Protect Students while Avoiding Becoming a Defendant in Student Suicide Court Cases

  • Tuesday, February 04, 2025
  • 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  • Zoom

Registration


Protect Students while Avoiding Becoming a Defendant in Student Suicide Court Cases

Without question school counselors want to support students who present as possibly suicidal. When school counselors are placed on notice by any means that a student might even remotely be in danger of suicide, they have an immediate responsibility to alert parents and guardians.  Part of that process will involve trying to give parents all the information that has been given to them and some need to gather additional information. The difficulty is not in the school counselors commitment to support students considering suicide; it’s in the use of protocols requiring school counselors to do the impossible; quantify suicide. Guiding principles from ten court cases involving school counselors will be discussed.  Determining suicide risk is problematic on many levels, not the least of which is the exercise of judgment of lethality based on a student's self-report. 

Objectives

  1. Identify the appropriate role of school counselors in the suicide assessment process
  2. Discuss court cases involving school counselors as defendants in cases of student suicide
  3. Discuss how to respond when asked to quantify suicide
  4. Become familiar with the ASCA Suicide Concerns: Information Gathering Tool


About the Presenter

    Carolyn Stone is a Professor Emeritus of Counselor Educator at the University of North Florida.  Dr. Stone was the 2006 President of the American School Counselor Association (ASCA) and served as ASCAs Ethics Chair for twenty years.  Dr. Stone chaired the last four revisions of the ASCA Ethical Standards for School Counselors and wrote 100 legal and ethical columns for ASCA’s SchoolCounselor.  Dr. Stone was awarded ASCA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2010, the Florida School Counselor Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, and UNF Distinguished Professor Award in 2016.  She has provided keynote addresses and workshops for all 50 state school counseling associations and presented approximately 840 presentations (700 of which were legal and ethical issues for school counselors) to international/national/state conferences and school districts.  She has completed dozens of webinars for ASCA. Dr. Stone has authored the only legal and ethical book exclusively for school counselors, currently in its fifth edition.  Prior to becoming a counselor educator in 1995, Dr. Stone spent 22 years with the Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, Florida where she served 239 school counselors as their district level supervisor and was an elementary and high school counselor and middle school teacher. 


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