Student suicides push Clark County (Nev.) district to accelerate reopening of schools

A spate of student suicides in and around Las Vegas has pushed the Clark County (Nev.) school district, the nation’s fifth largest, toward bringing students back as quickly as possible even though Covid-19 remains a health threat.

The New York Times reports that the Clark County board gave the green light earlier this month to phase in the return of some elementary school grades and groups of struggling students despite the huge numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths in the Las Vegas area.

Superintendents across the nation are weighing the benefit of in-person education against the cost of public health and the psychological and academic toll that school closings are having on children.

Greta Massetti, who studies the effects of violence and trauma on children at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, says there is “definitely reason to be concerned.” Millions of children had relied on schools for mental health services that have now been restricted because of the pandemic, she says.

In Clark County, a system that monitors students’ mental health episodes has sent more than 3,100 alerts to district officials since schools closed in March. The alerts raised alarms about suicidal thoughts, possible self-harm or cries for care.

By December, 18 students had taken their own lives. That number of suicides over nine months of closure is double the nine the district had the entire previous year, district officials say.

This fall, when most school districts decided not to reopen, more parents across the nation began to speak out about how the shutdowns were harming their children. The parents of a 14-year-old boy in Maryland who killed himself in October described how their son “gave up” after his district decided not to return in the fall.

President Joe Biden has laid out a robust plan to speed vaccinations, expand coronavirus testing and spend billions of dollars to help districts reopen most of their schools in his first 100 days in office.

By then, children in districts like Clark County, with more than 300,000 students, will have been out of school for more than a year.