This paper presents data on participants’ mental health status and sustained participation in the program’s afterschool youth group, where participation is conceptualized as a component of overall engagement ( Staudt, 2007). Moreover, such programs struggle to engage at-risk youth ( Lauver & Little, 2005 Byrd & Zhang, 2006 Weiss, Little & Bouffard, 2005).Īs a potential intervention, Project Step-Up is an interdisciplinary, secondary prevention afterschool program targeting socio-emotional and academic domains while also providing needed mental health resources for hard-to-engage youth.

However, most afterschool programs focus on middle-school populations, and are either only academic or socio-emotional focused rather than a combination of efforts ( Levy & Shepardson, 1992 Stephan, Weist, Kataoka, Adelsheim, & Mills, 2007). Afterschool programs provide an excellent opportunity to target academic and socio-emotional domains coupled with secondary prevention efforts for at-risk youth ( Roeser, Eccles, & Sameroff, 2000). Efforts to assist at-risk youth with behavioral difficulties in their academic pursuits require a multi-pronged focus on both academic and socio-emotional success ( Durlak & Weissberg, 2007 Gardner, Ross & Brooks-Gunn, 2008), as well as an emphasis on secondary prevention, defined as “the prevention of clinical illness through the early and asymptomatic detection and remediation of certain diseases and conditions that, if left undetected, would likely become clinically apparent and harmful” (Encyclopedia of Public Health, 2011).

Inner-city, low-income Black and Latino youth are at high risk for developing severe behavioral difficulties and dropping out of high school ( Angold & Costello, 2001 Vallerand, Fortier, & Guay, 1997).

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