School Staff and Administrators
Below is a full menu of professional development and training opportunities designed to meet the suicide prevention needs of school staff and community members.
Creating Suicide Safety in School
This full day (six hours) workshop is designed to assist school administrators, school-based mental health and health professionals, school safety staff, and school counselors with planning suicide prevention activities. Sometimes board members, teachers, and parents attend; it is ideal to include members of the school community who are vested in assessing current prevention and response readiness and providing recommendations for improvements. Implementation teams come together to spend the day learning about suicide and best practices in prevention. Small and large group discussions facilitate the development of a customized action plan.
Suicide Safety for Teachers and School Staff
This 60- to 90-minute training is designed to meet the basic needs of school administration, faculty, and staff. Emphasis is on recognizing warning signs, clarifying the referral process in place at school, and making a warm handoff.
Helping Students at Risk for Suicide
The focus of this full day (six hours; administrative overview is two hours) workshop is to incorporate the process of assessing, intervening, safety planning, and following up when there is concern that a student may be at-risk for suicide. This training is suitable for school-based health, mental health, pupil services, school safety professionals, administrators, special education, and pupil services administrators. The goals are two-fold: 1) to improve the competence and confidence of school-based professionals to intervene when suicide risk is identified, and 2) to assist school leaders with developing standardized policies and procedures to support best practices in suicide intervention.
Lifelines Postvention: Responding to Suicide and Traumatic Death at School
Lifelines Postvention is a manualized, full-day (six hours; administrative overview is two hours) workshop which helps school crisis teams review current procedures for suicide and other traumatic deaths in the school community. The strategies presented respect the critical role of the school in the recovery process and provide support, control, and structure to maintain order while assisting in the grieving process of school community members. This training is suitable for school crisis team leaders and members, those who support students and staff in the aftermath of traumatic death and suicide, school policy makers and leaders, and community agency staff who respond to schools after tragedy.