From hosting stress management workshops to enacting Pippin onstage, local students’ projects highlighting mental health and suicide prevention led to three high schools winning a combined $5,000 in Trevor R. Simpson Award funds.

Award grantors Scot and Leah Simpson, who lost their 16-year-old son Trevor to suicide in 1992, presented plaques to Mt. Si High School (First Place), U Prep – Seattle (Second Place), and Lakeside School (Third Place) this fall. The award is based on the number of school-based individuals trained in suicide prevention and student-led behavioral health promotion or stigma reduction projects. 

“It is particularly exciting to see the students coming up with creative ways, as they did in this past year, to protect their fellow students from the deadly silence that is suicide” remarked Scot and Leah Simpson. They were referring to the great work done by the winning schools.

 The Mt. Si High School suicide prevention team undertook 13 ambitious projects, including:

– Launching an ASB subcommittee that exclusively focuses on behavioral health.

– Distributing playing cards with positive messages to peers at the anniversary of a student suicide.

– Teaching stress management and mindfulness at the Be the Change Youth Summit.

– Posting information about healthy relationships and teen dating violence in bathroom stalls.

– A student-produced video (“Mental Health Matters”) featured in Teacher & Parent suicide trainings, and student-produced TV ads shown to students.

At University Prep, a student’s project addressing suicide prevention and depression was presented to other teachers and students at a virtual conference.

Lakeside School held a series of engaging discussions for students on perfectionism, drug and alcohol use and normalizing mental health and decreasing stigma. They also had student-led workshops to learn about stress management tools.

Each school has a suicide prevention team, which will create a student-driven plan to use the award funds towards advancing suicide prevention.