ConVal High School and Monadnock Community Hospital are partnering to bring Hope Squad, an internationally recognized suicide-prevention program, to the ConVal community.
“We’re very excited to share this partnership with Monadnock Hospital and to be bringing this program to New Hampshire,” said ConVal School Superintendent Kimberly Rizzo Saunders.
The Hope Squad program, which started in 2004 in Provo, Utah, is now implemented at 1,600 schools in the United States and Canada, including elementary, middle and high schools. The program also has international locations in Ghana and South Korea, and includes 8,000 “squad members” worldwide. ConVal would be the first school district in New Hampshire to implement a Hope Squad program. Programs currently exist in 43 other states.
“When Rich (Scheinblum, CFO of Monadnock Community Hospital) first called to talk to me about this, I thought, ‘Well, we already have several suicide prevention programs. We have Signs of Suicide, we have NAMI Connect, we do mental health first aid, we are in good shape as far as suicide prevention,” Rizzo Saunders said. “But this program is very different. It’s not about training adults or even educating students in the signs of suicide; it’s about creating a tiered approach.”
Each grade level would have a Hope Squad of eight to 10 students who are selected by their peers for their empathy, compassion and ability to listen. The Hope Squad would function as an extracurricular activity, with members meeting after school to receive training. Squad members would also coordinate a yearly week-long event, Hope Week, and organize activities for the whole school around mental health wellness and suicide prevention.
“The goals of Hope Squad are to create a safe school environment, not just with the adults in the building, but with the other students in the building,” Rizzo-Saunders said. “Because this program has been around since 2004 and it’s evidence-based, we can see that Hope Squad schools have less mental health stigma, and less suicide-related stigma, particularly in males. Hope Squad schools had significantly mor e referrals from all students compared to non-Hope Squad schools.”