Skyline High School in Millcreek has gone nearly a decade without losing a student to suicide, and staff there say that record is no accident. The school has leaned on a full-time psychologist, a resilience-focused motto called RISE, and a discretionary funding push from its own community council to keep mental health support embedded in daily campus life.
According to KSL News, Skyline High School students are handling stress better, and teachers have reported that emotional wellness at the school is up. The school, located in Salt Lake City and part of the Granite School District, has more than 2,100 students across grades nine through 12, according to Granite School District records. Established in 1962, it is one of eight comprehensive high schools in the district and offers coursework including the International Baccalaureate program.
Victoria Hatton, Skyline’s psychologist, studied a teacher’s role in suicide prevention at Brigham Young University. She works one-on-one with students to help them develop resilience tools and encourages students to report concerns about friends and look out for each other, per the same KSL report. Hatton said the Skyline community had suffered because of suicide deaths for many years.
Trust Land Dollars Fill a Funding Gap
Keeping a full-time psychologist on staff wasn’t guaranteed by state or district budgets alone. Skyline High School’s community council agreed to use trust land money to cover the remaining funds needed for the psychologist position, the KSL report notes. Utah’s School LAND Trust Program distributes tens of millions of dollars annually in earnings from state trust lands directly to local School Community Councils, which hold discretionary authority to allocate that money toward student support initiatives like mental health staffing, according to the Utah State Board of Education. Those councils are made up of parents, teachers, and principals who allocate trust land revenues based on school-level data…