Word: school
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Accordingly, schools minister more and more to the mental health of their student bodies. At Webster Groves each student is assigned to one of the school's six guidance counselors, who keeps tabs on them for all four years. But it's those closest to students--teachers, coaches and even peers--who serve as the primary mental-health detectors. Teachers receive a checklist of the signs of adolescent depression, ranging from "lack of concentration" to "crying spells" all the way to "thoughts or plans of suicide." If a student matches the profile, teachers alert a 16-member team...
...Ferrugia works at the school only three days a week, and each counselor, in addition to doubling as a college adviser, must monitor more than 200 charges. Regardless of the resources pinch, there will always be some troubled kids who simply escape notice. "I call them the wallpaper kids," says nurse Buss, "those kids who will be carrying big loads, but they're so quiet nobody notices...
Matt was a relatively well-adjusted teen until the summer of 1998, when his close friend Jeremy DeNeal died in a car accident. "There was no one to get me through Jeremy's funeral, so I had to do it alone," says Matt. "In school I started making comments like 'I'm going to kill myself'...I turned to heavy drugs so I'd be numb...
...student with Matt's history naturally worries school administrators. The week before, Matt says, he asked his Latin teacher, "What happens if you make a threat to kill a teacher? Do you get suspended or expelled?" He says he likes to play mind games and was just curious, but school officials were quick to take action. They immediately called Matt's psychiatrist and his mother and asked his teachers to keep an eye on him. An administrator told him, Matt says, "If I threaten anyone or make any 'I'm going to kill myself' statements, I would be suspended with...
...school's reaction angers Janet. "I think they're trying to take too much control," she says. "I think they're going to look for anything they can, and if they can get him out of school, they'll be relieved. If the situation at Littleton never happened, things would be a lot different now." Matt complains that the school targets students who stand out. "They don't talk to the preppy kids. They flag the kids that are Goth and wear black...