Palo Alto’s Project Safety Net seeks input on youth suicide

Monday afternoon, June 6

Dear Fellow PAOnliners,

This is good news.

Ms. Gloner and Project Safety Net have moved to fill a gaping hole in the CDC’s inquiry. This survey is likely to provide worthwhile information. Three cheers!

But, with the CDC’s initial report due out this month (it’s undergoing clearances, according to the county office of public health), and PSN survey responses welcome until June 24th, it seems unlikely that the report will have the benefit of this highly useful survey.

This will be another limitation on a study that’s already very limited–and whose focus has been misunderstood, due to incomplete news and publicity. Even in national publications such as Newsweek and the Washington Post, and on CNN and ABC News Nightline, in-depth information on the CDC study has largely gone missing.

Everywhere, people have gained misimpressions about what the CDC study actually is and actually isn’t.

In reporting this, I feel no happiness. As one of Palo Alto’s hundreds of “first responders,” on the scene in the classroom, I’ve been with many of our teenagers in some of the hours of their sharpest grief, and have looked high and low for insight into our high-schoolers’ problems, for encouraging news, even for outside help. So I’m loath to dash in others the very hopes I’ve sought myself.

But the brave “bugle call” for the CDC’s study–as if a contingent of the U.S. Cavalry were riding to our rescue–has raised unwarranted hopes.

The CDC’s mission at its core, as stated by the county office, is focused on “the use and analysis of existing quantitative datasets”: vital statistics, emergency department and hospital data, school survey data, rates of alcohol and drug use.

They’re not delving into cause-and-effect; they’re lining up correlations (e.g., do we have high rates of substance abuse to go with the high mortality rate?). As the Weekly’s article attests, they weren’t here to reconnoiter new, “primary” sources; they were assembling already-existing, “secondary” sources.

Disconcertingly, they’re seeking no first-hand knowledge of Palo Alto’s teenagers. The study will include no substantive interviews with the District’s 4000 high-schoolers. This is a great loss, when it comes to a problem that has brought Palo Alto so much sorrow. And interviews are much more revealing than surveys–because more personal, full of feeling, and less limited by the questions.

Nor will the CDC be drawing upon other school sources–not administrators or counselors or coaches, nor the new therapists our School Board recently hired at some expense, nor even the 200 classroom professionals who spend more weekday hours with teenagers than any other grown-ups and who are privy to their journals and artwork, their embarrassments over homework tardy due to parental separations or social-media humiliations, their confidential tears before and after class.

And finally, sadly: the CDC isn’t seeking out the friends and families, or studying the experiences and histories, of our ten (now eleven) departed children.

And what is the report likely to recommend? The same reassuring-sounding but ineffectual measures–e.g., “community education,” “response protocols,” “coordination with local physicians”—that the CDC proposed in 2014 for northern Virginia, and which Palo Alto already developed and endorsed six years ago, following our first rash of losses, but which failed to prevent last year’s cluster.

The CDC recommended too, for Virginia, curricula to “promote positive attitudes,” build cognitive skills, teach students to help peers at risk. We already have this here in spades. Even though the titles of recent books on schooling and child-rearing are unanimously flashing red—“over-scheduled,” “overloaded,” “over-parented,” “over-tested–our District has added more to students’ lives: “social-emotional” curriculum, lessons on depression and mental health, wellness teams, workshops on stress reduction–all aimed at fixing our kids.

But we need to stop trying to fix our kids–and starting fixing our schools. Our teenagers aren’t the problem; their environment is.

We should: a) shrink the largest class-sizes, so that kids don’t feel lost in the crowd (Palo Alto’s two high schools, fall semester, had 407 classes with 30 or more teenagers per room); b) restore sleep and home life and friendship time to students by, first, empowering them with a voice in their nightly homework minutes (via a confidential app that will crunch the numbers conveniently for teachers), and, second, requiring guidance counseling for any go-ahead for multiple APs (just some words of wisdom about how little difference they make to admissions, and how many wonderful colleges there are).

We should: c) roll back our kids’ all-day dependence on social media by requiring phones to be turned off, first bell to last (and my making campuses more companionable); d) curb the bombardment of grade-reports that obliterates much-needed time to heal from the setbacks of adolescence; e) end the misery-inducing, rampant cheating that occurs at rates of 75-80%.

Such changes will not come easily. The community coalition Save the 2,008– made up of hundreds of parents, Stanford professors, PAMF doctors, faith leaders, engineers, venture capitalists—has long been advocating for such adjustments but has been rebuffed by our Superintendent and School Board. (With the exception of Mr. Dauber, who has called Save the 2,008 “a gift to the community.”)

The bugle call of the CDC sounds bold and brave, and we deeply need hope, but it is leading us in the wrong direction. The incompleteness of their inquiry will prevent them from really riding to our rescue; our fate is much more in our own hands.

Still, the bugle summons will only distract us if we let it. If we set our hearts on what will truly bring hope to our high-schoolers, well, help is surely on the way.

Sincerely,
Marc Vincenti
Gunn English Dept. (1995-2010)
Campaign Coordinator, Save the 2,008
savethe2008.com (please visit and consider joining our alliance)