As has been documented for months now, the shuttering of our schools and forced "distance learning" has been an absolute catastrophe, and one that Kate Brown and Patrick Allen have continuously ignored in their pursuit of achieving impossible and arbitrary "community infection" rate metrics. One disastrous effect of this failed policy has been student suicides.

In Oregon, these statistics, like many others that show the devastation of lockdowns, have fallen on the deaf ears of Brown and Allen. However, in places with compassionate school district officials that care about the overall picture, not just COVID-19 infections, these statistics are driving officials to get students where they should have been all year - in the classroom.

As documented in the New York Times, Surge of Student Suicides Pushes Las Vegas Schools to Reopen:

The reminders of pandemic-driven suffering among students in Clark County, Nev., have come in droves.

Since schools shut their doors in March, an early-warning system that monitors students’ mental health episodes has sent more than 3,100 alerts to district officials, raising alarms about suicidal thoughts, possible self-harm or cries for care. By December, 18 students had taken their own lives.

The spate of student suicides in and around Las Vegas has pushed the Clark County district, the nation’s fifth largest, toward bringing students back as quickly as possible. This month, the school board gave the green light to phase in the return of some elementary school grades and groups of struggling students even as greater Las Vegas continues to post huge numbers of coronavirus cases and deaths. Superintendents across the nation are weighing the benefit of in-person education against the cost of public health, watching teachers and staff become sick and, in some cases, die, but also seeing the psychological and academic toll that school closings are having on children nearly a year in. The risk of student suicides has quietly stirred many district leaders, leading some, like the state superintendent in Arizona, to cite that fear in public pleas to help mitigate the virus’s spread.

In Clark County, it forced the superintendent’s hand.

“When we started to see the uptick in children taking their lives, we knew it wasn’t just the Covid numbers we need to look at anymore,” said Jesus Jara, the Clark County superintendent. “We have to find a way to put our hands on our kids, to see them, to look at them. They’ve got to start seeing some movement, some hope.”

However, hope is something Kate has deliberately withheld from Oregon's students, partially because the teacher's unions - one of her primary constituents with money - have a laughably unrealistic expectation of everything being "perfectly safe" (show me anything in life that is "perfectly safe") before going back in the classroom, and partially because all she cares about is looking good with statistics.

In Clark County, 18 suicides over nine months of closure is double the nine the district had the entire previous year, Dr. Jara said. Six students died by suicide between March 16 and June 30; 12 students died by suicide between July 1 and Dec. 31, the district said.

“I feel responsible,” Dr. Jara said. “They’re all my kids.”

Over the summer, as President Donald J. Trump was trying to strong-arm schools into reopening, Dr. Robert R. Redfield, then the C.D.C. director, warned that a rise in adolescent suicides would be one of the “substantial public health negative consequences” of school closings. Mental health groups and researchers released reports and resources to help schools, which provide counseling and other intervention services, reach students virtually. Mental health advocacy groups warned that the student demographics at the most risk for mental health declines before the pandemic — such as Black children and L.G.B.T.Q. students — were among those most marginalized by the school closures.

But given the politically charged atmosphere this summer, many of those warnings were dismissed as scare tactics. Parents of students who have taken their lives say connecting suicide to school closings became almost taboo.

So in other words, people hated Trump so much that they would sacrifice their kids because of that hate, otherwise known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.

A video that Brad Hunstable made in April, two days after he buried his 12-year-old son, Hayden, in their hometown Aledo, Texas, went viral after he proclaimed, “My son died from the coronavirus.” But, he added, “not in the way you think.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Hunstable spoke of the challenges his son faced during the lockdown — he missed friends and football, and had become consumed by the video game Fortnite. He hanged himself four days before his 13th birthday.

Hayden’s story is now the subject of a short documentary, “Almost 13,” Mr. Hunstable’s video has more than 100 million views, and an organization created in his son’s name has drawn attention from parents across the country, clearly striking a chord.

“I wasn’t trying to make a political statement,” Mr. Hunstable said. “I was trying to help save lives.”

And he's not the only one. I personally have seen multiple cases of kids who have committed suicide since school closings.

This fall, when most school districts decided not to reopen, more parents began to speak out. The parents of a 14-year-old boy in Maryland who killed himself in October described how their son “gave up” after his district decided not to return in the fall. In December, an 11-year-old boy in Sacramento shot himself during his Zoom class. Weeks later, the father of a teenager in Maine attributed his son’s suicide to the isolation of the pandemic.

“We knew he was upset because he was no longer able to participate in his school activities, football,” Jay Smith told a local television station. “We never guessed it was this bad.”

Finally, many people are waking up to what has been obvious to anyone who actually cares about kids.

“There’s a lot we don’t know, but what we do know about schools is they are the nexus of adolescent life,” Dr. Button said. “And in times like this, young people are sometimes the canaries in the coal mine.”

And yet Kate and Pat treat these kids as experiments, expendable toys that get in the way of achieving their amazing statistics.

Clark County realized there was a problem, and started to look at it.

By July, after the sixth suicide since March, the district invested in a program, the GoGuardian Beacon alert system, to send reports of mild to severe suicide risk. The system, which scans student writings on district-issued iPads, generated more than 3,100 alerts from June to October, indicating behavior such as suicide research, self-harm, written comments, or just the need for help or support.

By November, the deluge forced the district to upgrade its contract to include 24-hour monitoring and a service that would sort out the most severe cases, like students who were in “active planning,” meaning they had identified a methodology and were ready to act.

“I couldn’t sleep with my phone nearby anymore,” Dr. Jara said. “It was like a 24-hour reminder that we need to get our schools open.”

Another student committed suicide after graduation, but after having the last part of his senior year ripped from him - the same thing that is happening to this year's seniors - he committed suicide as well.

His mother, Pamela, did not know whether quarantine pushed him over the edge, but she said: “Our kids are feeling hopeless. They’re feeling like there’s no future for them. I can’t see how there’s any other explanation.”

Another student tried to hang himself, and was saved because of the Clark County System.

“If there wasn’t a security device that triggers that kind of alert, we would not be having this discussion,” his grandfather said. “It absolutely consumes you.”

His grandson, whose dog died during the pandemic, was doing well academically in virtual school but was “Zoomed out,” Larry said. The only indication the boy has given for what pushed him over the edge is saying repeatedly, “I miss my friends.”

“He is having a hard time functioning in this isolation,” his grandfather said. “It goes against everything that he is. There has to be an option of letting these kids go to school.”

As a human being, I have yet to determine how anyone can read these stories and not realize that we need to do whatever it takes - even with the risks - to get kids back in school. However, after watching Kate and Pat operate for the past 10 months, I am thoroughly convinced that between their egos and the thick layer of ice around their hearts, there is no getting through to them.

As has been documented here in Oregon, with "distance learning", kids have been failing clases at much higher rates than normal, and the same was true in Clark County

Indeed, failure is another crisis at the school, where flunking rates are 60 percent to 70 percent. That, in turn, is depressing the teachers and staff. The district is conducting a survey to see what supports it needs to queue up for its employees.

One more story shows the impact on both students and administrators.

Colleen Neely, a counselor at Shadow Ridge High School, recalled how a young man she had advised since ninth grade used to stand outside her office every day after fourth period.

He had overcome so much by the 2019-2020 school year in his determination to graduate: When he was junior, he was homeless and the school connected him to a shelter; for a week, he lived in a park near the school, and staff gave him food and other resources; his schedule was shortened so he could work at McDonald’s.

In the spring of 2020, Ms. Neely sent the young man an email telling him how proud she was of him, that he was so close to getting what he wanted. Two weeks before graduation, she got the call that he had shot himself.

And they ask some good questions.

“Part of me will always wonder if he’d had access to his teachers, and his peers, and me, if it would’ve changed the outcome,” Ms. Neely said through tears. “I will never know. These suicides, they don’t impact one person and one family. They impact me to this day.”

Dr. Jara understood.

“I can’t get these alerts anymore,” he confessed. “I have no words to say to these families anymore. I believe in God, but I can’t help but wonder: Am I doing everything possible to open our schools?”

In Oregon, the answer is an emphatic "no". For months, Kate used her capricious and arbitrary "community infection" metrics to make schools think they had a chance to re-open, but they were so low - in almost all cases lower that matrics used by other states that had their schools open, such as Idaho - that they were impossible to meet. Then in December, she graciously made her metrics advisory instead of compulsory, giving the impression that she actually cared about students.

However, as I expected when I saw this announcement, it turned out that this was all about appearance and making herself look magnanimous, not substance. Instead of giving the districts the leeway to implement policies as they saw fit, she made them subject to the demands of the Alphabet Bureaucrats - the bureaucrats such as Colt Gill from the Oregon Department of Education (ODE), Pat Allen from the Oregon Health Authority (OHA), and Jerry Green from the Oregon School Board Association (OSBA) - Kate's acolytes who live in fear as much as she does. They did not let up on their overwrought requirements, and have put a stranglehold on what the districts are able to do.

As explained by my own school district, the two most onerous requirements are

• Every student must have 35 sq. ft. of "bubble space" around them at all times.
• Each student must somehow be limited to only coming within 1 mile (only a slight exaggeration) of up to 100 people per day.

The end result is an absolute joke, and totally pathetic. For high schoolers, they will get to be in school two days per week for a total of 2 1/2 hours. During that time, they will be locked in one room, with the same students. They will then go back home, and do two more classes via "distance learning". So "returning to in-person school" is a grand total of 5 hours per week, locked in one room.

Our kids have had the entire first half of the school year - and all their sports and activities - unnecessarily ripped away from them out of paranaoia, cowardice, and overreach, and this has been demonstrated by teh spike in suicides, as detailed above. The true leaders in other (usually Republican-led) states recognized this from the beginning, and as in the case of Ron DeSantis in Florida, have pushed hard to have kids in school. Kate Brown, however, has treated kids as throwaway, unimportant, and irrelevant, and the effects are showing.