SCHOOL AND POLICE NEGLIGENCE

In August 2006, a state court ordered the 29,000-student Shawnee Mission School District in Johnson County, Kan., to stand trial for alleged staff negligence in connection with the deaths of Mrs. Mares' sons. Jason Mares, 16, hanged himself in February 2003. Seven months later a distraught Justin Mares, 18, also hanged himself.

 

In June 2007, two weeks before the trial date, the district settled out of court with Mrs. Mares. The settlement terms remain unknown. But there exists little mystery about the implications for schools that ignore the longstanding national recommendations for school-based programs designed to prevent youth suicide.

 

Easy litigation targets include schools with a history of ignoring youth suicide and available prevention strategies.

 

scientifically tested prevention technologies, it is estimated that fewer than 20 percent of the nation's 100,000 elementary and secondary schools have heeded the call. (Obtaining reliable data will require a monitoring system capable of identifying which schools have implemented prevention programs and which merely claim to have done so.)

 

Pushing for Change

While it is unclear how many schools assign management priority to suicide prevention, there is little doubt that all have been asked to do so. The National Association of School Psychologists has published "best practices" standards on prevention of suicide and other crises since the 1980s. In 2005, the American School Health Association publicly called for all schools to implement such standards. The intervening 25 years saw a host of similar pleas from the public and private agencies.

 

Experts can recommend change, but only courts and legislators can require it. Though American courts traditionally have been reluctant to hold schools - or anyone else - responsible for suicides, some legal barriers are showing their age. Chief among these is the "intervening force" doctrine, which deems suicide an "unforeseeable" event for which no one but the deceased is responsible.

 

Unforeseeability remains the defense of choice in suicide-related lawsuits, but its days may be numbered. Suicidologists have eradicated the ancient notions about depression as an untreatable malignancy whose outcome is neither foreseeable nor preventable. It is now widely accepted that youth suicides can be reduced by the same techniques that have reduced fatalities involving other diseases: education, early detection, early treatment.

 

Early detection, according to a 2003 report by the Bush administration's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, does not begin at home. "Schools," the commission wrote, "are where children spend most of each day."

 

Legal Targets Emerge

Due in part to the spate of school shootings and the finding that two-thirds of school shooters were suicidal, public sentiment for school prevention programs is evolving more quickly than judicial theory. Administrators can no longer assume that grieving parents will turn away in silent shame. Many now turn to attorneys. Easy litigation targets include schools with a history of ignoring youth suicide and available prevention strategies.

 

The well-informed school administrator should not be surprised. Since the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, American schools have accepted responsibility for the needs of children with physical and emotional disabilities. The historical record was not lost on the Mares court in 2007 - or on federal appellate courts 10 years earlier.