September is known as suicide prevention month.
On September 2, 2025, Tr’Vaughn Williams, 11, started planning out his ideas for preventing suicide at his school. He drafted a poem and hung-up posters with the poem around the school hallway.
“I started doing it now because I realize how important it is,” said Williams.
Williams’ main message is “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem and I’m trying to tell people that there’s always help out there and that people care for them no matter how lost and lonely they feel.”
Williams wants people to live their own lives and to not take their own based on a current event happening in their life slowing them down.
“There’s somebody out there who cares about their presence and cares about their wellbeing and that if they need help, they should seek help because taking your life isn’t the option you should take and I want people to like live their lives,” said Williams.
Autumn Baker, 11, and Chase Magnett an English teacher at North, are both helping Williams achieve his goal in their own ways.
“This really meant a lot to him, because we all know lots of teenagers are struggling and working alone on a project defeats the whole purpose. It’s supposed to help bring people together, and I wanted to assist him the best I could with that,” said Baker.
Baker helped Williams with his grammar on his poem while Magnett helped Williams with all the technical issues.
“I was mostly letting him do his own thing because this was his project, but I was trying to give editorial ideas for some of the words and then how to design his poster with the QRCode and by adding links onto it for help lines and stuff,” said Baker
Williams chose Baker and Magnett for help. Williams chose Baker because she is his friend. When Williams eventually turned to Magnett for support as a teacher.
“I just want to support students who are stepping into leadership and designing their own projects,” said Magnett.
Willaim is trying to spread his message manly to teenagers; however, he is open to spreading the message to any age group.
“Mostly to teenagers at North, but also the adults so they can understand it from a teenager’s perspective because it is kind of hard to understand something when you, are not in that persons’ shoes,” said Willaims.
Williams, Baker, and Magnett all believe that this would leave a positive impact on students in the future.
“I saw people stopping to scan the codes, so I don’t know how it affected them specifically, but I feel like it really reached out to people,” said Baker.
William hopes to spread his poem outside of North someday.
“I do want to spread this outside of North. It’ll probably be through the forms of poetry which I could publish outside of North,” said Willaims.
William, Magnett and Baker all hope that William’s poem will become a tradition to bring awareness to suicide prevention month.
“It would be cool to make this a yearly thing for the school to bring awareness to the issue and hopefully it would help motivate future students to ask for help and know that it’s okay and everyone struggles sometimes,” said Baker.
