Five documents, two agencies, eight years
Oregon has produced a serious body of school suicide prevention guidance. Anyone building a program here should know it exists, and should know where the gap is.
CAIRN Oregon School Suicide Prevention and Wellness Protocol Toolkit (2017).
The foundational document. Comprehensive protocols for prevention, intervention and postvention in schools.
Oregon Department of Education, Mental Health Toolkit (2020).
ODE's guidance for districts on mental health supports, MTSS integration and staff capacity.
Adi's Act Toolkit (2021).
Support for districts writing the student suicide prevention plans that ORS 339.343 requires.
OHA School Counselors Suicide Screening Brief (2024).
OHA's guidance for school counsellors on screening practice.
Oregon Toolkit for Suicide Intervention in Schools, First Edition (2025).
The most recent, developed by OHA with a working group. Strong intervention content.
And the training that sits alongside them
Youth SAVE is Oregon's nine-hour virtual training in suicide assessment and intervention for youth-serving professionals, managed by REAP in collaboration with OHA and Oregon's Big River partners. It trains adults to assess and intervene with a young person who is already in front of them.
SAFER is the step before that, and the two fit together rather than overlapping. Universal screening is how that young person gets identified in the first place.
The gap
Not one of these documents covers universal screening with a tiered response.
They cover prevention. They cover intervention once a student is identified. They cover postvention after a death. They cover planning, and they cover what a counsellor does in a conversation.
What none of them covers is the operational question: how a school screens every student in the building in a week, what it does with several hundred results in four hours, who sees which student and by when, and what happens to the students who opt out.
That gap is what SAFER is for, and it is why this toolkit exists alongside those five rather than instead of them.
Use all six. Where these documents are stronger, this toolkit points at them rather than restating them.
Where SAFER sits formally
This work is carried out under YSIPP initiative 3.1.4.1: "OHA will continue to adapt and update a toolkit on best and promising practices for suicide risk assessments, screenings, and safety planning."
Two things commonly said in Oregon that are not accurate
Adi's Act does not mention or authorize screening. ORS 339.343 requires districts to adopt a student suicide prevention plan. It is a planning and postvention statute. Universal mental health screening in Oregon schools is governed by ORS 336.216, which is restrictive rather than enabling, and which is covered in Unit 1.
The Oregon Healthy Teens Survey no longer exists. It was discontinued in 2019 and replaced by the Student Health Survey. Materials citing OHT data are citing something at least seven years old.
Critical Reflection
Which of these documents does your district already reference in its Adi's Act plan? If the answer is none, your plan may be older than the guidance.
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