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.