Since when did PAUSD start caring about parent wishes and student concerns? The lack of information is because it is negative press for the district. The strategy of the district is pretty well established.

Having been a parent when a suicide occurred on many occasions, it is true that rumors with either true or false information circulate around the student body and as a parent we get to hear it third or fourth hand and have no idea which is true and which is not. This also happens when there is a death in the school community due to cancer or some type of road accident, etc. As parents, we often have to deal with grieving teens and it is always hard to know what they are grieving about because their first reaction is not to tell us.

Teens are difficult to assess. When they close up it might be because of grief, or it might be because of something such as drugs/alcohol/or being dumped by a romantic partner. As parents we have to deal with "moody teens" without any clues as to why they are behaving the way they are behaving.

I agree that more transparency to families in schools makes much more sense than keeping quiet. We don't have to know all the details, just enough to make sense of what our teens are feeling. Then we can hug them and support them. Otherwise they just tell us to go away and leave them alone leaving us wondering.

As a PAUSD parent, I do not wish to get too much information on a specific suicide case. Especially for someone I don't even know. I remember when a high school suicide happened few years ago, we received emails from our middle school principal, superintendent, district counselor. It was so stressful to read all those emails. It added so much unnecessary stress to me and my family. Please combine all the information to ONE email! We already read the story from the news. That's enough!!! Please also respect families who do not wish to get too much information on a specific suicide case. Thank you.

No one is entitled to this kind of private family information. It is the family's right to decide what they want to share or feel able to share. It is not the district's place to decide what private information will be released.

A dear friend lost her father to suicide when I was a young adult. She found his body. Her pain enormous, and it took many years before she could fully share her feelings...even with very close friends. I made sure she knew I was available to listen. I waited until she was ready. No one is entitled know the private pain of others.

When someone dies, we support the people they leave behind with love. We do not ask the mourners to relive the details of the death. We support them by letting them know that we share their grief. We support them by listening when they are ready to talk. We do not push. We make sure the family is taking care of themselves. We do this by bringing flowers and meals or whatever they may need. We do not ask invasive questions that make a terrible wound fester.

This is LOVE. Accepting another's grief and giving them what THEY need in a time time of crisis and loss.

We do NOT ask probing questions to feed our need for information. We do NOT gossip. When others gossip, we do not participate.

Support each other. Love each other. Support the families who have lost a loved one. This will also help you heal if you share their loss.

If you need information on suicide and how to cope with it because you have lost a friend, please ask for help for support in your grief. If there isn't someone close you can turn to, reach out to a professional.

There is good information about how to cope with suicide available. You do not need to know the details of these terrible losses in order to sort through your personal loss.

I think the district is doing the right thing respecting the family's requests. This is not the district's story to tell.

Love listens. Love is strong. Love lifts us up.

Our intention by no means was to pressure parents to disclose information that is not wished to be shared. As we wrote in our letter linked at the bottom it is important to respect the parent's wishes. Our intention with this letter goes beyond this specific case and tries to start the uncomfable conversation about mental health. It is important to understand the pressure and toxic environments students from PAUSD face every day. Moreover, as a community member, I urge whoever is in charge of the suicide postvention plans to take a step toward transparency. This is so we aren't left to assume that the only reason why certain news were ignored was because of fear of bad publicity.

Web Link

Mental Health providers and schools cannot give out information about individual student's health, nor should they. This means the public cannot know if the school district's answers are true, or if they cherry picked one case to make it appear their answer applies to all cases. Ms. Conaway is not a mental health specialist. She leads mental health services, creating the risk she needs to make her services look successful.

The students raise a valid concern they believe the quality of mental health services are poor, difficult to obtain and rushed. This comes after years of district reports these services were re-organzied and expanded. Since this was done for the benefits of students, their voices need to be taken seriously.

The students raised a concern at the same time the Board of Education abruptly halted broadcast of meetings over Zoom, making them inaccessible. We can have sympathy for the families for their loss and consider the current student's desire for improvement. They are working for transparency when possible and to ensure adequate mental health services are available to reduce the chance of a tragedy happening in the future.

Look closely at the administration officials quoted. The superintendent is nowhere to be found on this - mind you, this is a person who loves to give a boastful quote. The narrative that "we are always winning" must always emanate from this boss. This story is clearly too icky for him. Sad. Listen to students! They are everything. They know more than we give them credit for.

The students’ request for more support in no way contradicts the need the protect the family’s privacy. Please listen to the youths’ requests. Let’s not shut them down but find ways to protect and support them. Thank you to the three students for speaking up and showing up at the school board meeting.

Thank you to Abby, Annika, and Juan for your courage to speak up on behalf of your fellow students. And thank you to Yolanda Conaway for listening to them and agreeing that improvements can and should be made and for your willingness to include our youth in these efforts. Click on the link that follows to read the joint letter from the City of Palo Alto and Project Safety Net sent to the community last October that timely addressed the loss in our community while respecting the privacy of the family. It might serve as a model in the future for district communication with students, staff, and parents. Web Link

Max Mcgree used to be very upfront and clear when suicides happened. Now Don Austin hides things. He just doesn't want parent community aware. He is passing a message that depression is something shameful and needs to be hidden.

The students are not asking PAUSD give names and details of the suicide. Max McGee used to inform the community a suicide has happened. A simple notice of suicide by a PAUSD student, and where students can get support for depression and mental health. Don Austin doesn't put his name to any emails or notices where he can't say he is a leader and doing a fantastic job. He only signs emails where he has good news. Take a good look. Bad news emails are left unsigned by the Superintendent and it comes not from his email but administrative staff. Only good news emails come directly from the "Superintendent" and he puts his name at the end.

There will never be transparency when it comes to suicide. Whether it's the school district, the media, etc. Respect the wishes of the family as well as their privacy.

This is a valid concern raised by current students. It's just such a complicated issue. A family who loses a child--to suicide, illness, or accident--is going through immense waves of grief, and they also might feel protective of their child's story, whether it is their child's depression, mental illness, drug addiction, or physical illness (among others). It just simply takes time for families to grieve and then to decide on the narrative they release to the public. This is not a simple act of "truth telling," as if a family can release the truth and then be free. Sometimes, they are awaiting toxicology reports, which can take up to two months. Other times, they just need time to process and grieve before any information can be released. There are certainly families who lose children and are immediately open about it. But there is no one way to grieve, and total privacy is a choice among many. It's very sad for students when they hear rumors of a death. It's true that district cannot release specific information without the family's consent, but they can certainly increase their mental health resources and attention paid to mental health.

Thank heavens Gunn High still has plenty of students who are observant, caring, and eloquent.

For example,student Abby Kuang observes here that mental health, in the curriculum,feels like an item to be checked off a list. As an actual student living through current-day high school,” Kuang notes, “my voice feels unheard and washed out by the adults who think following a textbook guide on mental health is accurate."

”Will those adults ever hear?  Ever change their thinking? 

The signs are not good.

Ever since our suicides began, and in my role as head of “Save the 2,008,” I saw with sadness that a substantial number of adults were quite frightened by the topic of suicide—did not even want to hear the word spoken or see it printed. 

In my conversations with them they jumped to other topics, were too paralyzed to listen, and sought one-dimensional explanations from which they might quickly move on.  In this town it has been practically impossible to find an adult who could listen to a teenager for fifteen minutes without interrupting.

Gunn itself,understandably awash in fatigue and grief, has never taken a hard but compassionate look at its practices—like most U.S. high schools it could be called a “helicopter school” or likened to a sweatshop.  And it has been left to suffer under anemic epidemiological studies (the CDC’s; Stanford’s “psychological autopsies”) and a series of blinkered principals, school boards, and superintendents.

Yes, Ms. Kuang,the “curriculum item,” “checklist” approach will not do.  Not until we are courageous enough to see the school as a whole as an unhealthy place—with overcrowded classes, un-moderated homework, wave after wave of grading periods, frantic over-subscription to A.P.s, a cellphone culture, and runaway cheating—will the likes of Ms. Kuang feel heard, seen, loved. 

(Note: I taught English at Gunn from 1995 to 2010.) 
[email protected] 

Having a child who survived suicide attempts in the Palo Alto district, its Administration is the worst place to deal with. Families want to be free of all involvement with the district as quickly as possible. It is not likely all families are hiding their youth's struggles. More accurately, the school district does not want the public to know about its high rates of student self harm and suicide to conceal the district's knowledge beforehand and their refusal to act. It needs to hide that many are Special Education students who were bullied and denied services and protection when the district knew they were being harmed.

The reality is the Palo Alto district has not hired or retained qualified staff, and its programs are only in place at some schools. Instead, the district provides aides a few hours training, grants them a new title and pays them more, then tells families these aides are now qualified to work with all mentally ill and disabled children. Training is often conducted by unlicensed and non-Board certified trainers, who lack knowledge to train, or even serve these students unsupervised. While this would not be legal outside of a school district, Palo Alto school district pay attorney and lobbyists highly to ensure the lowest standards, and kids are pushed into inappropriate programs because the district claims to have created them.