New York City Public Schools and the Health Department have partnered with the Jed Foundation, a mental health non-profit, to provide new suicide prevention training courses for nurses this school year amid a rise in suicidal thoughts among children.
According to the city’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, in both 2019 and 2021, 15.6% of New York City public high school students had seriously considered suicide. Renia McCauley, Jed’s director of learning and development, said the foundation has partnered with the city’s Office of School Health to provide the new training.
While public school nurses provide physical assessments, prescribe medicines and monitor chronic problems, the new training gives them additional tools to handle a mental health situation. As of now, school counselors and social workers are students’ first point of contact in a mental health crisis. Now nurses will intervene by directing students to trained professionals when there are signs of physical illnesses caused by mental health issues.
Christopher Martinez is an RN staff development coordinator and mental health liaison at the Office of School Health. In an emailed statement, he said that mental health “is often perceived as outside of the main focus of traditional nursing care, and thus can be intimidating or unfamiliar to school nurses.” He added that these obstacles are “especially relevant when dealing with the complex mental health of school-aged children and adolescents.”
New York City’s highest suicide rate of 9.2% per 100,000 people is in Midtown’s Chelsea-Clinton neighborhood, according to NYC Health data from 2015-2019, the most recent figures. According to the National Association of Social Workers, there’s supposed to be one social worker for every 250 students.
But there are Midtown schools with a much higher student-to-staff ratio.
The High School of Fashion Industries on 225 W. 24th St. has over 1,600 students with 12 counselors and five social workers to support the entire school population. LaGuardia High School on 100 Amsterdam Ave., has only two social workers for 2,378 students, which translates to 1,000 students per social worker.
The new suicide prevention training for nurses is a 90-minute online course that teaches them how to “identify, screen and refer students at risk for suicide” using “scenario-based learning,” among other tools, according to the Jed Foundation website.
McCauley said the goal of the training for school nurses is to “reduce 9-1-1 calls and come up with some better triage strategies for crisis response protocols.” Then nurses would be equipped to handle different scenarios that require certain interventions, she added.
Although the new training will enable another support system for students in a mental health crisis, children are still more likely to reach out to friends when they’re struggling instead of school staff, said Madelyn Gould, a psychiatry professor at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. But nurses’ expertise will still be helpful, she added. “There are times that psychological problems manifest in physical ways,” said Gould. “A 90-minute training can at least provide minimal skills.”
The overall feedback from nurses about the new training was positive, said Martinez in his statement. “Many nurses have responded that they feel more comfortable participating in conversations surrounding student mental health without feeling like they are operating outside of their expected scope of practice or knowledge base.”