SOS for School Staff Suicide Prevention Program: Perspectives of School Staff

Schools play an important role in child and adolescent suicide prevention efforts and many states have begun to mandate suicide prevention education for school staff.

This study explored school staff's (N = 1509) perceptions of the impact of a brief virtual suicide prevention course titled: SOS for School Staff.

This study used an online posttest and three-month follow-up to explore school staff's (N = 1509) perceptions via a posttest and follow-up measuring preparation, confidence, and knowledge.

In this study, most school staff agreed that the training increased their preparation (85.4%), confidence (86.2%), and knowledge (89.7%) about responding to a suicide disclosure. Approximately one-third of the respondents used the training content three months after the training, but there was a low response rate for the follow-up.

This is a promising suicide prevention training for school staff, who report it improves preparation to identify youth in distress, confidence at engaging youth in caring conversations, and knowledge of how to respond to a student's disclosure of suicidal thoughts and behaviors; however, larger follow-up studies are required.