A student who declines the screening is routed to the Screening Feedback and Awareness survey instead.
It is not a consolation prize
It asks a handful of questions:
- Why did you choose not to complete the screening?
- On a scale of one to five, how much do you trust that the school keeps things private?
- If you were going through something, who is the first person you would go to?
- Have you heard of 988, and do you know what it is?
These are questions the screening cannot ask, and the answers change what a school does.
What it produces
From one recent four-day screening week, of 113 students who opted out:
- 41 said there is nobody at school they would go to. More than a third.
- The rest named a specific teacher, a coach or club advisor, a counsellor, or someone in a role nobody would have predicted: a campus youth advocate, a case manager, cafeteria staff, a bus driver.
Both halves are findings. A third of the students who declined screening have no adult in the building they trust, which is an argument for the program rather than against it. And the adults students actually name are frequently not the adults on the crisis team.
Critical Reflection. If a student in your building named a bus driver as the first person they would go to, would that bus driver know what to do? Would they know who to tell? Most gatekeeper training goes to certificated staff. Look at your list again.
Why SAFER counts total engaged
615 screened plus 113 opted out is 728 students engaged.
That is the number SAFER reports, and the reasoning is that a student who opted out, told us they trust the school a 3 out of 5, and told us they have nobody is a student the school now knows something important about. Opting out of the screening is not opting out of the program.
