Last April, Jack Reid, a 17-year-old student at one of the nation’s elite boarding schools, stuffed a Bible into his gym pants and a piece of paper into his pocket directing his parents to a resource. Google data explains his feelings of despair. Then, in his dorm room, he took his own life.
On Sunday, the anniversary of Jack’s death, Lawrenceville School in New Jersey issued an unusual confession of failure, publicly admitting that it knew Jack was being bullied by other students, but the school had ” miserably lacking” in its obligations. to protect him.
“The school acknowledges that bullying and unkind behavior, and actions taken or not taken by the school, likely contributed to Jack’s death,” Lawrenceville officials wrote in a statement. dad. statement posted on Sunday morning on the school website.
The school is committed to taking a series of corrective actions including the appointment of a new principal that will focus on mental health issues, with the goal of becoming a model for anti-bullying and mental health. mental health of students.
This statement is part of an agreement negotiated with Jack’s parents, Elizabeth and Bill Reid.
It provides a candid and detailed catalog of the school’s missteps prior to Jack’s death and a window into the culture of a private institution where accommodation amounts to $76,000 a year. It also represents changing attitudes around Adolescent mental health crisis and bullying role in a consistently complex set of factors that can contribute to suicide.
Dr Reid, a clinical psychologist, said in an interview attended by her husband: “We feel like we are both sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. “The only thing I want to change here is to bring Jack back. I can not.”
She added, “I know if he were alive, he would want me – both of us – to try to do something good out of this and honor him the way he lived his life. me.”
Richard Lieberman, the leading suicide prevention expert for the Los Angeles public school system, the nation’s second largest, called Lawrenceville’s response rare — and courageous. He said he had never heard of a school taking responsibility so openly after a suicide.
“We need to talk more about this. We really do,” he said. “It’s the leading cause of death for our youth.”
Jack was bullied over the course of a year, the school said in a statement posted on Sunday.
After he committed suicide, the school board hired the law firm Petrillo Klein & Boxer to investigate the circumstances surrounding his death. The investigation included interviews with 45 students, faculty and others, according to a detailed report of its findings, which the school provided to The New York Times.
The company also looked at emails from more than 100 students and school staff, as well as Jack’s personal emails, phone records, text messages and internet searches, the report said.
“We said from the beginning, ‘Find the truth and follow it where it leads us. Stephen S. Murray, principal of Lawrenceville School, said Sunday. “And that’s what we’ve been trying to do step by step.”
He added: “This happened under my supervision and I am deeply saddened. However, I cannot begin to compare that to Bill and Elizabeth Reid’s pain and sorrow.
Lawrenceville’s statement says that their agreement with Reids is intended to “glorify Jack, accept appropriate accountability, and establish meaningful changes that will support the school’s aspirations to be a model of anti-bullying and mental health of students.”
The coronavirus pandemic exacerbates an already worrying morale emergency health in adolescents, made worse by a severe shortage of therapists and treatment options as well as insufficient research to explain this trend. Almost three out of five girls Report feeling persistently sad in 2021. The suicide rate also increased that year after one two-year declineespecially among the groups hardest hit by the pandemic, according to a report released in February by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Christine Yu Moutier, medical director of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, said: cause of suicide always complex and never bound by just one stressor.
“Bullying is quite possibly an important factor that could be part of a convergence of many factors leading to suicide,” Dr. Moutier said in an interview, generally speaking rather than talking about his death. Jack Reid or any other specific incident. “But it is not assumed that, in all cases, suicide is the sole cause.”
Law firm Kaplan Hecker & Fink, which represents the Reids, declined to comment on the settlement or whether it includes school payments to the family.
Lawrenceville enrolls approximately 830 students on a spacious campus in western New Jersey, between Trenton and Princeton. It is considered one of the country by the school ranking website Niche Top 10 boarding schools. Before enrolling in Lawrenceville as a sophomore, Jack attended Buckley School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, where he is remembered as a leader who stood out for his kindness. About 900 people attended the funeral, Jack’s parents said, and another 1,500 watched online.
His parents said Jack’s early days in Lawrenceville, where he arrived as a 10th grader in the fall of 2020, were happy days. He made friends and the dean’s list.
But in the spring of 2021, a persistent and untrue rumor that Jack was a rapist spread widely among the students and led to malicious comments from some students, according to the parents of the student. he.
In September 2021, when he returned to school as a senior, he was still elected president of Dickinson House, one of the residences where the school’s boarders live. That seems to have increased animosity between some of his classmates and caused rumors to spread further, his parents said.
Jack’s parents said days after the election that baseless rape allegations were anonymously posted to a nationwide student-run app popular with boarding students.
His parents said bullying spread quickly online, and at Christmas, during a secret Santa gift exchange between classmates in Lawrenceville, Jack received a rape whistle. and a book on how to make friends.
Mr. Reid recalls that his son was deeply traumatized, and when Jack came home for Christmas, he seemed to withdraw. “Dad, will this ever go away?” he said his son asked him, “Will he ever exit the site?”
Mr. Reid noted that face-to-face bullying at school combined with the power of internet posting has created the impact of rumors.
“We think bullying, with the internet’s 1,000 times more responsive and known to everyone, is going to be more devastating to children and in Jack’s case it created a very big action,” he said. impulsive. “He had to get rid of the pain from the humiliation he was feeling.”
Early on, with the support of his parents, Jack approached school officials and asked them to intervene, leading to a school-led investigation around allegations of bullying and sexual assault.
According to the school’s statement, the school’s investigation found that claim to be bogus and that a classmate involved in spreading the rumours, who was subsequently expelled for violating school rules, did not. related, was officially disciplined for bullying Jack.
But Lawrenceville never told Jack or his family – or anyone else – that the investigation concluded that the rumors regarding a sexual assault were completely untrue.
“There are steps the school should have taken but failed to take, including the school’s failure to make a public or private statement that it investigated and discovered false rumors about Jack. ,” Lawrenceville said in the statement.
The school and Reids have also tried to remove comments related to sexual assault allegations from the app, but were unsuccessful.
The school also admitted that it made the mistake more specifically the night Jack took his own life, just hours after the classmate involved in the bullying was officially expelled. Instead of being supervised while packing, the boy was allowed to participate in a lengthy farewell session that included one final run around campus and a group photo. During the gathering, several students also made harsh comments about Jack, inaccurately blaming him for the boy’s expulsion.
“The school administration did not notify or test Jack,” the school’s statement admitted. “That night, Jack took his own life, telling a friend he couldn’t go through this again.”
Dr. Reid said that Jack was seeing a therapist at the time of his death from bullying, but he never discussed suicide. She also said that Jack also did not exhibit any underlying factors that could indicate he was at risk of suicide.
The school says it will contribute to a foundation the Reid family has established that will focus on education and preventing bullying, and it will be a recurring gift to a mental health organization to support research and best practices for suicide prevention in school settings.
Public schools in most states are governed by laws that govern the investigation and response to behavior perceived as bullying and require guidance to limit its spread.
But private, parish and boarding schools have more autonomy in deciding how to deal with bullying.
Mr. Reid said the family also hopes to lobby legislation in New York and New Jersey in an effort to expand bullying-related laws in private schools.
Lawrenceville said in its statement that it will contract with an expert to draft policies to identify and address behaviors that lead to school and cyberbullying.
“We admit,” the school said, “that we should have done more to protect Jack.”
If you are contemplating suicide, call or text 988 to contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.
