Katie 
"There's no worse news to receive or relay to a parent than the death of a child. Since this pandemic, we've lost 20 students to suicide, a reality that was nearly unthinkable before now. We're not merely a school district under stress, we are in grief," Jesus Jara, Superintendent of the Clark County School District in Nevada stated during his State of the Schools address today.
Beginning March 1, schools in Clark County will begin to transition to in-person instruction for pre-kindergarten to third-grade.
In an article written for the Las Vegas Review Journal in November, Jara reported that there had been 11 suicides within Clark County, a number disputed by the Nevada Current, citing a corrected figure of "10 students districtwide" for the 2019-2020 school year from the Clark County School District.
After the sixth student suicide last year, administrators installed GoGuardian, a suicide prevention tool onto all electronic devices that had been issued to students for the purpose of remote learning.
The alert system is triggered whenever a student initiates a search utilizing key words that indicate they may be considering self-harm. According to Zero Hedge, the software had triggered over 3,100 alerts from students between June and October of last year.
"I can't get these alerts anymore," Jara was quoted as saying. "I have no words to say to these families anymore. I believe in God, but I can't help but wonder: Am I doing everything possible to open our schools?"
One such alert that was triggered was from a 12-year-old boy that had run a search asking "how to make a noose" on his school-issued iPad. School administrators were quickly able to make contact with a parent who then soon after found the boy with a noose around his neck.
When asked what led him to such a desperate move, the child was reported to have simply stated, "I miss my friends."
Parents, stuck in much the same situation as their children, are seeing behavioral changes that concern them. One parent said of their previously active sixth-grader, "He was a star student previously in accelerated classes, and now he's just not going to class and he doesn't care."
Based with this information, Victor Joecks states in an editorial that, "In a sane world, this evidence would cause the School Board to convene an emergency meeting to reopen schools immediately. Union officials would beg for forgiveness for the months they spent fearmongering. If grocery clerks can go to work safely, teachers can, too."
"But decisions in the real world are often driven my political clout, not data," he stated the same day that the CDC finally issued a statement showing that the “preponderance of available evidence” shows that schools are safe to reopen given that they follow certain guidelines they outline including mask wearing and social distancing.
But these incidents are by no means isolated to Sin City itself. There are stories from Maine to California, Illinois, to New Mexico, and even around the world. And let's not forget the video that went viral in May concerning the death of Hayden.
Dr. Sheldon Jacobs with the Southern Nevada Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness says there is a mental health crisis brewing among children "due to being more isolated. being away from them friends, not being in school physically."
"We are seeing increasingly more incidents of suicide attempts and completion from kids younger than 12, even 8, 9, 10," Dinisha Mingo, CEO of Mingo Health Solutions added.
Despite what parents are seeing in their children and the searches the students themselves are conducting, there are still those that are questioning whether or not student suicide is really on the rise due to the lock-downs. I believe this would be an appropriate time to ask: Isn't one too many?
In a presentation given on January 14 at a Florida church, Dr. Simone Gold of America's Frontline Doctors outlines the statistics behind the fear and the potential ramifications of an experimental vaccine.
According to information that she had the others had obtained, COVID poses nearly no threat to those under 20 who are generally in good health. Not once did she say that there is no such thing as Sars-COV-2, but rather, that the threat, when someone is a generally healthy individual, is much less than presented. The threat level of course changes with the presence of comorbilities namely, diabetes and obesity.
So while schools rush to reopen, we're left with consequences that we likely will not truly understand the full ramifications of for some time to come. All in the name of "safety."
Contributor
