Three different situations that each leave a student unscreened, and they need different answers.
Students who opted out
They are not unscreened. They completed the feedback survey, which is its own intervention and produces data the screening cannot. See Module 4.4 for what it asks and Module 9.4 for what to do with the answers.
Students who were absent
Every screening week produces them. Absent, suspended, off campus, sick the whole week.
This is not a neutral miss. Chronic absence is itself associated with risk, so the students the screen misses may skew toward the students who most needed it. A screening week that reaches 94 percent of a school has not reached a random 6 percent.
✓ Take Action. Pull the absence list for screening week and look at it. A student absent all four days is information before they are a scheduling problem.
Students who arrive after screening week
This is the gap most schools do not plan for, and in Oregon it is large.
- 60 percent of Oregon students in foster care are identified as mobile, against 12 percent of all students
- 19.3 percent of Oregon students who changed schools midyear were experiencing homelessness
- 58.1 percent of Oregon's McKinney-Vento students were chronically absent
A single fixed screening week systematically misses these students, and they are the students Unit 8 says are at the highest risk in the building.
The fix is screening at enrollment. A short standing process:
- The registrar flags new enrollments to the counselling office weekly.
- The student is offered the screen within two weeks of enrolling, with the same notice and opt-out their family would have received before screening week.
- Same protocol, same response, same two-hour standard. A High Risk result in February is treated exactly like a High Risk result in October.
- The consulting clinician is reachable that day, or the screen is scheduled for a day when they are.
This is the same capability the absent-student run builds, used continuously. A school that can screen three absent students in November can screen a new enrollment in February, and that is the difference between a screening event and a screening program.
The absent students are your first solo run
This is the SAFER recommendation and it is deliberately more than a make-up window.
In the two weeks after screening week, the school screens the absent students itself. Not SAFER. The school's own people, running the school's own protocol, with SAFER on call that day but not in the building.
Two or three students, real protocol, lowest possible stakes. It is start with one student applied to the school rather than the counsellor, and it turns the absent-student gap into the bridge from year one to year two.
Before you do this, three things have to be true.
1. A trained safety planner is available that day.
2. The consulting clinician is reachable, by name and number, or the school knows exactly who it escalates to instead.
3. SAFER is reachable and knows it is happening.
A High Risk result on a random Tuesday with nobody trained in the building is the scenario this is designed to prepare for, not the one to discover.
