How might we, as school crisis leaders, hold school communities and cultures in the complexity of memorializing and commemorating students who die by suicide, not only in the acute aftermath but in the years after?
How is suicide postvention currently defined, and what would it look like/sound like/feel like to have a more embodied, equitable, and liberated approach?
Let us imagine school-based suicide postvention leadership as a tree in the woods. Just as a tree relies on every part of its structure to grow and thrive, effective liberated suicide postvention leadership relies on a comprehensive approach that considers personal and shared context, culture, language, policies, practices, and desired outcomes. This tree of school-based suicide postvention leadership has six parts: soil, seeds, roots, trunks, branches, and fruit. For each part, we will offer leadership considerations, advice from the field, and invitations to reflect that will support you and your team/colleagues as you prepare to walk this path.
Throughout 2021-2024, the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal project gathered educators, crisis responders, suicide prevention and postvention leaders, youth advocates, and other community leaders to explore how to hold space to honor students’ lives years after they die by suicide, how practices of commemoration and memorialization collaborate or collide with school postvention, and to name some of the challenges that arrive with creating space and place to honor students’ deaths by suicide equally and equitably.
Through several SCRR workgroups and communities of practice, we explored the essential questions above and grappled with current gaps in school suicide postvention practice and policy:
- How might we expand the current timeframe of postvention so that it isn’t only about acute contagion and can go beyond response into recovery and renewal?
- How might we center student and educator needs in how we understand and metabolize student death by suicide, as school leaders?
- How might we ground our approaches to suicide postvention leadership through a culturally humble and liberated approach, embracing an analysis of power and structural inequity?
This guide is a “conversation capture” of dialogues and communities of practice and seeks to add clarity and context for future conversations in the field.
This guide curates lived experiences and actions taken by people in your shoes – leaders through postvention, offering reflective questions to support anyone in the school community supporting young people after a death by suicide.
