In 2017, Herriman High School in Herriman, Utah, lost seven students to suicide in a single calendar year. It was the worst crisis the community had ever faced. And the existing mental health infrastructure — counselors, hotlines, awareness campaigns — had failed to prevent it.
What happened next would take five years to fully understand. And what it revealed would challenge how we think about youth mental health, school culture, and the role of connection in human survival.
The diagnosis.
Vice-principal Julie Scherzinger was brought into Herriman after the crisis. Her background as a counselor and administrator led her to seek out proactive approaches. In 2019, she was listening to David Kozlowski's podcast — Light the Fight — when she heard something that reframed the entire problem.
"David explained the current youth mental health decline as not being a mental health issue. Instead, he viewed it as a social health issue with serious mental health side effects."
Kozlowski's field research at Herriman confirmed this reframe: 91% of students reporting suicidal ideation cited relationship breakdown — not clinical illness — as the primary contributing factor. They weren't losing kids because they lacked counselors. They were losing them because the relational infrastructure inside the school had collapsed.
The intervention.
In August 2020, Kozlowski launched Level Up — a Social Health curriculum — for all incoming sophomores at Herriman. The class was taken during the quarter students weren't in driver's ed. It taught specific, trainable relational skills.
The curriculum wasn't therapy. It wasn't SEL. It wasn't a mental health awareness program. As Scherzinger described it:
"That's the beauty of it. It's not a mental health class."
Students learned how to make eye contact. How to use someone's name. How to lead with statements instead of questions. How to walk away from unhealthy relationships. How to repair broken ones. How to practice what Kozlowski calls Social Cardio — the daily, face-to-face interaction that maintains relational fitness.
The results.
Within six months of implementation, Herriman saw a 30% drop in at-risk behaviors. Within one year, the number of students reporting suicidal ideation dropped from 155 to 5.
In a survey of students who completed the course, 92% said it was something all students should take.
KUTV Channel 2 News covered the story. The Orrin G. Hatch Foundation introduced Kozlowski to Utah lawmakers. A bill was drafted to expand the curriculum statewide.
But the most telling data point wasn't a number. It was a behavior: students who had taken Level Up were spontaneously befriending isolated peers. Teachers watched students who would never have spoken to each other forming genuine connections — not because they were told to, but because the curriculum gave them the tools and the permission to try.
What it means.
Herriman proved three things that have shaped everything Social Health Systems has built since:
1. The crisis is relational, not clinical.
Most youth mental health interventions treat symptoms. Social Health addresses the root cause: the quality, frequency, and infrastructure of human connection.
2. Connection is trainable.
Relational skills aren't personality traits — they're behaviors that can be taught, practiced, and measured. Level Up proved this at scale.
3. The classroom is the right delivery system.
Unlike counseling (which students must seek out) or awareness campaigns (which students ignore), a curriculum reaches every student — including the ones who would never ask for help.
Herriman was the laboratory. Social Health Systems is the framework it produced. And the accreditation model ensures that what happened there can happen everywhere — with fidelity, measurement, and accountability.