Looking at the numbers on young people and suicide, substance abuse and mental health and, of course, Bend-La Pine Schools and Deschutes County Public Health wanted to help.

The numbers for Deschutes County suicides among 10-17 year olds from 2002-2020 were awful. A total of 58% of Deschutes County deaths among that age group were suicides, compared to 29% in Oregon and 19% in the U.S.

Too many.

Too many students in schools use illegal drugs. Too many students in schools struggle with depression or other mental health issues that hurt their ability to learn.

One way the school district and public health department are trying to help is with a program called Healthy Schools. It’s in its fourth year. It puts public health workers in high schools and middle schools. It gives students and teachers access to resources. It gives public health workers a way to get their messages more directly to students.

But questions from the beginning of the program have been: Would it work? Could success be measured?

There’s more evidence that it may be working.

It may have contributed to a roughly 20% reduction in behavioral health emergency department visits for youth aged 11-17 in Deschutes County for the 2024 school year.

There’s a lot of fine print behind those numbers and many confounding factors. Behavioral health emergency department visits are classified as those coded for suicide, substance use, depression and mental health. The reduction is calculated by looking at the difference between the actual number of visits for students in Zip codes with Healthy Schools programs and those that did not, based on trend data.

There could very well be factors that account for the differences beyond the Healthy Schools programs. When the information was recently presented to the school board, that was not explored. Unfortunate.

There are other things that Healthy Schools helps with that are easier to track. There are more successful referrals to appointments. There is now full coverage of topics by teachers in health instruction, such as sexual abuse prevention and suicide prevention, compared to 2021 when apparently some topics were not fully covered. There have also been improvements in the curriculum.

There is room for improvement, notably in connecting families with mental health resources. Help is there but the connection needs to be made, as school board member Cameron Fischer emphasized.

It will likely always be difficult to make some of those connections. It will likely always be difficult to measure just how much a difference this program makes. But it’s very important to try to give more students a chance to be successful in school and in life.