East Hampton School District officials remain virtually silent about the September 29 suicide of a high school junior whose family and friends say he was bullied because he was gay.
District officials have declined requests to discuss the death of 16-year-old David Hernandez and instead issued a statement on Friday through Syntax, a public relations firm from Bohemia, that was attributed to Superintendent Richard Burns.
“Our school district maintains a progressive, affirming culture of respect and acceptance through student-centered programs and services for families,” the superintendent’s statement said in part. “These include everything from our Gay-Straight Alliance clubs to character education, anti-bias programs, cyberbullying awareness for students and parents, suicide prevention workshops, and numerous other efforts.”
“We consider our district to be in the vanguard with regard to these efforts,” said the statement, which did not address specific claims made by the boy’s mother and other people in an article published in last week’s East Hampton Star. Neither Mr. Burns nor the high school principal, Adam Fine, would agree to discuss the matter.
Carmita Barros, David’s mother, told The Star that her son was bullied because he was gay and that school officials ignored his predicament because he was Latino. David arrived in this country from Ecuador about three years ago after his mother and then his older sister had gained a foothold.
Neither Ms. Barros nor several people who criticized the school district at a private meeting at the family’s East Hampton home on October 4 responded to requests for comment.
David had attended a meeting of East Hampton High School’s Gay-Straight Alliance a few days before his death at home in East Hampton. Last Thursday, the alliance celebrated National Coming Out Day at the high school at a meeting also attended by administrators, faculty, staff and School Board members. The author Steven Gaines said he’d been invited after David died to speak about his own experience growing up gay “in an ultra-Orthodox community” in Bensonhurst during a time when few people spoke at all about homosexuality and tried to “cure” it. “I was tortured by adults as well as kids,” Mr. Gaines said. “I had stopped going to school because I was so unhappy.”
He said that kids need to know that, today, “there are so many remedies, so many places to reach out to” when feeling isolated. “We’re living in a different world,” he said, with “people constantly coming out” on television and elsewhere, although harassment of homosexuals by all means does continue. “You can do anything,” said the bestselling author, who ran for East Hampton Town Board last year as an openly gay man.
Mr. Gaines called the superintendent’s statement, which was released the day after his talk, “mealymouthed and equivocating.” He suggested that the school and others in East Hampton Town mount a “huge” campaign against bullying hand in hand with the Latino community. Meanwhile, Mr. Gaines spoke of the value of the Trevor Project, which provides crisis intervention and suicide prevention services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and “questioning” young people. The project’s name comes from an Academy Award-winning film about a boy who feels suicidal after being mocked for having a crush on the most popular boy in school. He makes it through—as do the vast majority of teenagers as well as adults—the Trevor Project emphasizes on its website (www.thetrevorproject.org; hotline: 866-488-7386).
So does the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention ((afsp.org; the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK [8255]). “Everything that we know about suicide is that it doesn’t fundamentally result from adverse life events or circumstances alone,” said Ann Haas, senior director of education and prevention for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, who said that drawing conclusions about causative factors can be dangerous because each person’s situation is unique. There are about 12 suicides for every 100,000 people, she said, with a much stronger link to depression and other often treatable mental illnesses than to painful life experiences like bullying or, for adults, unemployment, divorce or the death of a loved one.
“Many, many people share these experiences, but suicide is rare as a response—mercifully, otherwise the rate would be huge,” she said. “We want to have another narrative there.”
Ms. Haas said that “suicide is not a normal, widespread response to bullying.” Which is not to say, she added, that “bullying doesn’t have an impact.”
Www.stopbullying.gov, a website of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, defines bullying as “unwanted, aggressive behavior among schoolaged children that involves a real or perceived power imbalance.” It goes on to say that “the behavior is repeated, or has the potential to be repeated, over time. Bullying includes actions such as making threats, spreading rumors, attacking someone physically or verbally, and excluding someone from a group on purpose.
New York State’s Dignity for All Act went into effect in public schools this summer. The act seeks to prevent bullying and discrimination by requiring schools to track and report instances of bullying to the state, update codes of conduct and character education programs to tackle a broader range of discrimination, and to train employees from administrators to teachers to drivers in preventing bullying at school functions and on school buses, according to Julie Davis Lutz, the deputy superintendent for Eastern Suffolk BOCES. She said that BOCES has been helping regional school districts to train staff for about a year. “A lot of this stuff schools already have been doing,” she explained.
“In general, disrespectful behavior happens where there is less supervision and less structure” than in a classroom, Dr. Lutz said, as when kids walk through halls, eat lunch or ride buses.
“It’s really about zero tolerance,” she said, “about not engaging in this behavior and reporting it when you see it.”
Overall, she said, “it’s going to be a philosophy change. It’s not an easy thing to change culture.”
Ms. Lutz said Comsewogue High School in Port Jefferson Station was exemplary in its efforts to combat bullying. The school has been named a School of National Character, according to its principal, Joe Coniglione, for a program called SUSS, for Students United for Safer Schools, which arose from a meeting at which parents “said they had a problem with bullying” that led to the founding of a task force, a grant from Child Abuse Prevention Services and training for about 10 students to raise awareness that rippled out to athletes, academic achievers, art students and all types of other students, the principal said.
“Schools change when students decide to change them,” Mr. Coniglione said. “Bullying is something that we battle. You never get rid of it; you just make the audience go away—then the bystanders stand up and say that’s not cool, that’s not acceptable.”
The challenges gets more complex with cyberbullying, he said: for example, there are cellphone applications now that allow texts to be sent anonymously by blocking the caller’s number, something that law enforcers but not the school can put a stop to. “You just have to try and stay with it,” Mr. Coniglione said. “You have to open up and be honest. It exists everywhere, but until you admit it and start to look how to change it. ...”
“The students are the changemakers,” he emphasized. “Adam has those relationships with his kids,” he said of the East Hampton High School principal, Mr. Fine. “My heart goes out to Adam and that district. I just hope that they’re able to get through it. Maybe now students will say, ‘We’re not going to accept it anymore.’”
“The main thing I have to say is, anyone who deals with these issues outside the school district consistently praises [it] for making efforts to minimize the bullying and set a culture where kids know it’s not accepted,” said East Hampton School Board President Dr. George Aman. “I don’t believe that anybody failed to attempt to prevent it,” he said of David’s suicide. “People tried; it wasn’t for lack of effort.”
“I’ve got to say on paper, input-wise, we’ve done a pretty good job,” he said. “But you have to look at output, and the output here was a disastrous tragedy. Somebody failed the youngster. I would rather generalize that it’s society as a whole.”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we could at least learn enough to prevent it in the future?,” he added.
Dr. Aman said that kids who bully need to be constantly reminded of how damaging it can be, that “you don’t get to wake up in the morning and have a do-over.” He said he was unsure whether there were issues of bullying among the high school’s Latino students, whose backgrounds and countries of origin are diverse and whose numbers account for approximately 40 percent of the school’s population. Dr. Aman also said it was possible that if bullying were taking place among Spanish speaking-students, as Ms. Barros reportedly said, “it might be hard for the adults in the building to know what’s going on, to pick up on what’s being said and the nuances of what’s being said.”
Dr. Aman said he did not believe administrators turned a deaf ear to complaints about bullying because David was Latino. “I think people work on all fronts to make it a level playing field for the kids who weren’t born in this country and don’t necessarily have a command of the English language,” he said.
Nevertheless, “We can’t let it happen again,” he said. “We’re not letting this thing go without making sure we address it properly.”
On Monday, Mr. Fine met with the junior class, of which David was a member, “to give students a voice in future programming and education in the area of decision-making, character education, bullying prevention, school culture and Challenge Day,” according to an email sent to parents of high school children that day. “I let the kids know that we all need to work together to improve our school culture and climate,” it said. “I also spoke about cyberbullying and bringing concerns forward to their parents and school officials.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Fine resent an email that had gone out to parents last year asking for their help in monitoring what their children view and post on social networking sites. “Please be aware that we do check these sites when we are made aware of anything that will impact the school and the well-being of our students,” the letter said. “Appropriate disciplinary action can and/will be assigned when necessary.”
An update to that added that students had become more active lately in informing adults about instances of cyberbullying and that the principal wanted “to keep the communication going.”
Another mailing to parents on Tuesday apprised them of upcoming “school culture and climate” program initiatives. The first will be on Monday, October 22, when there will be a community forum with representatives from LIGALY, which stands for Long Island Gay and Lesbian Youth. The group played a large role in getting the Dignity for All Act adopted in New York State and in particular with making certain it protected the group’s constituents, who many people said tend to be the kids who face the highest degree of discrimination. In fact, said the network’s CEO, David Kilmnick, it was the protection for gays and lesbians that for a long time proved a “stumbling block” in the State Assembly.
“Part of why we’re having this meeting is that the bullying not only takes place in schools,” Mr. Kilmnick said, “but ... also in churches, in our local streets.”
“What adults have to realize is that their words and their actions to promote inequality, and their actions to promote discrimination, is a form of bullying.”
LIGALY hopes to establish a community center for gay people in East Hampton to serve the East End, as the consortium’s center in Bay Shore is so far away. A resource like that “builds community, a more cohesive, integrated community [that’s] not only gay,” Mr. Klimnick said. “Having that community center saves lives.”
“We really have a long way to go to make sure that every kid could feel supported and nurtured for who they are,” he said, adding that even “acceptance and tolerance are negative levels of feeling and behavior.”
Instead, he said, “what we should be doing as a country or as a community is working to support all of our kids for who they are, and let them just be.”
