Rebecca Cerna:

To effectively address student suicidality, it’s helpful to begin with the clear understanding of what is happening statewide. Examining trends allow us to move beyond isolated incidents and really see broader patterns where, for example, there might be challenges where disparities may exist, where prevention efforts might be most needed. And these data will help us with a foundation to inform and strengthen local initiatives like the one we’re going to hear about today from San Diego County Office of Ed. I have just a couple of slides to share data from the Biennial California Healthy Kids Survey, which is a random sample of schools from across the state. And it’s going to be highlighting two… I’ll be highlighting, I should say, two indicators and showing trends from 2011 all the way through 2025. There’s many positives and also some areas where we can still focus on improvements.

So the first indicator being experienced chronic sadness and hopelessness where students were asked to respond to a question whether in the past 12 months they had felt so sad or hopeless almost every day for a two-week period or more that they stopped doing their usual activities. And this graph is depicting the data that were reported by 7th, 9th, and 11th grade students from the 2011 biannual survey all the way through the most recent administration, which is the ’23-’25 school years.

There’s definitely some positive news and that there’s a decline in recent years since the pandemic. So we’re back to similar percents from the 2015 era. So we’re moving in the right direction as a state since the pandemic, and there’s still room for improvement. When you have about looking at the red line, the one with the circles, the 11th graders, a third of students reporting still that they experience chronic sadness.

And we can go a little bit deeper by exploring one demographic indicator, in this case, gender. The story, when you look at female students, they’re reporting significantly higher levels of chronic sadness than their male counterparts across all three grade levels. You see the percentages hovering somewhere around 36, 35% of females in 7th, 9th, and 11th grade reporting chronic sadness.

This is just one demographic. If you do administer the California Healthy Kids Survey, you would have access to the dashboard from your district where you’re able to further explore the data by other demographic indicators that are provided through the survey. And there’s also a mental health report card that is provided.

I’m going to share one final indicator, and this is on suicide ideation and whether they seriously considered attempting suicide. And again, you see a decline in students reporting suicide ideation in the past 12 months. So this question wasn’t added for a seventh grade survey in the seventh grade survey, I should say, until the ’19-’21 biannual survey administration. And so that’s why you don’t see the blue line before. But from the ’21-’23 through the ’23-’25, we are seeing a decline in suicide ideation.

And again, if we further explore by that same demographic indicator, gender, and this slide is only highlighting 11th graders, you again see the disparity between female and male students trending in the right direction, decreasing, but you still see that disparity between female students and male students. And also, we just want to recognize that behind every data point is a student, a family, and a school community trying to support students. So it’s important to dig deeper with the data.

We’re happy to have Heather Nemour from the San Diego County Office of Education. Heather is a coordinator for the student wellness and school culture for the San Diego County Office of Education. She provides training, technical assistance, and coaching to 43 school districts and over 100 charter schools across the county in the areas of suicide ideation, mental health, mental health and wellness, and positive school climate. She also co-leads county and statewide suicide prevention and mental health initiatives to inform school systems and practices so that students are safe and supported. Previously, she was instrumental in the development and oversight and sustainability of a model community collaborative and a network of five school-based family resource centers that supported over 70 schools. Joining her is also Rachel Wegner. You will see her in the chat. She’s a program specialist for student wellness and school department for San Diego County Office of Education, and she’s going to be supporting with answering some of the questions through the Q&A feature.

And now I’m going to pass it to Heather.

Heather Nemour:

Okay. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Thank you everyone for being here today. Very excited to share with you our local initiative that we have been really just leading the last four years. So I’ll just dive right into it. So if we can go to the next slide.

So today, what hopefully you walk away with is data collection strategies, including how to measure and track outcomes around mental health and suicidality. I’ll share key components and tools that can be adapted. You’ll get a lot of resources and templates, and really this initiative is meant to be a pilot over the four years that can be replicated across the state. Crisis response protocols to effectively intervene and keep students safe. Our policy to practice toolkit, it’s all in one toolkit that I’ll be sharing. And then peer programming strategies to support each other in foster positive school change and share our work around peer programming with mental health and suicide prevention. All right. Next slide, please.

So in San Diego County, just to give you an idea of some context of how many schools and districts we have, we have 43 school districts, 129 charter schools, which equates to about over 480,000 students in our county. Next slide, please.

So I’m going to give you a high level overview of the COPES initiative. Again, it stands for Creating Opportunities for Preventing and Eliminating Suicide. Next slide, please.

So just a high level overview. You saw how many districts we have in our county. We got a very good, really a good group of LEAs in our county that we offered every LEA to opt into this initiative. And we have 16 school districts, 12 single site charter schools, and four multi-charter school organizations, which equates to over 440 schools that are represented in this initiative. Next slide, please.

So for the Behavioral… Well, it was the Mental Health Accountability Commission that is now changed to the Behavioral Health Oversight and Accountability Commission. They wrote a report called Striving for Zero, which they mentioned in there the importance of tracking suicide risk screening data as a best practice. And it is highly encouraged for tracking trends in our county. This initiative is modeled for the state to really show the importance of collecting suicide risk screening data. And so a big part of this initiative is, I’m going to talk about it, was really getting our LEAs to do this. There’s so much we don’t know about suicide ideation, how many students have been screened or assessed. And this is critical data that really can help inform programming, funding, and policy. Schools collect suspension data, expulsion, attendance, but we don’t collect this critical life and death data. So referring to the zero suicide document on page 78, it states that CDE should be required to collect suicide risk screenings or assessments and including that demographic data.

So this is what our county’s been doing to model to the state. And I’m really happy to say that our team just presented at the Behavioral Health Commission meeting, and they just approved for LEAs to collect suicide risk screening data and demographic data to put into legislation. And it is going to the legislator, and there’s already a legislator that’s going to author this bill. So really, all of you being here today, proactive to be able to learn best practices in collecting this critical data. All right. Next slide, please.

All right. So what this initiative really is about is it’s a capacity building initiative. And instead of spending the funds on school mental health staff, services and schools, we took a different approach, which is pretty unique with every county in our state having these funds. And we decided to really build the capacity of every LEA involved in this to become subject matter experts in suicide prevention and mental health. So that way, beyond the grant years, we’ve built the infrastructure with trainings and with resources and peer support, all of that really being lifted up to build that strong foundation to go beyond the grant years. So you can see here, the mental health promotion and education, the work we’ve done, we’ve really spent the first year focused on the suicide prevention one for prevention, intervention, post-vention, supporting LEAs to make sure they’re meeting the legislative requirements and best practices in this critical work.

And one of the biggest successes of this grant was to get all 440 schools to be able to switch to a evidence-based suicide risk screening tool, which I’ll talk about in a minute. And then everything we do in this initiative is data-driven really to get the buy-in with our LEAs. We use the data that we’ve trained and supported our LEAs to use their data in a way to be able to inform the planning and programming each year of the grant. All right, next slide, please.

So one of the big key pieces of data that we have done is we, with our evaluation team at UCSF, developed a very comprehensive needs assessment that our LEAs do each year. Our team meets with their teams that they build at their LEA to really be able to review this data and use it to inform the work we’re doing with each district and charter school. So the student mental health referrals, looking at what are the referral protocols and partnerships and forms that they’re using, looking at mental health services and supports, those tiered supports and mental health emergency supports, suicide prevention, really looking at those protocols, practices, and policies, tools, and training, and mental health promotion, really reducing stigma, building mental health literacy, and really focusing on staff wellness as well, which is just as important as student wellness. And then just lifting up peer programming, peer engagement to really make sure we’re doing this with students, not to them or for them, lifting up student voice. All right. Next slide, please.

So our comprehensive needs assessment was specifically designed around the unique needs of San Diego County, but we want to give you this fabulous resource from SHAPE. This really shaped how we ended up doing our needs assessment and resource mapping and so forth. So we just highly recommend this guide because it gives you all the tools and information to be able to do this well in your county. Next slide, please.

Another critical piece was resource mapping in schools. So we wanted to make sure that every LEA had, based on the needs assessment they do, they put the tiered supports for the trending mental health issues. So everything from anxiety to depression, to eating disorders, to substance use, to really see where are the tiered supports in place, and then where are the gaps? And then we did a gap analysis to identify those gaps. And then we worked to create a countywide resource map for those trending mental health issues.

And this has really become a much bigger project than we ever anticipated. And so we have been able to put together an amazing resource map with over 600 resources. Think of it as like a 2-in-1 for schools for training mental health and behavioral health issues. And then with those resources that we were able to fill the gaps within each LEA’s map. So this is going to be something that is sustainable and is going to eventually be made public. We’re working on it for our LEAs to be able to go in and find anything they need at their fingertips, whether they’re part of this grant or not. All right. Next slide, please.

So I’m going to move to key components and tools most that can be adapted by your school district charter school. So the first one, if you can go to the next slide, just want to set the stage for so much of the work we did to build the foundation, which you’ll see our data really reflects this, is stigma reduction. And so we really start off with mental health literacy and give just a hour overview training, or we do youth mental health first aid of a whole day training to really make sure that people understand that mental health disorders just can impact how we treat students, how we treat each other. And it can lead to unkind or insensitive to remarks that really lead to stigma and shame and how this shame can make people afraid to say they have a mental health disorder or that someone they love has a mental health disorder.

And I can guarantee every person in this webinar knows someone, has someone in their family or themselves who are struggling with a mental health challenge. So we really got real with our LEAs and made sure that they were training their staff to understand that everyone has mental health. It’s a part of our everyday life. It ebbs and flows and to just knock out that stigma. Next slide, please.

So some of the ways that we did this, these are examples. There are many more. We started a mental health webinar series for staff, and they’re like, “Just give us strategies, tell us what we need.” And we know that school staff don’t have time. So we created lunch and learns and really 50-minute webinars where we give them exactly what they wanted, ranging from depression, anxiety, eating disorders. And just so you know, the links are all here to the recordings and to access the slides. And so really just building that mental health literacy with all our staff was very important.

And then similarly, with the next slide, you’ll see we did this with parents. We truly believe that parents should have the same information and resources as school staff do to really make sure we’re addressing the whole web of support for students. And so you can see here, we’ve been partnering with Rady’s Children’s Hospital for several years now. And every year we gauge what are the trending mental health issues that parents want to learn about? And then they identify physicians or clinicians to present on these topics where parents can then have a Q&A session with them. We wanted to make these available to all as well. So these are examples. Again, we often have schools reach out and say, “Can you do this webinar or training for our parents? As a County Office of Ed, we don’t have the capacity, but what we do offer is access to recordings and slides.”And we’re like, “Have a parent gathering, have a cafecito with parents and show the recording. And then you can do a Q&A discussion after.”

And we most recently created discussion guides for schools to prompt questions for them after, which will also be posted on our website soon so anyone can access these. We just started our webinar series for parents last night. And if you go to our website that Rachel’s putting in the chat, you can get access to the current webinars. And these are open to everyone in the state. We don’t care about zip codes at our county office. We care about all kids, all families, so we share everything with everyone.

All right. So the next slide is this legislation went into effect, I want to say two years ago, AB748, which requires middle and high schools to post these mental health awareness posters in schools in places where students can visibly see them. So we partnered with youth across the state to co-create these mental health posters to make sure that they resonate with youth and they’re on CDE’s website. Hopefully these look familiar or you can create your own, but hopefully you have mental health assistance posters in your schools to meet those legislative requirements. Next slide, please.

Similarly, every year we work with teens across the state to create a teen guide to mental health. And if we can go to the next slide. Thank you. This is also available for every middle and high school student in our state. So this is also something you can share so that youth have at their fingertips the resources they need to support each other. And then we also have a site on our website where teens create mental health resources created by teens for teens. An example here is an anxiety coping card, a group of neuroscience students at a high school. And San Diego decided we have a lot of resources, great, but we need something in our pocket, especially in May during testing or college applications and we’re all stressed out and they chose the five senses that they could just be able to tap into. And that can be printed and folded and given away to your students as well.

Next slide, we have parent resources. So everything a parent needs to be able to access information, resources, training to support their kids at home. The green one you see is for middle and high school parents, and then the orange one is for elementary. And then next slide, please.

So one of the things we did in the COPES initiative is we keep hearing students saying over the years, “Adults are great, but sometimes they just want to fix us. And we prefer to get support from each other, from our peers, from our friends.” And so we really knew it was important to increase mental health literacy for our students so that they can support each other and reduce that stigma on school campuses. So these are two examples of mental health peer programmings we did in our high schools, NAMI on Campus, but most are actually doing Bring Change to Mind, which has been just a game changer. And I’ll show a little data in a minute about that, how that has impacted our schools.

And if you go to the next slide, you can see our peer programming for suicide prevention, which has been just a game changer and really taking away that stigma and empowering our youth to learn about suicide prevention and how to support each other and normalize it. And what’s really unique about this is that there’s not a lot out there for suicide prevention in elementary schools. And we created a guide that puts everything out there so schools can meet the legislative requirements of AB 1716. And this Hope Squad and Sources of Strength are two examples of peer programming that start as young as elementary because we know suicide ideation is happening in elementary just as much as middle and high. And we have this in, I think, 131 of our schools, these peer programming models. So we’re really starting to see some nice outcomes with this.

Next slide is just a glance of some of the peer programming outcomes that we’re seeing. So you can see that it’s making an impact on our peer leaders by building community, increasing connections to support, and increased understanding of mental health. And then it also has an impact on the school community by increasing connections to support, improved peer support, and increased knowledge of resources and improved school climate.

So just some takeaways. We were able to take a group of students to the Wellness Together Conference, and they just did an amazing job with their advisors on doing a whole breakout at the conference on the impact of these peer programming models that they have.

All right, so moving on, sorry, a lot of information. So moving quickly.

Now, suicide intervention was … A lot of our work is really spent on suicide intervention after prevention to really be able to effectively intervene and keep students safe when there is a mental health crisis. So I want to get everybody on the same page here. So if we can go to the next slide, what we have found even before this initiative, surveying our schools and finding out that there’s just such a wide variation of how schools are screening kids for suicide ideation or assessing students for suicide ideation. And we found that our schools were just using … Some weren’t screening, some were, some were assessing, some weren’t. Some were using a tool, an evidence-based tool, many were creating their own tool. Some were using a threat assessment for a suicide assessment, and we were like, “Wow, we got to really have a systemic consistent approach where we’re all screening and assessing in the same way.”

So what we had to do is just back it up because there’s so much confusion between the difference of what a suicide risk screening is and a suicide risk assessment. And everyone from school psychologists, to clinicians, to counselors, to principals use these two terms interchangeably. So we really were clear with our LEAs and getting them on the same page to what is the difference between a suicide risk screening and a suicide risk assessment. So you can see here, suicide risk screening, it’s a standardized instrument used to identify students who may be at risk for suicide administered by any school staff. So in our grant, our LEAs chose to use the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale, evidence-based, it was created for K-12 schools. Most of our schools were using it that were using an evidence-based tool, and most of our school partners use it such as child welfare and probation and so forth.

So getting on the same page using the same screening tool. Now, when I say suicide risk screening tool, we are not talking about universal screening. That’s another confusion. A suicide risk screening tool is only used when there are warning signs that a school staff notice that the student may be experiencing suicide ideation. Universal screening tool is when we’re screening all kids the same way, which this is not that. Suicide risk assessments, it’s a more comprehensive evaluation tool used to confirm suspected suicide risk, estimate immediate danger, and decide on the course of treatment and administered by a trained school professional. Big difference. Suicide risk screening tool, principals can do it. Parents can do it. Columbia University’s got brochures for all stakeholders and how to do the screening where risk assessment, you want a trained mental health professional to do that. So you can do a suicide risk screening, and if it indicates moderate to high, you can then do suicide risk assessment, but suicide risk screening is what our initiative focused on.

Okay. So now with that, going to the next slide. So before this initiative started, as I said, we surveyed our LEAs to really use that data to inform this initiative. So we first determined which screening tools were being used. We wanted to find out if it was evidence-based, and then we adopted a standardized screening tool, which was the Columbia, and then we made sure that everyone was trained on proper tool usage, not just how to do suicide risk screening in schools, but the continuum of care thereafter. And then establishing thorough and consistent protocols and practices, which we have it all packaged for you in our policy to practice toolkit, and then being able to track those screenings. Okay. Next slide, please.

So our suicide intervention toolkit, the policy to practice, it really has everything a school, district, or charter school needs to implement comprehensive systemic practices and suicide intervention. And so everything from the protocols to the practices and using systemic best practice actions, we have templates in there. You can just adapt and make your own, put your logo on it and align it with your own policies there and the strategies and resources, everything’s in there, the tools, and you can make it your own. We are proud to say that this toolkit received the CSBA Golden Bell Award in 2023, and it has just been widely used, not just across our county, but across our state. So again, we share everything. So this is something, if you are able to stay for the Q&A after, I can walk you through the toolkit or answer any questions you have about it. All right, next slide, please.

So some guiding resources that were really essential in working with our districts and charters. Our first, we do this suicide prevention resource guide for K-12 schools every year in partnership with our suicide prevention council. And this is really something that was in response to school administrators years ago saying, “I am overwhelmed. I don’t have time to sift through everything that is out there. I need you to tell me. I need you to vet the resources, the trainings, the tools, the programming, the curriculum, so I can just have it at my fingertip.” And we heard them loud and clear. And in response to that, every year we update this guide to make sure it’s current, relevant in the field of suicidology.

So this is something you can go to and look at all the legislation around suicide prevention in schools. You can easily look up, “I want to do peer programming in my school.” I just shared a couple with you. You can look at all of them in there. It can tell you if it’s at cost or no cost, and it gives you links and a short description so you can easily navigate everything that’s out there that we know of. And we of course vet this guide and share it with our partners at our statewide suicide prevention, statewide student suicide prevention partners meeting that our office facilitates and with our COE Mental Health and Wellness Collaborative across the state that we also facilitate.

The other thing is the Suicide in Schools book. The second edition here, it is the best thing out there for schools to be able to use. We bought two copies for every LEA in our grant, and we use this constantly. And if they’re asking questions, we can answer them and reference the page number. It’s really our Bible to everything in schools and suicide in schools. I can’t say enough about how helpful this book is. Everything from we’re often worried about liability and documenting and what do I do in this scenario? What do I do in that scenario? It’s all there for you. So highly recommend that you buy a copy.

Okay. So next slide, I’m going to go into some of the data. So again, everything we did in this initiative was data-driven, and I’m going to talk a little bit about how we did that. So with the first slide, we have the annual data collection, which gives you an overview of all the data we collect. So of course, we made our LEAs do the CHKS core module and the CHKS Mental Health Supports module, which I think the name changed to behavioral health, but making sure that our LEAs were doing this each year so that we can really monitor and look at that data. And I’ll give you examples of how they used it. Suicide risk screening data I talked about, we also collect, this is a capacity building grant. So we build the capacity of the LEAs and then they train their schools and their staff. So we collect those trainings and activities and events, and then the needs assessment data, which I talked about.

So if we go to the next slide, I’m going to break this data sharing down for you. So our suicide risk screening data, I want to give you a snapshot of what this really looked like. So if you go to the next slide, we started this about two and a half, three years ago, and to date, we have over 10,000 suicide risk screening data that our LEAs report to our evaluators. They collect the number of suicide risk screenings, the gender, race, ethnicity, grade, level, severity, and the outcome. And we are gifting you a Word version of the Qualtrics data collection questions we ask them.

So it’s all there for you if you are interested in doing this with your LEAs. So we not only use this data to collect high level trends in our county, but we also teach our LEAs how to use this data. And some of the things they’re doing is their school boards now expect quarterly reports on the suicide risk screening data. They use it to support advocacy for funding, services, and programs related to student mental health. School administrators advocate for staff training, peer programming, and school-based supports with this data. And some schools use it in staff meetings to ensure staff are aware of the need to support student mental health and suicide prevention. So presenting screening numbers and grade level data to students and families also explains the need for mental health programming supports. It provides evidence of effectiveness of programming and support, and really using this data also in team meetings to ensure students are receiving proper levels of support. So those are ways our LEAs are using the data.

If you go to the next slide, these are our high level trends. Just a couple examples I’m going to share with you that we’ve captured. So we know that females were screened more than males or other gender categories. So when Rebecca was showing the surge of females with chronic sadness and hopelessness, this kind of correlates. And so you can see that females are really trending in suicide risk screenings. The next slide shows you the majority of the screenings occurred in grades six through eight. So thinking about this, we ponder, and we know middle school, it’s a tough time. There’s a lot of transitions and changes. They’re trying to figure out their identity and so forth, but it really shows us that we need to have a lot of supports in our middle schools. And then the next slide shows that in the past two years, there were more screenings conducted in fifth grade than in ninth grade. And what this shows is how important it is to realize that suicide ideation is happening in elementary ages. In as young as 10 years old, we’re seeing suicide deaths and how critical AB1767 was in passing that legislation because we need suicide prevention policies and practices in our elementary schools.

And then the next slide shows you just how our county office, our team uses this data to drive our technical assistance and support we provide to our LEAs. We noticed, for example, that not all LEAs were saying they provided resources to the student or family after suicide risk screening. And we were able to circle back with them and kind of learn more about that and ensure that they knew they had these tools, handouts to give them. Also, following up with the parent and guardian when it’s low severity, there’s hesitation, why should I bother the parent? But you have to treat every single suicide risk screening the same and just as important to let parents know so we can all be on the same page. So these are examples of how we’re using the data.

The next slide just shows you our needs assessment data and how we’re using this, not just our county office, but how are our LEAs using it. So we know that 100% of our COPES districts and charters are using an evidence-based suicide risk screening tool, and they’ve trained staff on how to use the tool. This was the biggest lift for us. We have big, huge districts, we have medium districts, small, rural, everything, we’re all on the same page. And you can see here how trainings to families on suicide prevention went from 26% to 74%. That is capacity building. Often we get grants and we spend it on staff and then the grant ends and the services go away. This was not our model. This data is exactly what we were striving for. Resources are on the website and tier one supports for suicide prevention went from 39 to 68%. Tier two suicide prevention, 42 to 77%. So you can see we’ve really built the capacity.

The districts and charters use this data to help mental health teams set goals and annual focus areas, and we work with them to use the data to plan each year. They use it to determine focus areas for suicide prevention work, and they use it to process the needs assessment process to align work across school sites. And tier supports data really, as I said, was used for our resource mapping project.

Next slide just shows some other gains in our county with this initiative around stigma reduction, because we can’t do any of this work without reducing stigma. So staff increase their knowledge about mental health challenges, the district and school leadership to normalize those conversations around mental health, that’s hard to do. And so it doesn’t look like a big game, but it is when it comes to that topic. Positive mental health messages and resources offered on campus went all the way to 90%, encouraged students to talk openly about mental health. We’re seeing a strong continuous increase in that area. And then the use of positive language when talking about mental health.

So I will say we are in our fourth year of our four-year grant, we are going to have our LEAs do another round of needs assessment at the end of this school year, and we don’t have our CHKS data back for this school year. So when all this is wrapped up, maybe Rebecca will invite us back, but we’ll have some kind of just probably more positive trending data to be able to share from this initiative.

Okay. So the next slide is our CHKS data. So it was so important to get our LEAs to do this data. And because most of our LEAs in our county do CHKS data, we also extended all of the trainings that we offered, the COPES LEAs, we extended countywide to all our districts, all our charter schools.

So I wanted to give you that context in the beginning because there’s a piece of this initiative that is also countywide. So we wanted to closely monitor the countywide CHKS data to see, are we making an impact? And we know that 93% of our 43 districts have staff trained in mental health and suicide prevention. So we know that this data is speaking to the trainings that have been done. So Rebecca shared some statewide data and we have some similar trends at our county level. You can see seriously considered suicide in the past 30 days with our seventh graders. What’s interesting to see here is that they’re at 11% and they’re even higher than our 9th and 11th graders, which correlates with those suicide risk screenings I was showing you that are trending in middle school. But the good news is it’s decreased by 3% for seventh graders. And then for 9th and 11th graders, we’ve decreased suicide ideation by 5%. So we will take those gains all day long. It’s still too high. It should be zero, and we’re striving for zero, and we hope to have more positive trending data at the end of the school year.

Chronic sadness and hopelessness where students said they felt so chronically sad and hopeless in the last 30 days that they were unable to do their usual activities. We see with our seventh graders are at 24%, but it decreased by 5%. And more impressively, our ninth graders decreased by 9% and our 11th graders decreased by 11%. So we’re seeing this downward trend, which is great. And then with our elementary CHKS data for our fifth graders, we didn’t see any change the last couple of years, but then this past school year, we saw it go down to 17%, so that’s a decrease by 2%. So we’re trending in the right direction, and this is hopeful promising data that gives us hope to keep this work going.

So I wanted to give you a sense, and Rachel’s here. She’s just been an amazing leader in all this, and her technical skills, it could not have happened without her. So one of the biggest supports we give to our LEAs is we take their CHKS data for the past four years from baseline to current, and we’re able to show them in the indicators that we’re tracking for this grant, the trends. And so we meet twice a year with each LEA and their leadership team to be able to share this data and really talk it through. And so you can see here, for example, let’s just take the fifth grade, you can see here the fifth grade frequent sadness and on the right side, on the right chart. And you can see that we know with the frequent sadness that if you look over to the blue, those are positive trending areas.

So if you go to the second to last column, last school year, it went down 1%. And if you go to the very last column, change from baseline, it’s gone down 8% since the start of the initiative. And the next one, knowing who to get help from, you can see 3% in the red, it actually went down. So good data to know. And we talk with our LEA and say, “What do you think’s going on here? What can we do to get this going in the right direction and put that in our action plan?” And then you can see it’s still positive, 11% decrease since the baseline. And I’m going through this with you because we …

Oh, so one quick thing is our LEAs use this, they share this data with their school community, with their boards, their administrators, their staff, students, and families to demonstrate the effectiveness of supports and programming and to advocate for continued efforts. So there’s been district-led meetings with administrators. They really look at this to focus on their school improvement efforts, guides decisions on their focus areas for each year. For example, their bullying data demonstrated a need for increased steps supervision at lunch. They present data to students to drive conversations on student wellbeing and school climate. And so you can see that there are so many ways schools can use this data just having it at their fingertips.

And if you go to the next slide, this one just shows the CHKS grade level comparison. And so it just gives you a way to look at in any given year, how has your grade levels, how are they doing by these indicators?

And then the last slide on this template I wanted to show you is we are gifting you this template. And thank you to Rachel for creating this for this webinar because we’re right now in sunsetting this initiative and everything we’re doing right now is sustainability. How do we sustain all of these efforts? So creating this template and being able to give it to you all, to give it to our LEAs and our county, they have everything at their fingertips to put in the formulas. So if you have your CHKS data for the last four school years, you can plop those numbers in there and those green positive indicators and the red negative indicators will automatically populate for you. You’re welcome.

When you’re sharing this, anywhere there’s text, you can modify the indicators and years across the top row too. Maybe you don’t have all those years, so it’s formulated to be able to make those changes. But when you do open this link, you need to make a copy of it first before you start using it. So this is in the Padlet for you to have access to and just be able to have a way for you, county offices, for you districts, for you school leaders to have this data and really use it because our toolkit’s called Policy to Practice because we have all these great legislations and policies, but they don’t often trickle down to daily practices in our schools. And this data-driven approach is a way to do that.

So with that, I think I’m at time. I just want to close by saying that everything we do is our success is born in our approach, and really that is everything we do. It’s with humility, understanding, grace, and being of service to others. And it’s called HUGS, and it includes our approach and work with everyone in the field, our colleagues, all of you, our families, our staff, our youth. We do it with hugs. And with that, I’m going to close out with my contact information and hand it back to Rebecca. And I’m at 10:23. Very happy. I stayed on time.

Rebecca Cerna:

Thank you so very much, Heather. And also, Rachel, on the background helping as well, answering some of the questions, we appreciate all this wisdom that you shared and what you’re doing in your county and also how it relates and is transferable to any county in our state and the offering of all of the resources that you have for sustainability, not only in your county, but also to help sustain and possibly grow and start some work in other pockets or strengthen some of the other work happening in some of the other regions in our state.

As I mentioned, we’re going to launch a quick feedback poll. We’re coming to the end of the actual webinar portion of this session. As I mentioned at the beginning of the session, we are going to stay on another 30 minutes for just an informal Q&A. I know that we were able to answer some of the questions on the Q&A feature of the Zoom platform, but we will have additional time if there’s more questions that haven’t been answered. And maybe also to maybe explore a little bit of a toolkit that Heather had mentioned that we can also share during that segment. So feel free to stay on if you’re able to. And thank you for completing this feedback poll. It helps us plan and adjust future sessions that we have.

We want to mention that as part of the Stronger Connections Technical Assistance Center, we do have an upcoming wellness mini session. This session is on February 11th, so feel free to register these wellness mini sessions, our 20-minute segments where an organization or another county or district offers a practice. So feel free to join us for the February 11th. We also have one scheduled for March as well, so feel free to join us for those. And we want to thank you, and you can contact us at [email protected].