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To reach out to her 140 to 150 students, Laury Scandling gathered them at a local church this school year after a teenager had committed suicide.

She knew some of the kids might be vulnerable to taking their own lives and decided to address it directly. As principal of the alternative school, Yaakoosgé Daakahídi, Scandling told them she knew a member of the community had taken his own life.

"We care about you," she said she told her students.

She also asked them to promise to tell at least one person if they were contemplating suicide. She made them write the name of that person down and to embed into their consciousness that they would turn to someone.

"I thought it was important to address it head on and let every kid know they have an advocate," Scandling said. "It's essential every kid have a go-to person."

At Yaakoosgé, students meet in small groups on Friday mornings for "advisory," or what Scandling calls a check-in.

The small learning communities planned next year at Juneau-Douglas High School and Thunder Mountain High School, slated to open in the fall, are intended to increase connections between students and faculty.

School administrators already changed the way they plan to handle their response to a suicide by rewriting the crisis-response protocol, and also are looking at new ways to add depression and suicide awareness into classroom teaching.

Privacy laws, more than the school's size, challenge school district efforts to connect with kids in a crisis, said Dave Newton, director of student services.

Students might be text-messaging back and forth about the news of a student death - some of it rumor or inaccurate - but district officials can't release information until they've worked with an involved parent or guardian on what can be said.

This restriction confused the district's response in the past. After reviewing the protocol this school year, Newton rewrote it.

Now, with expanded descriptions of who is in charge and how and when students will be provided information and counseling, it creates a clear outline about what to do, he said.

The new protocol adds a level of outreach for teachers and counselors who help students through the days after a crisis, and allows an additional level of grief support.

"This is not something clinical to us like a plan. It's personal," Newton said. "We know these families and have for years."

In the area of suicide prevention, district staff writes a report on each student who talks about self-harm.

Newton said one of these reports lands on his desk "on a regular basis," nearly once a week. He follows up by calling parents, offering counseling and arranging depression tests when a student seems to be having problems, he said.

"Sometimes parents follow through with that and sometimes they don't," he said.

Counselors do not randomly screen kids to measure mental health but make themselves available to students, Newton said.

In the classrooms, more instruction is needed, said 10th-grader Marie Speegle.

Through her health class at Juneau-Douglas High School last year, Speegle connected up with Juneau's AWARE chapter and a program designed to teach coping skills called TRAIN (Teens Resisting Abuse and Initiating Non-violence). After 40 hours of training, she now works for a local teen crisis hotline (586-5920) on Monday nights and teaches coping skills in schools around Southeast Alaska.

She said her experience taught her a lot: If she had a friend in crisis before, she's not sure what she would have done.

"I would have been kind of helpless," she said.

Speegle's health class was a catalyst for her, but the actual class did nothing to help her understand mental illness, she said. The issue was talked about on only one day, during a shortened class period that allowed about a half hour of discussion.

"If anyone had been suicidal in that class, I don't think it would have helped," she said. "I was annoyed we seemed to rush through it."

Principals are looking at options to change instruction in classrooms, Newton said.

A psychologist commissioned to study suicide intervention strategies reported back in January with a variety of programs that could be used by teachers, and a decision about the curriculum is expected in April, he said.

• Contact reporter Kim Marquis at 523-2279 or kim.marquis@juneauempire.com.