The Genesis of School Pulse

Welcome back to another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour. Today we are hanging out with a new friend. His name is Yuri Melo. Yuri is a licensed clinical social worker with 20 years of experience and the proud father of five. He’s the co-founder of School Pulse, a national student support service that delivers positivity, optimism, and growth mindset tools to students, parents, and faculty via text and email. After several teen suicides in his community, Yuri co-created School Pulse in 2017 to proactively support student wellbeing. He’s also authored the Mind Over Grey Matter and the teen bestseller Know Thy Selfie, and the developer of Adventure-Based Therapy.

With over 300 schools in 25 plus states, Yuri’s mission is to bless the human family in inspiring students every day through kindness, psychology, and powerful weekly videos. Dang, that’s really inspiring, Yuri. Welcome to the drug prevention power hour.

Awesome, brother. Jake, we’re gonna rock today, dude. I love it. I love it already. I’m just happy to be here and let’s get this thing rolling, man. I love it. Thanks for the intro.

Yeah, well, I have to know. mean, you kind of alluded it to it. It’s in your bio is that maybe this mission started with a tragedy. Will you take us there and kind of tell us why you started this School Pulse program?

You bet. Yeah. I would say, and I think I was just describing to you, live honestly in this just marvelous place, man. We live in St. George, Utah, and it’s just this idyllic setting. It’s a beautiful community. We probably have five or six high schools and about seven years ago, yeah, we had seven students that took their life by suicide, like right here in our community. had my, oldest girls were going to school at one of the schools and they lost two of their classmates to suicide. And then later on, they actually lost another one to kind of another accident. And this principal who I believe is a true innovator, he reached out to me, him and I had had some interactions in the past in part because I think by then I had released one or two of my books. And he reached out to me honestly, because he was just under pressure. I mean, if you can imagine being an administrator, right? I mean, and you just lost not one, but two of your students to suicide. And I remember talking to him and him telling me like, honestly, Yuri, like I had no idea those kids were not in my radar. They’re fabulous kids, like great families. And basically he reached out to me because he felt like to be honest, Yuri, I feel like all I have available to me are just reactive tools. It’s like I’m passively waiting for crisis to happen. And then we all kind of just

Do the best we can to deal with it, which of course he did and he did phenomenal, but him and I began this, this, series of meetings where we discussed like, what can we do? Right? How, how can we go from passive to proactive? How can we go to reactive to proactive? Right? What can we do? And we came, you know, we thought about, well, let’s build the websites or more resources or let’s create an app. And then later on, I met with a good friend of mine, Trent Staley, who’s a software engineer and a fabulous person and a genius.

And he loved the concept, loved the idea and said, Hey, why don’t we do that? but instead of just building a resource, why don’t we figure out a way to text students proactively, individually. And that was really the Genesis, right? That was the beginning. And we kind of launched at that school. And at that point, I won’t bore you with all the details, but little by little, you know, we went from just being kind of an outgoing text where we would text one, you know, one text per week and we weren’t even providing live support at that time to about three to four years later where students were beginning to engage back and we weren’t even answering at that point. And we thought to ourselves like, my gosh, like what would happen if we started to actually provide real people like real support. And when we did that, Jake, bro, it wasn’t like we exploded in business. No, because schools are, it’s hard to change. It’s hard to adopt new things, but yeah, like the stories, I mean, that we’re just so unbelievably honored to be a proud of, to be a part of, you know, all the way from students who are just doing incredible, right? They’re just celebrating, they’ve graduated, they’ve gone on their first date or life is good, right? They just got their first kiss, whatever it is, right? All the way to students who are, yeah, like they’re actively struggling, they’re actively suicidal. There’s been school shootings, there’s gang violence.

You like they’re reporting physical or sexual abuse. mean, anything that you can imagine and that you’ve already heard of, they themselves are struggling, whether it be with substance abuse or their parents are struggling with substance abuse. And we’ve just become this incredible service that I feel we just have these like Nobel prize winning like interventions with kids. It’s just incredible. And then in addition to that, we’ve added, we’ve just listened to schools.

Over these past seven years, just trying to figure out like, what do you need? Like what, what are the problems? Like how can we solve? then, you know, when they tell us, well, we need more of this or we need this, or we don’t have enough resources for this. Or then we begin to create all of these additional little tools and we just provide them the tool. And it’s been a heck of a ride, man.

Wow. Okay. I have a ton of questions, but I got to control myself. here’s what I would love to know first is as you went and you were developing this solution in a way, and you’re being proactive and on this podcast, we’ll call it prevention. Like you’re being proactive, you’re in prevention and it’s in your bio, right? You’re talking about growth mindset. You’re talking about emotional strength and all these different things that are really important for character building.

Proactive vs. Reactive Approaches in Schools

That’s correct and for strong, resilient kids. So we know it’s prevention, but a school has 100 problems going on. And so when you’re saying, hey, I have this solution and I definitely want to get like a map of how it works and what exactly it does. But I am wondering when a school has a hundred problems going on, how do you get them to care about this one? Is there it the story that makes it applicable? Is it some type of framework or does every administrator have a fear of this happening to them? What is it that way you think your partners that you have that are on board and it’s great, what are those partners like?

What a fabulous question. I, I’ll give you one quick example, because I think you’re actually correct. It’s probably a mixture of all of those and every single school or administrator or even district has different things that are really kind of top of mind. Like I’m thinking of, for example, we had a school, well, I mean, I’ll actually, I mean, you’re down in Phoenix. have a, a district down there. The Tulsa district is one of our love those people and the, and the lady that got our program into their school, like one of their concerns, I mean, is there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of violence in their school. They have some gang issues at their school. They have some, violence that has occurred in school. And of course, you know, they fear, I mean, student suicide and all these things, because they could, they dramatically impact the atmosphere and the culture at a school. mean, the impact of losing a kid, whether it be to a shoot and you’re to an accident or to suicide or to have a school shooting. I those things can dramatically impact a year, multiple years. And so one of the things that I think administrators or districts or even states, we have a contract with the state of Idaho, is they’re absolutely looking to bolster their suicide prevention efforts. So that’s almost like a mandate. If you want to look at it, like every school has this mandate. We have to provide some sort of suicide prevention education to our students, to our staff, to our parents, right? And then in addition to that, they have to provide some form of student wellness or social and emotional learning opportunity. just depends on the state or mental fitness or mental excellence. And that’s really what we provide. It just happens that our focus is more on what I would say is the protective factors, right?

Our goal is really to provide enriching content that can protect or somewhat insulate or mitigate some of the challenges that students are facing. I find that a lot of schools, even though I think they’re attempting to do prevention, it’s more like intervention. I think that’s really more what they’re doing. They’re kind of stuck in the at risk when it happens and then we intervene.

And our goal is really to write, be the precursor, right? We’re way back there. We’re proactively engaging students who are at whatever level they’re doing well, they’re doing great, they’re not doing great. And we proactively engage them. Then we address them when they’re in intervention. And then we even do some post-vention where we continue on our efforts and we just don’t stop. And so it’s really difficult. I’ll tell you another thing that a lot of schools are looking for as well.

Is they’re looking for alternative ways to discipline their students. Like, so they, they, we can’t, most schools don’t want to just discipline kids. I think that there’s a really strong push to make sure that we’re not just doing that and that we’re providing corrective or alternative or more positive ways to discipline kids. Right? So we’re not just saying like, don’t do this behavior. Like we’re actually saying, don’t do that.

We actually want you to do this and let me educate you on how to do that. And so we’ve created these really easy to access activities that schools can administer to kids. And so once again, our goal is to just come to the rescue of schools who constantly tell us, like you said, we have a thousand things happening. We don’t have enough staff that can provide for the mental health needs of our kids.

Their behavior is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Our kids aren’t paying attention. Their attention is fragmented. And so we provide these solutions, like you said, that don’t add burden. Like we handle the email campaigns. They don’t even have to touch them. The text campaign and the support, we do that. We do that after they’re gone home and they’re with their school. So we provide this huge just net of support. So we really are trying to be that like. We’re not coming in and surgically trying to change your school. We’re just coming to your like call. Like we need help and we can help. So it’s kind of where we’re at.

User Experience and Engagement with School Pulse

Yeah, I know our listeners are really resonating with your methods and that it’s truly prevention because even just mentioning that you’re focusing on those protective factors to build the students who, how can we stop the behavior, the risky behavior from even happening in the first place? And I think there is a difference between those administrators and districts who get that and those who maybe don’t know yet what restorative programming is or diversion programs that like there’s prevention, which is, hey, how do we keep the students who are making positive decisions on that route as long as possible? And if, hey, we know students are going through a lot of stuff. So if we need to course correct, what’s a actual caring and helpful way to do that instead of the slap on the wrist, you get out of school and now you’re behind and you do more risky behaviors because you can’t like, cope with things that are going on, you didn’t get any new tools. So I’m super interested in hearing about the tools and the methods of School Pulse. So let’s say a school district tops on board and you’re like, hey, School Pulse, this sounds really cool. So you’re going to send message campaigns to our kids, email campaigns, maybe there’s some activities and stuff.

What does it actually look like as far as the user experience when a student is part of a school pulse district? We’ll call it that, right? What are they experiencing? What are the students getting?

Yeah. So this, this is what it looks like when we contract with schools. For example, I mean, I’ll just use the example because you’re just right there until, mean, in Phoenix, but in Tulsa. So we have these and you can actually kind of see it just right here. There’s this little QR code just right over here. We actually place these throughout the school, like these, and they’re actually like posters with cool sayings and things like that in a QR code. And our goal is to just invite students to participate, right? It’s, mean, they’re minors. We can’t force anybody to utilize her. Obviously, the schools can also enroll students. let’s say maybe, you know, there’s a counselor or an administrative and they’re aware of a kid who’s struggling. can easily opt the kid right into the service and just imagine that, right? Once a kid, you know, grabs their phone, they scan that QR code or they’re, you know, opted in either by a parent or even by the administration.

From that day on that student from us, right? They’re going to be texted twice a week. Like we’ll literally just kind of tap them on the shoulder, right? We deliver our positive like student success videos every Tuesday. On Friday, we deliver other inspirational content and we actually have a couple of questionnaires that we release on Friday, every other Friday. So we do a general wellness questionnaire, a competence questionnaire, an academic effort and their perception of the culture at the school. And then we actually provide that data live, like it’s live to the administration so that they can actually see, right, the pulse of the school, of the student body. That’s kind of where we get our name. But from that moment on, the moment that that student is on, not only does the school know, this student is going to be reached out twice a week for the remainder of the school year.

They’re going to have live support all the way from 8 a.m. to midnight through holidays and through the summer. Like this is just a fabulous intervention. And when there’s a student, right, who is actively struggling, right, maybe they’re, you know, having some suicidal ideation or maybe they’re reporting something else or they’re burned out. Number one, they’re going to be met by real people, not AI, real people who are going to provide live support who are gonna drop like incredible resources right over text. And when there’s a need, we will do everything in our power to connect that student, number one, to their parents, which is where they should be connecting. But most of the times we end up connecting those students to the professionals at the school. We’ve had students who have reported physical and sexual abuse. We’ve had students who have reported abuse happening within their school, and we’ve been able to intervene and just provide not just support for that student, but connect that student with resources right there where they are. So that’s just one. And once again, the beauty there is the school puts that. I usually do kind of a virtual assembly and kind of hype the kids up, invite them to come on. But that’s all. Like the school, once again, we’re not trying to get in there and make life hard. The email campaigns day.

It’s simple. It’s one email a week. We send it. We manage the campaign. They simply give us their parents email and we, and we begin it. And we actually believe in parent development. They don’t touch it. They just track it. They know what’s going. It goes out to the parents, goes out to the students. We do have some, like I said, the school-based resources. We’ve created those because schools have told us like, Hey, we want these, right? We want these restorative practice activities. Like we want these student success activities.

Crisis Management and Support Systems

We want to proactively in a classroom, in home room, in advisory time, like we want to share these, you know, seven to 10 minute non cringey videos to our kids. Like that’s what we want to do. And so, and our content, do want to say is, is our, our niche is really that like six through 12 grade. Like that’s, those are our people.

Where at this point we don’t really have content for elementary schools. At some point we probably will, that’s who we’re serving is those kind of secondary schools. So it’s fun, man. It’s been fun.

Wow, that’s interesting. And do parents? I’m sure you have data. Are parents engaging with the content? And I’ll tell you, full vulnerability. When we do parent education with our partners, to get them to show up to anything in person is so difficult that we started doing kind of like you. We developed these five videos that we could send out to parents and our partners can use them how they want to, but we don’t get data on whether it’s being opened or anything like that. So I know normal email open rates is like a couple percent is great. So I’m wondering what you guys have seen as far as our parents watching the videos, are they opening the emails? Even if they do a couple of times a semester, that would be great, but I’m wondering what you see.

We do. So our video campaigns are really, really simple. And once again, we want to be, I always want to be mindful. Like I realized that I think that there’s parents are already getting a lot of things over email. And so, but our videos are really simple. usually have, you know, for example, usually the videos that we send kind of match the time of the year. So for example, as the school year was coming to an end, we sent out a lot of videos on you know, how to deal with burnout or, you know, videos about I’ve fallen behind, I can’t catch up, right? And of course, as the summer has started, you know, we release videos about, you know, five things, know, five tips to have an extraordinary summer or, you know, other videos that we try to match to the time of the year. I actually don’t know the exact open rate on the emails, but we do also invite parents to participate on the text based platform. The reason why we do that, by the way, number one is transparency, right? parents, I think parents want to be involved. We respect that. want to be involved. And so when we’re, when I say we’re intervening and if, and and if they have intervened in saving lives or been a part of those interventions, it’s not just with kids, man. have parents who themselves are going through divorce.

They’re dealing with their own substance abuse. They’re dealing with their own depression. They’re going in and out of mental health hospitals and we’re providing that support to them. So we really want to provide schools and districts with a robust solution that we believe can protect them. Had a conversation with the superintendent in Washington who was actually going through a civil suit. They had had a I think a student who had taken their life by suicide. And then I don’t know all the details and they probably matter less, but there was a civil suit happening where I think the parents or the family was suing the district for whatever reason, right? And I think they ended up settling or whatever. But I remember when I first introduced our program to that superintendent and that superintendent just telling me, man, Yuri, I got to tell you, man, I wish I had school pulse in my pocket walking into that courtroom, you know, just because we offer such a potent and comprehensive solution that goes to parents. It goes to students. It’s utilized in the classroom. I mean, we just try to cover the basis for schools and really give them something where they feel like, man, I am doing everything in my power to make sure that my kiddos are doing awesome. I am providing every possible tool for them to help them to excel. And that’s what we try to do.

And I think what’s neat is that it sounds like it’s very easy for people to implement. You’re taking work off of their plate. And I know from meeting so many school counselors and administrators, when a student comes into your office with trouble, you often can give them a very small amount of time before you have to go on to the next student because they’re so overwhelmed with the demand and the class sizes and there’s so many challenges today. So the fact is they would love to keep in touch and keep texting these students and all that stuff. And you’re basically saying, hey, if a student comes into the office and they have an issue or they get caught with this, or they have a challenge with this, tag us in. We’re happy to help. We’ll check on them. We’ll send them a good content. And if they’re ever in trouble, they can reach out. And if, you know, if we need to alert you, we’re going to do that. We’re going to plug you in. And that’s, that’s such a valuable thing. And it is needed today so, so much. And yeah, I’m so excited to check more about School Pulse for as far as who is responding to these texts. So when a student is texting back and forth with you or mentioning, hey, I’m in trouble, is it somebody that has a certain licensure or is it a company module and do you have internal SOPs that teach people how to respond in those moments? Like, how do you make sure that the right stuff is happening?

The Importance of Prevention in Mental Health

I love that. Yeah, that’s, that’s definitely one of our most asked questions, right? I mean, number one, the most asked question we get when we’re meeting with schools is what happens when a student is in crisis, right? When a student texts you at 7 PM at night and says, like, I want to take my life. Like I’m going to kill myself. Right. Like what happens, right? What’s the protocol, right? How do we become aware of that? Right and we don’t text, we don’t text administrators after school. Like I always tell schools like that’s why you’re hiring a service like this so that you can go home at five and you can know, right, that you’ve got a team of individuals that’s going to be with that student throughout that day. Like that’s why you’re hiring us. But let me, who we have, our team is, is a mixture. have other individuals like me, they’re licensed clinical social workers that are licensed.

But the large majority of our team are trained paraprofessionals that are QPR certified. So kind of a national certification. In addition to that, we actually have some partnerships with the University of Utah. We take their bachelor’s level social workers and their master’s level social workers. And I mean, we’ve been doing that now for almost five years. And it’s just been awesome. We’ve just had such a great partnership with them. And we actually do Southern Utah University as well with some of their psychology students. And so we have a young, I think that’s exactly how they should be. We have other people who are a little bit older like me, I’m like almost 50, but we have a pretty young and we train them. We have very specific protocol that we deal with. And of course, when there is a crisis, we do have really specific protocol that we abide by, but our conversations are transparent to the school. I’ll have to show you maybe another time, but so that way.

Schools can keep track. can see what’s happening. The students are anonymous. We don’t know who the students are. I mean, we, these are minors. have specific laws. Like we’re not allowed to have their personal information unless they tell us, right, that they’re actively suicidal or they’re looking to harm somebody else. We’ve had actually some of those as well. Uh, and where we’ve been able to intervene. It’s just been amazing. Like it’s kind of incredible. Um, Wow, okay, that’s cool.

I’ll tell you one quick story. I’ll tell you one quick story. I want to say, right. It was in December. I don’t recall what it was, but in Wisconsin, it was that school shooting. don’t know if you recall that, but, Jake, I kid you not, I, this is almost going to sound too fantastic, but the very same day we had another student in Wisconsin whom we had chatted with before and we had been texting proactively.

And they communicated with us a concern that they themselves were having homicidal ideation as well. And we were able to intervene with that student and just honestly love them and care, like can provide great tools and support. And we were able to connect that student to the principal, to the administration at the school. And they were able to get that student help. So I always say there’s that one school in Wisconsin that everybody knows about because a tragedy occurred there.

And then there’s this other school that nobody knows about because prevention occurred there. And I, I don’t want to be arrogant and say like, Hey, we stopped the school shooting because it was very early to say that. But we do know that there was a student who did say that and we were fortunately able to intervene and assist. And that’s just one of many stories, like just awesome kids, by the way, like I, I know that we kind of fear.

And I think the statistics that we hear about our kiddos these days, I think it scares us to death. I mean, I’ve got, like I said, five kids, but we engage with these kids all the time and Jake, they are just stellar. They are stellar. Like I am more optimistic as a result of our engagement with kids. I absolutely am. Like I know they face challenges and I actually think they’re going to figure it out. but they do have some stuff that they need to work through and some of that is a little bit on us. We’ve kind of put this stuff in their hands and now they’re going to have to deal with it. And I think they will, but it’s, but it’s going to hurt them a little bit too. So.

No, I’m with you 100%. We get to see students at every type of school and help them make better decisions around substance use. And all our partners listening are like, yeah, you’re right. The ones that catch headlines are the tragic stories. But the work that we’re all doing in prevention is we don’t get patted on the back for this kind of stuff because there’s no headlines. There’s no hero badges. It’s just like,

Yeah, thanks. Now we’re going to cut your funding. Thanks. How do we do like… Now we don’t need you anymore because you said that you’re doing a good job. Like, prevention will be undervalued no matter. Hopefully that changes, you know? And the budgets will reflect it. And I think the smarter we get, the more prevention is going to be prioritized. There’s that saying that what an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And it’s a very cute saying. And once you see the data on it, you’re like, my gosh, we could be saving billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of lives if we prioritize prevention. so, man, Yuri, I’ll be praying for school policy and your journey to get into all the schools in the whole country. Cause it sounds like y’all are doing some incredible work and making the lives of school teachers, which they give so, so much. They and all the staff at do schools give so much. So to have a partner like School Pulse would be incredible. Will you please leave us with some information on how we can learn more and then we’ll say goodbye.

Let’s do it. Yeah, you can reach out to me individually. So my name is kind of a strange name. It’s Yuri. It’s spelled I U R I. So you can email me directly at yuri@schoolpulse.org, or you can go to schoolpulse.org. And that’s our website and you can check out our stuff there and you can reach out to us.

If it’s okay, Jake, I’ll leave a couple of links for you as well. We’ve put together the most comprehensive mental health resource for teens in the world. I promise you, you’ll be blown away. And we’ll put a link in there and parents can look at it, teens can look at it, and they don’t have to sign up or do anything weird. They can just open it, look at it, utilize it. You’ll be able to see all of our videos. I think you’ll be impressed. I think you’ll be impressed. And hopefully that’s a good link for your listeners and hopefully that’s something that they can utilize themselves.

That’s awesome, Yuri. Thank you so much. And for everybody listening, get on schoolpulse.org, find what’s ever below this video. We’ll put that link in all the notes so you can download that resource because I mean, mental health, we could all use a little bit more resources on it. We know that it’s important, but yeah, let’s get some tools, some videos that Yuri’s putting out there and see how we can put it to work and save more lives. And for everyone listening, I hope that you have an incredible week. Stay in the game because the world needs you and we’ll see you next Monday for another episode of the Drug Prevention Power Hour