2022-25. With funding from the Mental Health Student Services Act (MHSSA), the San Diego County Office of Education and the County of San Diego Behavioral Health Services is leading the Creating Opportunities in Preventing & Eliminating Suicide (COPES) initiative to build the capacity of schools and districts to support their school communities. Programming options include suicide prevention, intervention and postvention, mental health promotion and stigma reduction, and school mental health referral pathways. Our School Health Evaluation and Research team will develop a needs assessment that will be administered to each COPES district/charter school annually, compile district and charter school level summary statistics annually from the California Healthy Kids Survey (CHKS) and CHKS Mental Health Supports Module data to examine changes in students’ mental health needs and supports over time and develop and implement an online reporting system for COPES schools and districts to track suicide risk screening data.
