AURORA | After a tumultuous start to the school year, behavioral issues among Aurora Public Schools students are starting to stabilize, district officials say.
Documents provided to the Aurora school board for its Tuesday meeting show that from August 2021 to March 11, 2022, the district conducted 744 non-acute severe risk assessments and 193 acute severe risk assessments. The numbers for each peaked in Sept. through Nov., and have fallen since then.
Risk assessments include potential suicidal behavior from students and threats against oneself. Acute assessments are ones where students were referred to someone outside the district for additional help.
“Our data from the beginning of this school year indicate that the number of risk assessments were high in the fall and have stabilized since December,” the document said. “Data also indicate that we saw consistent numbers of referrals across all levels.”
During that same time frame, the district referred 1,070 students to behavioral health services, and an additional 275 students self-referred to receive support. All of the self-referrals were from high school students.
“In terms of behavioral health referrals, the data is sporadic,” the document said. “We saw a large number in the fall and an uptick in February. We also saw a high number of referrals at the elementary level.”
At the elementary level, 458 students were referred in total. At the high school level, 484 were referred or self-referred, and 350 middle school and P-8 students were referred.
School districts across the country have noted an uptick in behavioral issues since the start of the school year, particularly in young students. At APS, the district has devoted millions of dollars it received in federal pandemic relief aid to social-emotional learning and mental health resources.
“non-acute severe risk assessments” Now that’s some high-falutin rewording for the common trouble maker student, that needs a serious talking to.
What a false narrative! If you are a journalist or writer for a newspaper, I feel that you have an ethical obligation to give us all the information to support what you have written instead of parroting what you heard at a meeting and giving a false narrative to the community.
Do a little research and check out prior years’ numbers so we can see the “Stabilization.” I just did my 5 minutes of research and found an end-of-year outcomes report from the APS website that gave actual numbers.
Behavioral Health Referral Numbers
2016 – 800 referrals
2017 – 850 referrals
2018 – 881 referrals
2019 – 868 referrals
2020-21 ?
Currently, 1345 referrals and the current year is not over. How does anyone say that “Issues are stabilizing.”
Watching the board meeting – it was clear that no one understood what the process or system was with the suicide risk assessments. This scares me that 937 suicide risk assessments were completed but yet they couldn’t explain what that meant. Sure sounds like things are “Stabilizing”
Suicide risk assessments – 937 total suicide risk assessments were done this year and it’s not over yet (Still unclear what “severe risk” suicide assessment is compared to a “non-acute”). What are previous years’ numbers? If this number is decreasing and stabilizing, I would be very shocked, especially coming out of a pandemic of remote learning. I’m interested in knowing if the APS board got the full scope of the data or just the narrow misleading version of the data reported here?
Board decisions are made on the data that is reported to them, and those board decisions directly affect resources, policy, and support for students and teachers. When board decisions are made on incorrect or insufficient data, this has a detrimental effect on our students and our entire community. Please get all the data before reporting a narrative that can significantly impact our community.