ACE-to-BASE™ (Adverse Childhood Experiences → Building Adaptive Social-Emotional Skills) was developed by Rebecca Bertone, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC, founder of WeeKids PsychCare, Inc., as a direct response to decades of frontline clinical work across emergency, inpatient, correctional, and community mental health systems, and the repeated absence of coordinated early-intervention prevention infrastructure within school environments.
The framework was not created as a curriculum or a commercial product. It was designed as a systems-level early-intervention and prevention solution to address what is repeatedly observed when prevention is delayed until after crisis occurs.
The primary goal of ACE-to-BASE™ is to develop and deploy a Tier 1 Universal Early-Intervention Screening & Prevention System designed to:
Be universally accessible to all children
Operate primarily within the school-based environment
Identify social-emotional risk early — before escalation into crisis
Reduce downstream reliance on Tier 2 and Tier 3 intensive interventions
Maintain high clinical and educational impact
Create low administrative and teacher burden
Be sustainable long-term
Generate trackable, evidence-aligned outcome data
Scale responsibly at:
County
Regional
Statewide
National levels
ACE-to-BASE™ is intentionally designed as upstream infrastructure, not reactive intervention — built to prevent crisis instead of only responding to it.
Through multiple Florida public records requests and county-level data inquiries, it became clear that:
Many counties were not conducting any formal mental health screening for students
Others had fragmented, inconsistent, or non-standardized approaches
Very few counties had universal Tier 1 screening tied to measurable prevention outcomes
This absence of coordinated early screening, paired with consistently rising behavioral crises, significantly accelerated the development of ACE-to-BASE™.
The guiding public-health principle became:
"We must help children heal before “broken children” grow into “broken adults.”
ACE-to-BASE™ was therefore structured to close this systemic gap with a universal, sustainable, and accountable Tier 1 prevention platform.
Rebecca Bertone’s clinical experience spans the entire continuum of psychiatric acuity, including:
Emergency psychiatric evaluation and crisis stabilization
Emergency Room in a Trauma level 1 teaching Hospital . She is a Certified Emergency Room Nurse (CEN).
Baker Act inpatient psychiatric treatment
Community inpatient psychiatric hospitals
Inpatient correctional psychiatry
Outpatient correctional psychiatry
Community outpatient psychiatry
Youth offenders and juvenile justice-involved populations
Intensive Outpatient Programs (IOP)
Partial Hospitalization Programs (PHP)
Detoxification (Detox) and substance-use stabilization environments
Medical- Surgical Hospital Care. She is a Certified Medical- Surgical Nurse (MEDSURG-BC).
She has worked extensively with:
Children and adolescents exposed to trauma
Families navigating multigenerational mental-health challenges
Individuals with co-occurring psychiatric and substance-use conditions
Justice-involved youth and adults
High-risk and high-acuity populations often seen only after prevention fails
This breadth of experience revealed a consistent pattern:
By the time most patients entered intensive systems, the opportunity for early prevention had already passed.
ACE-to-BASE™ was designed to move the system upstream, into the earliest possible point of intervention — before emergency rooms, Baker Acts, incarceration, and chronic disability become the default pathway.
ACE-to-BASE™ is grounded in:
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) research
Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) science
Early childhood brain development
Trauma-aware educational practices
Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS)
Longitudinal outcome-tracking methodologies
Rather than operating as an isolated program, ACE-to-BASE™ is engineered as a public-facing, data-accountable prevention infrastructure that can integrate into:
School districts
Public health systems
Community mental health networks
Legislative and funding accountability frameworks
ACE-to-BASE™ is developed by WeeKids PsychCare, Inc., but operates as a distinct program-development and prevention initiative separate from direct clinical psychiatric care.
Clinical services are delivered through the WeeKids PsychCare clinical practice division
ACE-to-BASE™ functions as:
A Tier 1 prevention and early-intervention system
An education-aligned screening & data platform
A training and certification infrastructure
A population-level outcome measurement model
No ACE-to-BASE™ development funding:
Directs individual clinical treatment
Influences patient-specific care
Replaces clinical diagnosis or therapy
Overrides district or medical decision-making authority
This structural separation preserves:
Ethical boundaries
Clinical independence
Educational neutrality
Legislative and regulatory compliance
ACE-to-BASE™ is currently in the Program Development & Pilot Readiness Phase, which requires:
Cross-sector clinical expertise
Educational systems alignment
Legislative and compliance engineering
Data governance design
Multi-year sustainability modeling
Founder-led development at this phase ensures:
Clinical accuracy
Developmental appropriateness
Ethical integrity
Institutional-grade program architecture
As the program scales, governance will continue transitioning into multi-institution advisory, legislative, and board-driven leadership structures.
The long-term vision for ACE-to-BASE™ is to operate as:
A county-deployable Tier 1 prevention infrastructure
A regional early-intervention system
A statewide public-health aligned screening platform
A model capable of national replication
With the goal of reducing:
Educational disruption
Juvenile justice system entry
Emergency psychiatric utilization
Chronic adult mental-health disability
Long-term public system expenditure
Through measurable prevention, early identification, system coordination, and longitudinal outcomes tracking.
ACE-to-BASE™ is developed and operated by WeeKids PsychCare, Inc., a Florida S-Corporation. All content on this page is informational and historical and does not constitute medical advice, clinical treatment, or a guarantee of school or district implementation.