Creating Suicide Safety in Schools (CS3) is a one-day workshop designed for school-based action planning teams, empowering them to establish a customized plan for engaging in suicide prevention and response. Typically, the school-based action planning team consists of 3 to 6 individuals including school administrators, school psychologists, school counselors and social workers, and others who are involved in prevention initiatives with the ability to affect change. The workshop format includes didactic presentations, coupled with small workgroup discussions, a needs assessment, planning documents, and exposure to resources that meet best practice recommendations and or evidence-based practice standards. The workshop incorporates key aspects of the social-ecological prevention model, public health perspective, and recommendations for school-based suicide prevention practices. Further, the workshop utilizes a comprehensive benchmarking assessment tool “School Readiness Workbook” for examining readiness, strengths and needs, as well as, an action planning template with objectives and tasks (Breux, Boccio, Brodsky, 2017. Creating Suicide Safety in Schools: A public health suicide prevention program in New York State. Suicidologi vol22, Nr.2. pg. 14-26. doi:10.5617/suicidologi.5438).

CS3 was developed to address the need for more comprehensive and consistent suicide prevention activities in school settings. CS3 provides a framework for implementing school-based suicide prevention best practices. The program has demonstrated its effectiveness in improving participants’ attitudes surrounding the importance of school-based suicide prevention, knowledge of best-practices, perceptions of support from administrators, and sense of empowerment to work collaboratively to enhance their schools’ suicide safety (Breux, P., Boccio, D., 2019. Improving Schools’ Readiness for Involvement in Suicide Prevention: An Evaluation of the Creating Suicide Safety in Schools Workshop. IJERPH 2019 Jun 19;16(12);2165. Doi: 10.3390/ijerph15122165).

CS3 was created in 2011 and since its inception it has been widely used by school districts across New York State. To note, CS3 was listed on SPRC’s Best Practice Registry starting in 2013 and most recently included in The CDC Suicide Prevention Resources for Action (https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/resources/prevention.html, 2022) as a promising practice toward the goal of creating protective environments.