Reflection Guide for School Leaders Navigating Recovery & Renewal After Student Deaths by Suicide
Leading with Courage, Care, & Connection:
A Reflection Guide for School Leaders Navigating Recovery & Renewal After Student Deaths by Suicide
This resource offers school leaders a thoughtful, reflective companion for navigating the long arc of suicide postvention. Not just the immediate crisis response, but the years of recovery and renewal that follow. Developed through the School Crisis Recovery & Renewal (SCRR) project’s work from 2021-2024, the guide draws on dialogues among educators, crisis responders, suicide prevention and postvention leaders, youth advocates, and community members who came together to explore how schools can honor and remember students who have died by suicide in ways that are equitable, embodied, and sustained over time.
Rather than offering rigid protocols, the guide functions as a “conversation capture,” curating lived experience and real actions taken by school leaders who have walked this path before. It invites reflection on core questions facing the field:
- How to expand postvention beyond acute contagion response into genuine recovery and renewal?
- How to center student and educator needs?
- How to ground leadership in cultural humility and an honest reckoning with power and structural inequity?
For anyone in a school community supporting young people after a death by suicide, this guide offers both grounding and guidance.
Eluna’s Bereavement Programs Manager, Jessica Porté, was among the SCRR Community of Practice & Workgroup Participants who helped shape this resource. If you are interested in a tailored training to help accompany this guide in your school setting, please contact us.
