After three student suicides in Keller ISD, mental health experts urge quick response

If you or a loved one is experiencing a crisis or suicidal thoughts, there is help available. Call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988.

Following the suicides of three students in the Keller school district in the span of four days, mental health experts say parents need to talk to their kids about how they’re feeling about the deaths.

Experts warn that clusters of suicides can grow, leading more students to try to take their own lives, and stressed the importance of parents and teachers talking to kids to help them make sense of what happened.

“Losing a classmate to suicide is a pretty upsetting experience for kids,” said Anna Mueller, a professor of sociology at Indiana University Bloomington.

Three Keller ISD students die by suicide in one week

Last week, Sean Duhon, principal at Keller Timber Creek High School, sent parents a pair of emails, the first notifying them that a student died over the previous weekend, and the second notifying them that a second student died Tuesday evening. Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office reports identify the victims as 18-year-old and 16-year-old boys. In the emails, Duhon offered ways parents could support their kids, including talking with them about their feelings and assuring them that they and their friends are safe and well cared for.

A third boy, an 11-year-old, also died by suicide April 24 at a home in far north Fort Worth, according to medical examiner’s reports. Keller school officials wouldn’t confirm the 11-year-old was enrolled in the district, but school leaders have acknowledged a third student died by suicide in the same week.

Bryce Nieman, a spokesperson for Keller ISD, said the district has flight teams of counselors who offer extra support on campus anytime a student dies. Those counselors were on hand at Timber Creek following the deaths there, he said.

Suicide clusters can affect teens disproportionately

Cases in which several suicides occur in short succession in the same community are called suicide clusters. Although suicide clusters can happen at any age, they’re most common among teenagers, said Mueller, the Indiana University professor, who studies suicide clusters among young people. Mueller is the author of the book “Life Under Pressure: The Social Roots of Youth Suicide and What to Do About Them.”

Young people tend to be more susceptible to peer pressure than adults, Mueller said. As people reach adulthood, they tend to have a more firmly established sense of self than they did when they were younger, she said. That stronger self-concept can serve as a source of resilience for adults when they go through difficult times, she said. But high schoolers are still trying to figure out their lives and identities, which can leave them more vulnerable to their social environments, she said.

Adults’ lives also tend to play out across a larger number of arenas, Mueller said. They have their work lives and home lives, as well as hobbies, interests and groups of friends outside of work. If anything goes wrong in any of those spheres, the rest of their lives are most likely still intact. By contrast, students’ lives are generally dominated by school, she said. Even outside the regular school day, many high schoolers are involved in extracurricular activities that can keep them in the building for hours after classes end. So social pressures at school can seem more acute and bad days can feel more devastating, she said.

The way students’ lives revolve around school can contribute not only to youth suicide, Mueller said, but also to suicide clusters. Losing a classmate to suicide is an upsetting experience for students, she said, especially for those who were close friends of the victim. Sudden deaths like suicides are difficult for people of any age to process, but especially for kids, she said.

The way parents and other adults react to a suicide can also influence how friends respond, Mueller said. Many parents and teachers instinctively shut down conversations about suicide out of fear that talking about it will drive other students to consider suicide, she said. But that’s a dangerous misperception, she said.

In research for her book, Mueller and another researcher looked at a small, affluent suburb where an unusual number of teenagers died by suicide over the past decade. During that research, she learned that adults’ unwillingness to talk about suicide heightened the risk of other students dying by suicide for two reasons: It damaged the trust between kids and the adults in their lives, and it drove kids’ conversations about what they were going through underground.

“They just started talking about suicide deliberately out of the earshot or the sight of adults,” she said. “And so then they were telling themselves these wild stories about suicide that were completely incorrect, and in the process, they were terrifying themselves.”

Many of those students talked about suicide not as a decision the victim makes, but as something that’s out of their control, Mueller said. It’s understandable that kids would have a hard time understanding suicide if they haven’t had any direct experience with it, she said. That’s why it’s important that adults talk to them about how to understand and manage their feelings when they’re having a hard time and how to get help when they’re feeling overwhelmed. Those conversations can help kids feel like they have control over their own well-being, which can be crucial in helping them cope with something traumatic like a suicide loss, she said.

Parents should talk to kids after suicide losses, expert says

Parents should talk openly and honestly with their children about what happened, said Julie Kaplow, a clinical psychologist and the executive vice president for trauma and grief programs at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. Avoiding the topic won’t help, she said, because kids will probably learn about the loss through other avenues. But don’t go into too much detail, Kaplow advised. Instead, let your child guide the conversation.

“Really let the child guide the discussion, that way they’re empowered to ask what they need to know in that moment,” Kaplow recommended.

Teachers, school counselors and parents should pay close attention to children’s behavior in the wake of a suicide death, Kaplow said. Children who are close to the person who died, children with previous mental health issues, and those who have experienced previous trauma or loss are all at higher risk, Kaplow said.

Adults should be on the lookout for any changes in behavior in children and teens, such as isolating themselves, engaging in more risky behaviors, or any mention of hopelessness about the future or wanting to harm themselves, Kaplow said.

School counselors stretched thin

With an enrollment topping 3,000 students, Timber Creek High School is the largest school in the Keller school district and one of the largest in Tarrant County. The school has 10 counselors on staff, district officials said. But according to the school’s website, only one of them is an intervention counselor. Eight of the other nine focus on college readiness, and the ninth is the school’s lead counselor. Nieman, the Keller spokesperson, said all counselors in the district are trained to offer mental health services, regardless of their job title.

“Of course, as with all aspects of public education today, we would welcome additional funding from the state to provide for additional counseling positions and counseling-related services,” Nieman said.

Elizabeth Rogers, president-elect of the Texas School Counselors Association, said students across the state are still feeling the mental health effects of the pandemic. At the same time, tight budgets are preventing districts from hiring more counselors to help students work through those issues, she said.

Given those budget restrictions, Rogers said leaders of schools like Timber Creek ought to consider designating other staffers to handle some parts of the job that don’t require mental health training. Texas’ guidelines for school counselors outline what their responsibilities should be, Including offering mental health support and guidance services like help with college applications and financial aid paperwork. But Rogers said counselors often get assigned other duties, as well, including coordinating tests, managing transcripts and setting up student schedules. By shifting those tasks to someone else, principals could free up more time for their counselors to work on mental health support and suicide prevention, she said.

If Timber Creek only has one counselor doing mental health intervention for a campus of 3,000 students, Rogers said, that’s worrisome. The pandemic laid bare the need for every teacher and staff member to be prepared to support students who are struggling, she said, meaning someone needs to prepare them. Schools also need to have referral processes in place to get students who are in crisis the help they need quickly, she said. In a large school, that’s likely too big a job for one person, she said.

Parents call on school officials to do more

During a Keller school board meeting April 25, board president Charles Randklev offered condolences and prayers to families affected by the “tragic events” of the week, and thanked district counselors for acting quickly to offer support to students who needed it.

But several parents called on the district to do more to prevent student suicide and stop bullying at school. Barbara Brewer, the mother of a Timber Creek graduate, pleaded with board members to provide mental health support to students who are in crisis. School leaders also need to encourage parents to talk to their kids about mental health, she said. When parents have those conversations, they need to listen to what their kids have to say without immediately leaping to a solution, she said.

“We are in the middle of a crisis now,” she said. “Now, it’s too late. It’s going to keep spreading.”

Katrina Jenkins, the mother of a Timber Creek senior, said her son has been bullied and harassed at school several times, and that school leaders have done little to fix the problem. School leaders had her son’s bully sign a stay-away agreement, a document that orders the aggressor to stop certain behaviors, including verbally or physically tormenting another student or threatening them online. But Jenkins said her son’s bully has ignored the agreement and continued bothering her son.

Jenkins called on district leaders to take more concrete steps to solve the problem. She pointed to the three students who died by suicide as evidence that the district hasn’t done enough.

“There’s going to be more,” she said. “Are you going to start planning their funerals instead of graduations?”

Star-Telegram staff writer Elizabeth Campbell contributed to this report.