CFS’s Stephen Roggenbaum and Natalie Romer have been named to the Florida Department of Education’s Suicide Awareness Training Workgroup
CFS’s Stephen Roggenbaum and Dr. Natalie Romer have been named to the Florida Department of Education’s Suicide Awareness Training Workgroup.
Activities of the 12 member workgroup will support the 2016 Florida Legislative Statute 1012.583, which requires the Department of Education to collaborate with the Statewide Office for Suicide Prevention to help develop a list of approved youth suicide awareness and prevention training materials for instructional personnel in elementary school, middle school, and high school. Each school in which all instructional personnel complete two hours of approved training will be designated as a Suicide Prevention Certified School. The training required must be included in the existing continuing education or inservice training requirements for instructional personnel and may not add to the total hours currently required by the department.
The statute requires training on how to identify appropriate mental health services and how to refer youth and their families to those services. It may include materials currently being used by a school district if such materials meet any criteria established by the department. It may also include programs that instructional personnel can complete through a self-review of approved youth suicide awareness and prevention materials.
Roggenbaum has served in numerous roles and on numerous committees related to youth suicide prevention. He was part of the research team that researched, designed, and crafted the Youth Suicide Prevention School-Based Guide, which was accepted in 2008 for the Suicide Prevention Resource Center’s Best Practices Registry for Suicide Prevention. Mr. Roggenbaum currently is in his second gubernatorial appointment term as one of four appointments on the Florida Suicide Prevention Coordinating Council, and is a member of the Florida Suicide Prevention Coalition, and Pasco Aware suicide prevention task force. He was a former member of the Florida Governor’s Task Force on Suicide Prevention.
Dr. Romer is Coordinator for the Florida Department of Education’s Now is the Time Project for Advancing Resilience and Wellness in Education (NITT-AWARE-SEA) program and also supports the School Climate Transformation grant, both of which are being implemented in collaboration with Florida’s Positive Behavioral Interventions Support Project. Dr. Romer has extensive experience implementing evidence-based interventions to children, adolescents, and families in school and community settings. Her research interests include strength-based approaches to universal screening, behavioral health intervention, and implementation of multi-tiered systems of social and emotional behavior supports.