Following a heart-rending school year with a succession of student deaths, the Boise School District is weighing updates to its suicide prevention policy as patrons ask for more clearly defined procedures.
As a rule, the district reviews student-facing policies — such as its standards for addressing student mental health — each year. But this year’s review struck a more pressing tone. Four students died by suicide during the 2023-24 school year, the Idaho Statesman reported.
“People care about our kids, and they just want to know that we’re doing everything we can to help our students out when they may be at risk for suicide,” said Becca Anderson, an area director for the district who also chairs the school board’s policy development committee.
The committee — made up of trustees, administrators and a student representative — initially made small changes to the district’s suicide prevention policy, Anderson said. That included removing “credible” from the phrase “credible threat of suicide.”
“We didn’t want to give anybody the impression that there was someone who’s deciding whether it was a valid threat or not,” Anderson said. “If there’s anything that someone might regard as a threat, we’re going to consider all of them.”
But patrons said the policy was too vague, so the committee pulled it back after the Boise school board’s June meeting.
The new version of the draft policy, introduced this month, lists the types of professionals that typically serve on a school’s mental health team. A typical team — which administers suicide prevention programs as well as intervention techniques when a student is at risk — could include school counselors, social workers, nurses and/or psychologists, the policy says.
District leaders want every student to have many trusted adults in their school buildings who will notice a student is struggling, Anderson said. ”Then we have trained mental health professionals in all our buildings, who are prepared to step in and support that student.”
The new version of the draft policy also lays out possible postvention strategies — activated after a student death. Those can include crisis counseling and education on dealing with grief and loss as well as support for staff through the district’s Employee Assistance Program.
When the new policy is adopted, a mental health webpage will be updated to include a more detailed description of suicide prevention and intervention processes, administrators told Idaho Education News. And it will be regularly updated with current programs and mental health resources offered by community groups that partner with the district.
“Hopefully it will put people at ease (because) it is very specific,” said Andrea Geraghty, Boise’s supervisor of social work and community mental health partnerships. “We are in no way just winging it with kids in our schools.”
The Boise school board on July 8 voted to advance the draft suicide prevention policy to a second reading. Trustees could vote to approve it at their August meeting. An agenda has yet to be posted.
To read the draft policy, click here, and to read the current policy, click here.
