40th Anniversary: Colorado Schools, Organizations Work to Prevent Bullying and Suicide

By Tatiana Flowers

Twelve people died by suicide in Moffat and Routt counties this year, including a 17-year-old girl whose death devastated the mostly rural communities. 

The year before, that number was 19, most of them middle-aged men who used firearms.

“Each year is so unique,” said Mindy Marriott, executive director of Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide, a nonprofit working in those two counties. “We’ve had years where we had zero suicides.”

Dozens of organizations, including Marriott’s, have either started new programs or strengthened existing ones to prevent suicides and bullying after receiving grants from The Colorado Trust during the early 2000s.

The Colorado Trust’s Preventing Suicide in Colorado initiative, which ran from 2002 to 2009, granted $4.1 million to nine groups servicing half of Colorado’s 64 counties. Grantees provided education and participated in training while working to improve access to therapy for people at risk of suicide, encouraged people with suicidal ideations to seek care, and collected suicide-related data to analyze trends and evaluate program efficacy.

The Colorado Trust’s Bullying Prevention initiative, which ran from 2005 to 2008, provided $8.6 million to 45 school districts and community-based organizations to train students and adults in identifying bullying and intervening. Bullying was defined as intentional exclusion of certain students, unprovoked physical and verbal attacks, mean gossiping and internet harassment.

The Colorado Trust’s Violence Prevention initiative started in 1995. “Then, [the] Columbine [school shooting] happened in 1999, and The Trust convened any funder in Colorado interested in talking about what to do to reduce violence or help kids when they’re in a position where they’re considering doing something extreme,” said Carol Breslau, The Colorado Trust’s vice president for initiatives from 2003 to 2007 and a program officer from 1995 to 2003. “That’s how we got entrenched in working to improve mental health and addressing suicide prevention and bullying prevention.”

Suicides persist in the U.S., especially in western states like Colorado with rural areas that face limited access to mental health care and higher rates of  social isolation, gun ownership, economic hardship and other factors that can increase people’s risk of wanting to end their lives.

The number of people who die by suicide continues to steadily increase statewide. People who lose someone to suicide experience grief, shock, anger, depression, anxiety and guilt, and they are more likely to die by suicide themselves. Estimates suggest that, in some cases, more than 100 people are affected when a person dies by suicide.

Likewise, many consequences affect a bully and the person bullied. Victims are more likely to struggle in school, have health problems and low self-esteem, and they often struggle to connect with others socially. Young people who bully are more likely to have criminal convictions as adults, according to StopBullying.gov, a website managed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Bullying has become such a serious problem that all 50 U.S. states have anti-bullying laws.

“Vulnerability to taking a suicide action is a health condition, and no one is immune to that. This can develop at any point in life due to a wide variety of circumstances, and everybody ought to know if they have this health condition and what some of the recognizable features are,” said Vincent Atchity, CEO of Mental Health Colorado.

“I think bullying and trauma are generational, and the impacts are hard to eradicate,” he added. “A bully is someone who needs help.” 

The number of suicide deaths in Colorado has steadily increased since the state began publishing the data in 2004. There were 1,306 suicides in 2024, up from 792 deaths in 2004. The highest number of suicides statewide occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, with 1,370 deaths reported.

From 2004 to 2024, 22,297 suicides were documented.

In 1998, then-Gov. Roy Romer signed an executive order declaring suicide a significant public health issue. Within months, Colorado became one of the first U.S. states to create a plan to reduce suicides, according to The Colorado Trust’s archives. The Colorado Suicide Prevention and Intervention Plan report, published later that year, included recommendations for the state Office of Suicide Prevention to implement with help from the Suicide Prevention Coalition of Colorado over the next decade. These included expanding and advancing mental health care, data and information sharing, partnerships, mental health literacy, substance use treatment, crisis intervention and changes to state policies.

In 2002, The Colorado Trust published a report about suicide deaths and attempts, as well as the lack of sufficient funding for communities eager to lead prevention efforts. In response, The Colorado Trust developed its Suicide Prevention initiative that same year.

Two years later, suicide prevention leaders in Moffat and Routt counties joined forces to create Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide at a time when residents, behavioral health providers and local leaders recognized such an entity was needed, Marriott, the executive director, said.

Other programs that commenced or advanced under The Colorado Trust’s Suicide Prevention Initiative include Colorado LINK, which worked to prevent suicides in two Denver high schools, and Urban Peak, a shelter for young people who were homeless.

An independent evaluator was tasked with determining the effectiveness of the Suicide Prevention initiative. “Gatekeeper trainings” taught participants how to recognize people who were contemplating suicide and refer them to appropriate care, said Jean Demmler, who conducted the evaluation. Forty-four percent of gatekeepers reported intervening at least once, and 13% reported intervening more than once.

The 45 grantees that worked on the Bullying Prevention initiative estimated that they reached 50,000 young people and adults through their efforts.

“The focus, until that point, that we were able to find in research was trying to get bullies to stop,” said Nancy Csuti, The Colorado Trust’s former vice president of research, evaluation & strategic learning during both initiatives. “Our program decided not to focus on that, but rather to focus more on the bystanders who didn’t intervene.”

The approach was specific because research also suggests that most bullying incidents include at least one bystander, Csuti added.

According to the Bullying Prevention initiative’s evaluation findings, the percentage of students who reported continuing to bully others dropped by 12% from 2005 to 2008. Physical bullying dropped by 9%, and verbal bullying, which included cyberbullying, decreased by 5%.

Evaluators also drew a link between schools with lower levels of bullying and higher scores on the Colorado Student Assessment Program, the state standardized test at the time.

“If children are afraid to come to school because they are bullied regularly, it is unlikely that they will start each day ready to learn,” evaluators wrote in the report.

When the middle school in Brush, about 90 minutes northeast of Denver, began its bullying prevention efforts, the rate of bullying among 8th graders was among the highest in Colorado’s middle schools. It dropped dramatically, by 56%, following the implementation of the Olweus Bullying Prevention Program. The Olweus program is a schoolwide bullying prevention approach that provides education and counseling for bullies, victims, teachers, administrative staff, students and others in the community.

School staff made bullying prevention a priority after they heard students say bullying was seen as entertainment, and that their peers watched and did not intervene if the victim was not a good friend or if they thought the bullying didn’t seem serious. The school addressed students’ requests for more adult supervision during free time, provided anonymous reporting mechanisms and gave higher-risk students a cell phone number for the bullying prevention coordinator.

“Bullying prevention is still important to our school district and to our community because if we want to focus on strong academic achievement, you have to have effective bullying prevention and make sure students feel safe in school,” said Marsha Cody, Brush School District superintendent. “A lot of those strategies are still embedded into our learning environment. Thankfully, we’re still seeing the positive impact that took place with that work from the early 2000s.”

Bullying prevention programs at schools that hired staff to run them often ended, Csuti said, but programs where schools recruited employees already working there were usually more sustainable because schools didn’t need to find additional funding to operate.

Bullying is “a prevalent problem now that’s not confined to K-12 schools,” said Kirk Williams, who evaluated the Bullying Prevention Initiative. “It happens in workplaces and in politics, and other institutional settings, and it’s been a pervasive problem for a long time.”

When students and teachers are willing to intervene, and when students feel they have trusting and caring relationships with teachers, bullying becomes less prevalent, Williams and his team wrote in their summary report.

Interventions that aim to prevent suicides are equally paramount, Marriott said.

Each time someone attempts or completes suicide in Moffat or Routt counties, local law enforcement officials page Reaching Everyone Preventing Suicide leaders, who send trained volunteers to the homes of grieving families to help with death notifications, travel arrangements ahead of funerals and any other needs. The agency offers the same crisis response and aftermath services to people in workplaces and schools, Marriott said.

The nonprofit keeps track of suicide-related deaths and trends in these counties. Efforts now focus on reaching middle-aged men, who are at higher risk for suicide in that region. The group is also providing suicide prevention information on the radio and in bathrooms at restaurants and bars. And it provides gun locks, teaches people about proper gun storage and offers free therapy and other confidential services to help prevent deaths.

“Suicide prevention is everyone’s business,” Marriott said. “It’s our community, and it really does need to be everybody’s business to make sure that we’re taking care of our people, especially our kids. If this wasn’t here, I can’t imagine the shape this community would be in.”