Findings from Analysis of Policies in the State of Utah
Here we present the School District Suicide Policy Evaluation Tool
(SDSPET), a proof-of-concept instrument for comprehensively evaluating
school-based policy content pertaining to suicide prevention,
intervention, re-entry, and postvention. It has high inter-rater
reliability (98.8%), even among raters with no prior experience in
suicide prevention research. The use of the SDSPET in an analysis of the
policies of all school districts in the state of Utah resulted in
several important findings. Overall performance was poor, with over
three-quarters of districts receiving a total score of less than 4 out
of a possible 36. There were, however, several outlier districts that
had much more comprehensive policies and therefore higher scores. Use of
the SDSPET also highlighted re-entry and postvention as areas of
especially poor performance.
Lastly, the following two criteria, “the policy indicates how often
professional development courses on suicide prevention are required for
all staff” and “the policy includes a protocol for parental
notification” were more consistently included in district policies.
Several factors could be contributing to overall low scores, including
state laws with potentially vague or unenforced standards, growing
opposition toward social and emotional learning modalities in schools,
or insufficient personnel knowledge in policy
creation.28, 29, 30 The low scores may be at least
partially explained by the fact that Utah state law requires school
districts to have suicide prevention programs but does not stipulate
that these be reflected in school board-approved
policies.16 Four districts scored substantially higher
than the rest, though the reason for this is not readily apparent. It is
possible that the leaders of these districts were aware of the MSDP;
communication with them might shed light on their higher performance and
yield valuable insights for other districts.