The numbers you have
After one screening week:
- How many students engaged, screened, and opted out
- Risk level distribution, overall and by grade
- Depression and anxiety severity distribution
- How many safety plans, and how fast
- Where referrals went, and where they could not go
- What the students who opted out said about trust and about who they would go to
The four numbers to look at first
1. Total engaged, not total screened. Screened plus opted-out. A student who declined and told you they have nobody at school is a student you now know something about. Opting out of the screening is not opting out of the program.
2. High Risk as a percentage. Expect under 10, typically between 2 and 5. A number much lower than that is not automatically good news. It can mean participation was poor or students did not trust the instrument, rather than that your school is unusually well. Read it alongside your participation rate before concluding anything.
3. Same-day completion rate. Safety plans completed on the day of the positive screen, as a percentage of High Risk students. This is the number that says whether your response model works. SAFER's target is 100 percent and it is achievable: across 2026, 22 of 22.
4. The trust score. From the opt-out survey, one to five. The only number in the whole program that measures whether you are earning anything. Track it across screenings.
What not to do with the numbers
Do not compare schools. Different buildings, different participation, different trust. A school with a higher High Risk rate is not a worse school; it may be a school where students answered honestly.
Do not compare to national rates to reassure yourself. Your students are not a national sample.
Do compare yourself to yourself, season over season and year over year. That is the only comparison that means anything.
Critical Reflection. Look at your risk levels by grade. If one grade is dramatically lower than the others, ask whether that grade is doing better or whether something about how the screening ran in that grade produced the difference. Which teacher read the script, and how did they read it?
The distribution question worth asking
Sort your High Risk students by depression score. Some of them will be low. Sort your severe depression scores by risk level. Some of those will be Low Risk.
That is the model working. The score tells you how many symptoms; the level tells you how dangerous. A team that finds this surprising after a screening week has not internalized Module 5.1, and that is worth catching before spring.
One thing your data cannot tell you
Whether the screen worked equally well for every student in the building. The instruments have not been validated across the populations in Unit 8, and your own numbers will not reveal that. See Module 4.1.
What your numbers can tell you is whether participation was even. If one group's participation or opt-out rate looks different from the rest, that is findable and worth finding.
