ZERO SUICIDES - SAFE KIDS: SUPPORTING EMPOWERING STUDENTS AT-RISK (SEAS)

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death for youth. School psychologists and other school personnel often struggle with receiving adequate training, coaching, and access to professional development or programmatic materials to assist with efforts to prevent and intervene with suicide. Given that schools often serve as the de facto mental health provider to children and youth it is imperative that school psychologists be prepared to serve as leaders in their schools to prevent suicide and intervene with students at-risk. School psychologists in schools across the country cutting-edge professional development in order to minimize risk for suicide. The Zero-Suicide: Safe Kids project is designed to provide online professional development, web-based resources, technical assistance and coaching, and live training resources in order to serve to prevent and intervene with students who are at-risk.The ZS-SK project will collect data to help the research team understand whether or not the program helps to increase the knowledge base of professionals working in schools and get some early indications of whether the program is easy to implement in schools and facilitates students getting the help they need. The research project will include an initial data collection phase where surveys will be administered to teachers, school psychologists and students regarding school climate, available resources, knowledge and attitudes about suicide and risk. After the first data collection, schools will be given access to the learning and program materials. During their completion of the learning materials surveys will continue to be given to understand if school psychologists learn the material and whether understood or liked the way the content was presented. After the period of time when professional development activities are over, data will be collected again from school personnel and students to see if there was a positive effect on knowledge, attitudes, and risk for those that completed the training. If the results of the project show that students are more aware of how to get help and are showing signs of decreased risk and if school psychologists are able to increase their knowledge to better help students there is a chance that the ZS-SK could be a program that could be implemented in other schools that may benefit more children and youth.