school that we have met with has had this concern, and our role is to help you address that concern and make parents feel comfortable

with this. And whether that's education and helping them get up to speed on how to drive some of this education at home, whether it's making sure that they just have their parental rights to consent or opt their child out of screening or potentially have, you know, education, certain content, we want to just help schools

facilitate that. And so that's been a lot of the conversations that we've been having it's schools feeling like, Okay, we think we're ready for this, but we have some concerns around how the community is going to respond. And we just need to figure out how we're going to address those in partnership with Maro. So I think my premise of my question, my assumptions, were

probably off base there. It sounds like it's something that there are people in schools and in school districts thinking about this exact thing, universal screening for at least psychological issues, if not directly mental health. And so there is a sort of a corollary in some schools, that to what you are doing. But you know, we live in a very politicized

educational environment. And at any time, you know, parents can go storm the school board or come complain, it's just been a big part of the landscape in the US. So it's really interesting to hear that last question for you. Before we wrap up. Let's talk about the other side of the parents issue. So we know that there are parents out there who say, this is not the school's role, or they're they're sort of

frightened of it. But I imagine there are also many parents who say, Wow, I am so excited to learn that it's amazing to be able to figure this stuff out for my kids earlier. And rather than, you know, going through years of trying to figure it out. I'm curious if you what your reaction has been from parents to the parents app to the information to the whole premise of Morrow.

The parent feedback has been honestly awesome, Alex, and that's because I think we spent so much time listening to parents across every opinion on the political spectrum, to find The way to really meet parents or anyone you think Morrow like that is kind of our internal mantras, how can we meet each of our users where they're at. And we take that really seriously.

And so we've had parents who were not very open to getting support for their child are really open to understanding whether or not their child has maybe a mental health disorder or something that they need to work through, and they'll read our content. And that actually propels them to feel like, wow, I totally see these symptoms, I understand the impact that they're having now. And I'm actually going to see a therapist like that's a real case study that has happened.

And I also think that there's been more of a propensity to use Maro, because people realize we're not trying to lock you into one path of what's right for your family, there's so many different options, and we're willing to help you get there. So one example is, we screened students at a school in California, and they have a really high population of Polish and Ukrainian immigrant

students. And they actually tried to do a suicide screener with the student population the year before, and had no students score within a range of need for suicidal ideation. But the counselor knew for a fact that that was incorrect, and that students were actually providing false information on the screeners. And what she uncovered was that because of cultural opinions and cultural beliefs around suicide, that those students really felt like they had to provide those

answers. And so they weren't able to identify which students actually needed support. So what we did is we said, we're not going to give a suicide screener, we're going to test for things that may contribute to suicide, like anxiety and depression. But we are not going to directly ask these students about any questions with the word suicide or killing yourself. And that's because what we want to assess is some of those foundational layers that may contribute to suicidal

ideation. And when we did that, we had 18 kids that were flagged for suicidal ideation of 120. And then what we were able to do was that counselor felt like she had the data to then open up more candid conversations with some of these parents. And we were able to find Polish and Ukrainian therapist who could work directly with these students in a culturally sensitive way. And so that was just kind of an awesome example

of that. I felt like where the screening and the parent communication all sort of came together. And we were able to find that middle ground and everyone, as far as the reports that we have felt safe, felt comfortable and never felt like their rights were, you know, stepped on. That's awesome. That's a great story. I think that's a fantastic note, to end on a gives the whole Morrow story in a nutshell, really exciting. We end every interview with two questions.

The first is what do you see as the most exciting trends in the EdTech landscape right now that are coming in the near future? So I think two things. One, I think we're seeing a lot of trends toward the overlap of education and healthcare. I'm excited about that, for obvious reasons. It's really cool to see these two things kind of

intertwine. And I don't think we're we're going to be backing down from that I think we're going to see more and more and more of people realizing schools are a place for some healthcare intervention. And so that's a big, exciting trend. And there are several leaders in the space, some of which I had already mentioned. But I'll mention marker learning again, just because I think they really

do that exceptionally well. The other trend is I do think that the days of throwing clunky UI at teachers are over and I am hearing from you know, technical directors at school from our end users themselves that this is a must have sort of requirement. They are actively testing products before they use them, and making sure that they do everything that they promised they will. And what I hear over and over is the phrase, I have felt like products in the past have under over promised and

under delivered. And we will no longer accept that as a district. And I think that's a really important thing for founders to be thinking of in terms of advocating for their customers. Is it really really matters and schools sense this and they've felt taken advantage of and the days of over promising and under delivering are no longer Yeah, that UI with 100 menus and five clicks to change anything that you want to change. That's

really good to think about. And yeah, definitely a good note for founders don't over promise and under deliver. Never good for anybody but certainly not good for school contracts. Right and school board. professionals have the most understanding of all of the audiences I think you could possibly sell to. So if you just tell them where they're at, they'll usually they're okay with it. They'll work with you. That's cool. What is a resource you would recommend for our

listeners? For people who want to learn more about anything we discussed today? Where might they look? So some of the resources and newsletters that I love I mean, I'm sure you hear this all the time, because they're I'm subscribed to a lot of the general ed tech ones because I love to get used to the landscapes I love Chalkbeat I love EdWeek market brief. I will say on the healthcare side, I subscribe to rock Health's thought leadership. They do a lot in behavioral health a lot

in pediatrics. I've really enjoyed learning about the companies that their investment arm is investing in. So that's another one. And I recently subscribed to digital health buzz. And I think they're just a really fun sort of quirky newsletter that gives a lot of good insights on the healthcare side. Very cool. So yeah, when you're working in the combination of health care, and education, you have two whole industries to

follow. As always, we will put links to all of those suggestions from Kenzie Butera Davis in the show notes for this episode. Thank you so much for being with us. I've wanted to do this interview since seeing that pitch back in March. You know, it's been a while we made it happen. Maro is a fascinating, fascinating company. I'm really excited to see where you go with and congratulations on the round. Thank you so much, Alex. I really appreciate it.