JOYCE– Crescent School’s youth suicide prevention team has won the Trevor R. Simpson Award, a statewide award, for its prevention efforts for the last school year’s prevention efforts.
This is the third year that the team — named Students Offering Support, or SOS — has won an award from the Seattle-based Youth Suicide Prevention Program.
It received an honorable mention in the 2004-2005 school year, won first place for the 2005-2006 school year, and again first place for the 2008-2009 school year in the small school category.
“No other school has ever received this many honors for prevention efforts,” said Sherri Jones, the program’s adviser.
The students received the award Oct. 15 during a school assembly, when Leah Simpson — the mother of Trevor Simpson, in whose memory the award was created — personally presented the trophy to the team.
TVW — Washington State Public Affairs TV Network, which is based in Olympia — recently filmed a segment on the team, Jones said.
Dave Johnson, co-producer of TVW’s “Engaged: Students Becoming Citizens” program, said that he expected the segment to air sometime in mid-December on cable television and be available on TVW’s Web site at www.tvw.org.
During the 2008-09 school year, the seven-member peer counseling team traveled to six other schools in the state and gave more than 20 presentations on how teens can help prevent youth suicide.
Team members — Nikki Norbisrath, senior; Brandon McGarvie, senior; Kylie Mitts, senior; Joey Barnes, freshman; Josh Anderson, senior; Bonny Hazlett, freshman; and Rashaya Donnell, junior — also led a national conference on suicide prevention in Bremerton in November 2008.
The Crescent students told of their own experiences, beginning with the death of Joe Rogers, who shot himself in a classroom at the age of 13 in 2004, a tragedy that prompted the formation of the school’s award-winning peer-counseling team.
In March, the team held its annual suicide prevention “walk and talk” around the Crescent track, in which both adults and youth are invited to come and learn more how to prevent suicide.
In June, the team worked with the Clallam County Teen Court — a court diversion program in which peers of juveniles set sentences — which sentenced a young man who had made a prank call to a suicide hotline to participate in a Crescent School suicide prevention presentation.
“At the end of the presentation, the young man reported feeling humbled by the efforts of SOS and acknowledged that what he had done certainly could have interfered with a suicidal person getting the help they needed,” said the Youth Suicide Prevention Program at tinyurl.com/ yzqzswp.
TVW segments
The drug court’s deliberations and sentencing in the case were filmed by TVW.
The 17-minute segment, one episode in the station’s “Engaged: Students Becoming Citizens” series, can be seen at tinyurl.com/y8r2es4.
The segment recently filmed was an update to the June program. It will focus on the work of the SOS team.
Several of the members of the original team, formed in 2005, graduated at the end of the last school year, Jones said. They includedfounding members Whitley Barnes, Peter Lester and Taylor Davis. Another team member who graduated last year was Jared Kilmer.
The death of Trevor Simpson by suicide in 1992 at the age of 16 led to his parents, Leah and Scot Simpson, beginning advocacy efforts that resulted in a the state Legislature writing a suicide prevention plan and, eventually, to the establishment of the Youth Suicide Prevention Program.
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Managing Editor/News Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3531 or leah.leach@peninsuladailynews.com.
