Reading that bullying is so bad at Mentor High School, my alma mater, that suicide has become an epidemic makes me feel a wave of emotions — shock, sadness, anger, frustration, confusion. Initially I can’t believe that four people in the last few years have killed themselves because bullying at Mentor High is so bad — but after thinking about it for a bit, the atmosphere there is ripe for intense and unregulated hate.
If you aren’t familiar with Mentor, it’s a suburb of Cleveland that has a little more than 50,000 people. It’s mostly white — and when I say mostly, that’s an understatement — Census data show that it’s 97.3 percent white. The second highest ethnicity in Mentor is Asian, with 1.2 percent. Mentor is not a diverse place — it’s a place where if you’re different, you stand out — whether it’s your ethnicity, your class (median income is $57,230), or your personality.
Mentor High is gigantic — it used to only be grades 10-12, and there were more than 2,000 students there. Now it’s grades 9-12, with almost 3,000 students. My graduating class had 831 people in it. Not only is this crowd of teenagers very one-dimensional, but it’s also huge — not fitting in becomes exponentially more noticeable, and the pool of bullies becomes larger.
Bullying in school is unfortunately common, but bullying at Mentor High is out of control. I wasn’t bullied at Mentor High — I was picked on in elementary school and junior high, but never to the extent that these teens were. People didn’t throw food at me, push me down the stairs, smack me, or knock books out of my hand. But I don’t chalk that up to Mentor not being a place where bullying thrives — I chalk that up to mostly taking AP or honors classes where everyone was a nerd and becoming good at fitting into the crowd.
Each of the teen’s story is a little different — one was being called a slut, one was being called gay, one was being bullied for her learning disability, and one was enduring name-calling. Two of these teens killed themselves within three weeks of each other. What they all have in common is that, even though half of them had been pulled out of school in favor of online classes — the bullying was so intense that it made these young people’s lives unbearable.
My mom works at the cafeteria of a local community college where Eric Mohat took classes (many students took post-secondary education classes in high school that would transfer to college). She remembered he would always come in and order an entire pepperoni pizza, probably because his nickname was “Twiggy” and he looked too thin to be able to eat the entire thing.
When she found out he had shot himself, she was extremely upset. She recalled that on the day he killed himself, he came through the cafeteria line as always, but when he went to pay for his food, he just had a drink. She thought this was bizarre, since he always got the pizza, and she noticed that he looked especially down. She lamented to me that she should have said something to him, and wondered if she could have done something to brighten his mood and stop him from taking his own life.
But it shouldn’t be up to my mom or other strangers to these kids to stop the bullying or convince these kids not to kill themselves. If a total stranger can be intuitive enough to see that Eric was distraught, why aren’t teachers and schools more aware? Probably because large class sizes make it more difficult for teachers to notice students individually; teachers and all education workers are overworked and underpaid; the Internet — particularly Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter make bullying even more prevalent, viral, and embarrassing (and unseen in schools); and schools aren’t equipped to deal with bullying, or perhaps have decided it is kids “just being kids” — the rule rather than the exception.
It’s important to note that, unfortunately, Mentor High exemplifies, rather than serves as an outlier for, suicides among young people. There have been four recent suicides because of gay bullying, which came to light after Tyler Clementi, a student at Rutgers University, jumped off the George Washington bridge in New York because his roommate outed him online, live streaming video of Tyler being intimate with another guy. One of the Mentor students was very publicly bullied because people thought he was gay, and people suspected another of the students was also gay but it’s unclear whether she was bullied because of it.
Mentor is a breeding ground for bullying, and anyone who denies it is either living in denial or was of the crowd that fit in to the preppy, white, middle-class atmosphere. You’re not a terrible person if you didn’t get bullied — but if you did the bullying, then yeah, you are a terrible person. It’s disgusting how teens treat each other, and the age at which I hear about teens killing themselves keeps getting lower and lower — some don’t even make it to their teens without committing suicide to escape the bullying.
Yes, teenagers are hormonal. Teenagers are awkward. But they shouldn’t be feeling so trapped in the bullying and the negativity that they feel the best solution is to just stop living. Bullying needs to be more heavily punished. Teachers and counselors and aides need to be trained to spot bullying and catch it before it consumes these kids. These kids need to feel like they have someone to talk to, that their complaints won’t be ignored or just lead to more bullying.
Parents need to be more involved — and I mean the parents of the children who are doing the bullying. Parents of the bullied can only do so much, the most extreme being home-schooling or online classes. But what about the kids doing the bullying? It shouldn’t be up to the person being bullied to just leave because they don’t fit in — what kind of message does that send to the student? That the only way they’ll find peace is being alone? How does that help them?
This blog might jump around, but I’m writing it fueled by the emotions that I described initially. I know so many people, my peers, who could’ve been these people. I watched them get bullied, heard about them get bullied, and myself even would gossip about them. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, but peers standing up and against the bullying helps those being bullied feel less alone; bullies getting stricter punishment helps; schools taking bullying more seriously helps; parents taking their kids as bullies more seriously helps; and not enabling the behavior by expecting it to happen helps.
Like Ellen said in the video I linked to above, “One death lost in this senseless way is tragic. Four is a crisis.” The Mentor school system can’t ignore that suicide is a big problem, and it needs to be addressed immediately — especially at the high school. And just because students aren’t killing themselves doesn’t mean other school systems should breathe a sigh of relief — everyone should be on alert for bullying, because people can still harm themselves without ending their lives.
i, sandwich 