Is School Too Much for Students?

Montgomery Suicides Lead Educators to Ask Why Adolescents Feel Overwhelmed

It was a routine offering on any high school calendar -- a seminar on managing teenage stress. But last week at Albert Einstein High School in Kensington, more than 60 people came to the evening session -- three times as many as attended a similar PTSA-sponsored seminar just a week earlier.

The change, administrators say, is an illustration of how life at the 1,800-student campus is quietly shifting after the suicides of two students in the past two months -- and the possible suicide of a former Einstein student in February.

Elisabeth Stanford, 16, a popular, well-regarded junior, took her life April 19 by standing in the path of a commuter train. On March 5, another popular junior, Kanishke Karunaratne, also 16, shot himself. The suicides have many in the Einstein community searching for answers.

What could have caused them to think this was their only option? Is school and the pressure to succeed too much? How can parents tell if their child is thinking of killing himself?

"I think most kids are still wondering why they did it," said Einstein senior Chris Madrid, 17, who knew Karunaratne.

Both students were enrolled in Einstein's International Baccalaureate program, a rigorous course of study that prepares students to pass a series of exams to earn a diploma accepted at universities internationally. It is unclear what role grades and academic pressure may have played in their decisions to take their lives. A note Stanford left behind read, "This has nothing to do with grades." Nonetheless, at Thursday's meeting, many parents expressed concern about the demands made on students.

Mental health experts say that it is rarely one thing -- a bad report card or a failed test -- that prompts someone to kill himself. More often, a complex set of pressures leads teenagers to feel as if they have no alternative to suicide.

Even so, school officials and parents say the deaths are an important reminder that the rigors of teenage life should not be ignored, particularly in the Washington, area, where high expectations and high achievement go hand in hand.

"I'm very concerned about the pressure on students who live in this region," said Cathy O'Brien, whose son is an Einstein sophomore. "In other areas, kids take three or four AP exams over the course of four years. Here, they'll take that many in a year."

In some ways the deaths seem to have rattled parents more than students. Experts said that isn't unusual.

"It's normal for parents to be more alarmed -- the worst thing that can happen is losing a child," said Brian L. Meyer, executive director of the Virginia Treatment Center for Children at the Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center. "When they see suicides happening, it's terrifying."

At the Einstein seminar, which featured Stacie Isenberg, director of the child and adolescent program at the Ross Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders -- the same expert who spoke at the campus a week before -- parents urged administrators to be more open with students about what happened to their classmates.