Mystery: Deadly Lessons

THE COUNCIL ROCK School District is known for both academic excellence and athletic achievement. It’s one of those districts with gold-star reps for producing the best and the brightest. The kids who go here are privileged, raised by parents who care — sometimes maybe too much — about quality education and the quality of life that education begets. The district is consistently well ranked statewide, thanks to its high teacher salaries and enviable student achievement rates. It’s competitive and large, usually graduating high-school classes that number above 1,000 district-wide.

By the 2002-’03 academic year, the student population had grown so big that the district’s high school split. The big stone building with ’70s-style architecture, located in Newtown, was renamed Council Rock North; a new, sleeker building two miles away was christened Council Rock South.

In the past five years, the two Council Rock schools have seen six student athletes — four of them wrestlers — attempt to kill themselves. Three of them, including Scotty Glover, succeeded. Some hung themselves; some used guns.

The suicides have torn Council Rock apart. No one seems prepared to call the deaths a cluster or contagion — the clinical term for a group of peers who hear about a suicide and then commit it themselves — but it’s hard to believe it’s not. Something dark and sinister is pervading the corridors of both North and South.

The sobering truth is that cloistered, affluent enclaves can’t protect themselves from the fact that sometimes kids, good kids, attempt to take their own lives in acts of selfish desperation. Many times, they succeed. The standing image we hold of the kid at risk of teen suicide — the disaffected loner from the trailer park, the abused kid from the inner city — couldn’t be further from the truth. There are no markers, per se — the seemingly well-adjusted, handsome quarterback from the top-flight high school is just as likely to take his own life as any other kid. This utter randomness, the roulette-wheel quality of student suicide, is both baffling and terrifying. Three years ago, Neshaminy School District saw four members of its 2006 class kill themselves; between 2000 and 2003, six teenagers from Cherry Hill took their own lives. Nobody knows why.

According to Council Rock’s teachers, there wasn’t a brooding misfit type among the kids who tried to kill themselves here. Some had problems at home, some had girl trouble, some apparently had undiagnosed depression. But any warning signs were, according to most of the people who dealt with these kids firsthand, unworthy of red-flagging as anything more than typical teenage angst. The only thing the kids appeared to have in common was that they were relentlessly … normal. Which left administrators, teachers, parents and students asking:

Why is this happening to us?

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