Steps to take after a suicide

Planning your school’s crisis response

Overview

After learning of a suicide death, your school’s crisis team should meet and implement a plan using the steps on this page.

A crisis team usually includes: administrators, counselors, social workers, psychologists, nurses, school resource officers, and/or local law enforcement.

Crisis teams are also encouraged to collaborate with community partners, as community services boards often have staff trained for crisis debriefing and support.

1. Confirm a death

  • Your crisis team will confirm a reported death and ascertain the cause of death as determined by the medical examiner or as reported by the family of the deceased, local hospital, and/or law enforcement.
  • Even when a death appears to be by suicide, do not label it as such until the cause of death is officially determined.

2. Communicate with the family

  • As soon as it’s practical, your school principal or a designated crisis team member should contact the family. Express sympathy as you would for any sudden death.
  • The contact person should ask what the school can share about the student’s death.
  • Acknowledge that this is a tragedy and that the school community shares their grief and wants to offer support to them and to the student’s siblings and friends.
  • Inquire about funeral or memorial arrangements. 

Although the fact that a student has died may be disclosed immediately, official information about the cause of death should not be disclosed to students until the family has been consulted.

The school may choose to initially release a general, factual statement without using the student’s name if the family does not give permission. For example, We learned that a ninth-grade student died over the weekend or The family has requested that information about the cause of death not be shared at this time.

The need to share information should be carefully balanced with honoring the family’s requests.

3. Assess impact and prepare a response

The crisis team should meet and prepare the postvention response to consider how the death will affect other students and determine which students are most likely to be affected. The crisis team should also consider the cumulative impact of other traumatic events that may have affected the school community.

The team should consider and act on the following tasks:

  1. Create a plan to immediately notify school staff of the death. If possible, this should be an in-person notification, especially for those who worked directly with the student.
  2. Determine whether additional grief counselors, crisis responders, or other resources may be needed from outside the school.
  3. Schedule an all-staff meeting as soon as possible, ideally before the start of the next school day.
  4. When possible, arrange for students to be notified of the death in small groups, such as in homerooms. Do not notify students by public address system or in a large assembly.
  5. With family consent, disseminate a written statement for students to homeroom teachers. See the sample death notification statement for students.
  6. In the class or homeroom of the deceased student, it may be helpful to have a mental health professional (e.g., school psychologist, counselor, social worker) present as well as the teacher.
  7. Identify school social media accounts that may need monitoring and designate a member of the crisis team to do so.
  8. With family consent, draft and disseminate a written statement to parents/guardians about the student’s death. See the sample death notification for parents/guardians.
  9. Disseminate these resources for school staff to give them more information about suicide and how to help their students.