Reflections on School Connectedness During Suicide Prevention Month

September 10, 2024

by Sheena Lall, Director of Learning Innovation and Social Emotional Competency, Talent Development Secondary

The Sad Truth

• Suicide is the second-leading cause of death for teens and young adults, ages 10-34 (NCHS Data Brief, 2023).
• Nine percent of high school students attempted suicide in 2023 (CDC, 2024). This percentage is highest among females (13%), Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (15%), Black, Hispanic, and American Indian or Alaska Native (11%), and LGBTQ teens (20%).
• From 1999 to 2020, over 47,000 Americans between ages 10 and 19 lost their lives to suicide, with sharp year-over-year increases (Ormiston et al., 2024).
• Between 2011 and 2020, suicides by overdose jumped 12.6% per year among female adolescents (Ormiston et al., 2024).
• Suicides using guns rose 5.3% per year among boys and 7.8% per year among girls from 1999 to 2020 (Ormiston et al., 2024).
• Between 2012 and 2020, suicide deaths using firearms rose by 14.5% per year among Black adolescents, with similar trends among Hispanic, American Indian/Alaska Native, and Asian American adolescents (Ormiston et al., 2024).

Schools Can Help

Drivers of student mental health challenges are many and varied. To name just one, emerging research is shedding light on the negative impact that social media can have on the developing minds of our youth. Ranging from body image issues across genders to cyberbullying, the social-emotional implications associated with unhealthy engagement with social media are becoming more clear.

It’s also becoming more clear that schools and educators have the opportunity to do something about it. School climates that encourage a sense of belonging—ensuring students feel accepted, respected, and valued for who they are—can combat the isolating and shaming influences of social media.

Student success systems offer a student-centered, actionable framework for schools to identify students in need of support and provide the connections children need. Focusing on efforts to improve agency, belonging, and connectedness are the most direct ways that a school can have an impact on a student’s mental health. Alongside the use of evidence-based predictive indicators like attendance, behavior, and coursework, school teams can identify the exact students represented in the above grim numbers. A supportive team of adults examining holistic, real-time, actionable data to identify root causes and design effective interventions that foster school connectedness can create the sense of belonging that could prevent a suicide.