Difficult Decisions

My personal response to the death of a student in Oklahoma

I gave birth, at home, to my oldest child on the eve of the election of President Barack Obama. The home birth was intentional, as were the cloth diapers. I have kept him alive for the last 15 years. He is now a 10th grade student who is being home schooled.

A 10th grade high school student died of unknown causes on February 8th, 2024 in Oklahoma. Owasso High School is located in the largest northern suburb of Tulsa. Owasso is a bedroom community of Tulsa with a median household income around $67,000.

We made the difficult decision of home schooling my child three months ago, directly because we feared that his continuing in a public high school might lead to his death. We live in a similar suburb to Owasso outside of St Louis. The median income for a household is around $73,000.

We had specifically moved to this district, at considerable cost, in order to access what was thought to be a better school district. As we have come to find out, all school districts are facing challenges right now because we are asking districts to educate and keep our children safe with their hands tied behind their backs.

There are real issues that led our family to remove our child from public high school in order to keep him alive that appear to have similarly affected the student in Oklahoma.

The deeper more insidious issues in American public high schools.

There are four areas of overlap that I see between the student in Oklahoma and my own child’s high school experience. The four issues:

1. Vaping and Illicit Drugs

2. Bathrooms

3. Mental health crisis

4. Cell phones

Vaping and illicit drugs

Vape pens have completely changed the landscape for high school students. As trivial as this seems, it is because they are no longer actually burning a product in the same way. When you used to light a cigarette or ‘smoke a bowl’ there would be an immediate smell and smoke therefore limiting the locations where someone could smoke. Vape pens have allowed students to access nicotine, THC, and other illicit substances within the school buildings all day long.

The student in Oklahoma was reported to be in an in school suspension (ISS) directly because of vaping products.

We ensured my high school student had no financial means to be able to procure vape pens, but they were simply handed to him within the high school’s bathrooms. The vape pens that are being shared at school are often not nicotine. THC vape pens are incredibly common, and can be incredibly potent.

Student are becoming frequently ill with rising cases of young people in emergency rooms with severe nausea and vomiting from a condition called cannabis hyperemesis syndrome because of THC vape pens.

There are students dying because what they believe is a THC vape cartridge will actually be a cartridge that has been laced with fentanyl.

The Free Press published a story on February 26, 2024 titled, “Fentanyl is Killing American Kids”

Fentanyl Is Killing American Kids. Most Don’t Even Know They’re Taking It.

The article contains a list of what students need to know to protect themselves:

Children need to know that trusting a vape cartridge can be equally dangerous. I begged the local high school to get the drugs and the vaping under control within the buildings. We had a meeting with our district superintendent, right before we decided to pull him from the district and start homeschooling him. At that meeting it was acknowledged that the district felt that it could do nothing to get vaping or illicit drugs out of the building. They reported that they are not allowed to search students and they are not allowed to search bags or pockets, until an incident has already occurred.

I told the superintendent that I was concerned that these policies would lead to the death of a student within the district and soon. I had no idea that day would come so quickly.

Within two months of withdrawing my student, there was a shooting in a parking lot by the school. Two high school seniors shot three other kids. The shooting was over vape cartridges

Vape cartridges.

Two children died as a result, and a third was in critical condition.

Two high school seniors will be charged with murder and will spend time in a Missouri prison.

The children who were shot in my school district over vape cartridges will never be named in the national media.

I cried as soon as I read the story in the local news. I could not believe that we were so correct in naming what we saw coming, a dangerous volatile situation occurring frequently within our American high school.

The bathrooms

Ask any high school teacher in any school across America what is the most dangerous room within the building and I believe most of them will say the bathroom.

My high school student was jumped, and in numerous fights in the bathroom. My high school student was in a fight in the bathroom and was picked up and dropped head first onto the tile floor, by a student that was nearly double his size and older. My middle schooler has also had water poured all over him at school.

It had gotten so bad in our local high school that they were seeking district money to pay someone to simply sit at the doorway of every bathroom to monitor how many students were going in and out, and that no illicit drug use or fights were occurring. They were trying to schedule teachers to rotate sitting outside of the bathrooms doors.

They simply did not have the financial means to employ someone to sit at every single group bathroom every day, so they were left with closing bathrooms and restricting access for everyone.

The student in Oklahoma was in a fight in a bathroom. Regardless of who started it or what their pronouns are, there should never have been students in a bathroom unsupervised, especially when those students were all in ISS.

We simply need to tone down all of the hostile rhetoric around bathroom use and gender and we need to allow every student in a public school access to a private safe bathroom.

How can that be achieved?

I believe by changing the way that we physically construct bathrooms in all newly constructed public buildings and by renovating all older public buildings. It is time to move to a model of single use bathrooms. I was able to travel to Finland last summer and this is how bathrooms are designed at a local university.

Single use bathroom entrance.

Single use bathroom interior.

All students should be afforded the basic safety of going to a bathroom and not being handed illicit drugs or beat up.

The mental health crisis

The student in Oklahoma was reported to have been on psychotropic medications for ‘mood swings’. It was stated that one of the medications was taken at night for anxiety, it was not specifically named.

Many high school patients that are placed on a medication for sleep or anxiety taken at night are prescribed trazodone. Trazodone is considered a first treatment choice for sleep disturbance in adolescents even though the FDA does not approve of sleep promoting medications for those under the age of 18.

High school students are now on multiple different psychotropic medications. Medication’s to treat anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, ADHD and these medications can have serious real risks. Medications that also easily cause serious problems when they are combined with illicit substances.

Most high schools are simply overwhelmed with the current mental health crisis in young people. My student’s high school did not know what psychotropic drugs the students were on, had no way to monitor these medications or be aware that if on psychotropic medications they could have issues if they missed a dose or if they were also taking illicit substances.

Most public schools barely have a nurse on staff, some public schools share the nurse with the nurse rotating to different schools within the district on different days. Even students on IEP’s or 504 plans do not have mechanisms to keep current with the prescribed psychotropic medications.

There is a real crisis in this country with the use of psychotropic medications in children and adolescents, it should not be ignored that this student was also on these kinds of medications.

The cell phones

Every single problem listed above directly circles back to stupid fucking cell phones. I hate them. I hate that I ever put a cell phone into the hands of my children.

Why do students know which bathroom to head to when there is no school monitor? Because they are using their cell phones all day long at school.

Why do the kids know who has a vape cartridges? Because they are using their cell phones all day long at school.

Every single high school student I have spoken to reports that they are on their phone all day long. They often will have one headphone in their ear through all of their classes listening to music or watching videos.

We begged and pleaded for the district to take the phones away from the students in classes, or at the start of the day and return them at the end. As a parent, I could not even keep the phone home because the way that the school set up their hall passes and the lunch money program was on the cell phones. My local district said that they were unable to take the cell phones away because the teachers refused to take on the liability of holding the phones in the classrooms.

There are some schools that are slowly taking the steps necessary to bring back real learning and attention, and some element of control back to the high schools. But as long as students have a cell phone in their hand all day long at school, we will see no change in these situations.

Real Failings

I continue to read news stories that beat on only one drum, only addressing one aspect of this young person’s life. As that happens we are going to continue to miss all of the other elements that contributed. These elements that are contributing to the deaths of students nationwide every single day.

Regardless of what nickname they wanted to be called, regardless of their pronouns, every single student that is dealing with these issues in our schools need all of our collective help. It is not a tenable situation for most parents to homeschool their children. It has been at a real financial cost to my family and should not have been a requirement to ensure my child could stay alive.

The student in Oklahoma was vaping. The student was on psychotropic medication. The student was in a bathroom, unsupervised, and in a fight.

If this is to be a wake up call for this country, let it be because this student demonstrates the real failings of adults caring for our young people.

All of our young people.