Paly Grad Starts Petition on Suicide Prevention Plan

Trevor Bisset, a 2005 graduate of , says he remembers how helpless he and his fellow schoolmates felt when a couple of their friends died by suicide on the Caltrain tracks during the 2002-03 school year.

“It was a pretty traumatic experience for everybody, and was pretty unheard of at the time, at least in our community,” he recalls. “As the suicides started stacking up more and more, it got to the point where kids were looking around saying, ‘what can we do? It seems like this is really becoming a trend.’”

Nearly 10 years later, the Palo Alto community is still reeling from the effects of those first , which have since been joined by those of five more students in 2009, and .

Bisset, who is now back in Palo Alto after graduating from Pomona College in southern California with studies in politics and environmental policy analysis, says he was frustrated to return to his community and see that, in his opinion, not enough has been done to address the causes of so many student deaths and make some concrete changes to try and improve upon the growing situation.

“It seems as if there has been no progress into looking into the causes, from a district level,” he said.

In an effort to try and brainstorm ideas to help, Bisset says he scoured the Internet, where he came across the official Project Safety Net (PSN) website, and the Facebook page for the local independent group, We Can Do Better Palo Alto (WCDBPA).

Bisset said he was very excited to read about the studies and analyses executed by the PSN committee, but was subsequently disheartened when he met Ken and Michele Dauber, the husband-and-wife team that founded WCDBPA, and learned about all the group’s efforts to try and convince the Palo Alto Unified School District (PAUSD) to implement more of the suggestions in the PSN plan for reducing student stress, to no avail.

“It turned out they weren’t getting much traction in trying to get the district to implement the plan, at least among younger people,” Bisset said.

Being a “young person” himself, and still having many ties to young people in the Palo Alto community, Bisset decided to put all his connections and resources to work to help motivate younger members of the community, such as current students and recent grads like himself, in supporting a collective cry for the district to do more to study the sources of student distress and suicidal tendencies, and explore more options for effective action.

One of the biggest efforts Bisset has put forth recently is the start of an online petition, specifically directed at PAUSD Superintendent Kevin Skelly and the five members of the Board of Education, calling for them to form a task force to perform more studies on what policies would be most effective in the Palo Alto school district and community at addressing students’ social and emotional health, reducing student stress, and helping to prevent future suicides.

The petition launched online the week of June 13 and, in little more than a week, has more than 250 signatures.

Currently, the petition is open only to current and former PAUSD students. Bisset says, once the number of signatures passes a certain milestone, he may open it up to anyone.

The online petition allows those who sign it to leave personal comments. Some put messages “in memory of” those they knew and lost, some included messages of support for Bisset’s causes.

Karen Walker wrote, “It is our responsibility to encourage the district to support our children completely and reduce the stress in their lives. It is our responsibility as parents to support our children in every way possible to enable them to have a great and positive school experience and go on to be happy, emotionally successful adults.”

Joanna Strober wrote, “I am a Gunn alum and very alarmed that the school is not doing enough to help and support the students. Please improve!”

When asked what he is specifically hoping to see from district administration in terms of action, Bisset says, he realizes there is no one easy answer to this growing problem, but that he would like to see more studies done to explore what some effective solutions might be, since he recognizes Palo Alto is a very unique community.

He said, he thinks the section of the PSN plan known as “P-8,” which suggests changes local schools can make to help reduce student stress, is a great roadmap for some possible solutions to Palo Alto’s problem, but that he doesn’t feel enough work has been done by the district to study whether some of the P-8 recommendations would work in Palo Alto. Bisset praises some of the work the district has done to date in implementing some P-8 recommendations like later school start times, block scheduling and a switch to pre-break finals, but says more needs to be explored.

“Many people come up to me and say, ‘well, how do you know this [plan] will work?’ And I say, ‘I don’t.’ Nobody knows for a fact whether any of these things would work in Palo Alto, because they haven’t a study, and nobody knows what would be the most effective, or what is the best way to use the district’s financial resources,” he said. “We’re not making policy recommendations, as much as asking them to study what the best policies are.”

Bisset says, his ultimate wish would be for the district to find additional ways to “reduce unnecessary academic stress without compromising academic standards.”

He added, he wants to make it clear he is not trying to “vilify” the superintendent or the members of the school board.

“We’d like to see more action on their part, but this is not adversarial at all,” he explained.

Bisset said, he plans to address the school board at its next meeting on Tuesday, June 28. That meeting will be the last one before the Board breaks for the summer and reconvenes in August.