This VA super is eerily sure his schools' latest student suicide was unrelated to the disciplinary process the kid was mired in

Suicide turns attention to Fairfax discipline procedures

By Donna St. George
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 20, 2011; 12:39 AM

Nick Stuban was all about football, a quick-footed linebacker at W.T. Woodson High School in Fairfax County who did well in the classroom, too: four As, two Bs and a C for first quarter. His history teacher described the 15-year-old as a "model student," and his German teacher was impressed by his enthusiasm for language. His attendance record was nearly perfect.

That changed Nov. 3, when Nick was suspended from school for buying a capsule of a substance known as JWH-018, a synthetic compound with a marijuana-like effect. JWH-018 was legal - Nick had checked it out first on Google - but he soon discovered that he had made a mistake with consequences far beyond anything he expected.

"I don't know what I was thinking," his father recalls Nick saying.

Over the next 11 weeks, his mistake unraveled much of what Nick held close - his life at school, his sense of identity, his connection to the second family he'd found in his football team. Nick's emotional descent was steeper than anyone imagined, and its painful finality brought light to a discipline system that many Fairfax families call too lengthy, too rigid and too hostile.

Nick took his life Jan. 20, the second student in two years to die of a suicide amid the fallout of a disciplinary infraction in Fairfax. In March 2009, Josh Anderson, 17, a football player at South Lakes High School, committed suicide the day before his second disciplinary hearing. . . .

by Ken

And here's the kicker, for me at least. In Ms. St. George's account, Fairfax County Schools Superintendent Jack D. Dale, while refusing to discuss the Stuban case, "vigorously defends his discipline system" and says, "The connection between teenage suicide and discipline policies is erroneous."

Well, isn't that good to know? Just in case anybody thought there might be a connection here, or in a whole slew of other cases of Fairfax disciplinary proceedings that led to alarmingly disproportionate consequences. If you read the story, I think you'll wind up frothing, screaming words like "murderers," hoping to see these "educators" strung up.

But of course we don't really know what the precise chain of cause and effect might have been. We have to make some delicate decisions about what and whom to believe. And that's how I keep coming back to Superintendent Dale's dead certainty that "the connection between teenage suicide and discipline policies is erroneous." It's set me off on a windingly circuitious path of speculation that I hope some of you may follow along with.

START OF LONG, POSSIBLY POINTLESS DIGRESSION

It relates to my jury-duty service last week, and one of my stranger experiences in a long string of jury-duty experiences over the decades. I mentioned in my earlier report that on my first day I was one of 90 prospective jurors sent to a courtroom for the start of a criminal case. I'm sure there's no easy or possibly even effective way for either prosecution or defense to effectively screen all these people in the time allotted, which doesn't allow for much more than filtering out people who raise the most obvious flags for one side or the other. And of course for the 90 people subjected to the process is not only minimally effectual but grueling and tedious.

An initial batch of 25 was chosen randomly from the stockpile of the 90 of us and subjected to the process of, first, each providing answers to a standard questionnaire provided by the judge, and then being questioned by first one and then the other lead attorney. Occasional individual issues were discussed in bench conferences with just the prospective juror, the judge, and the lawyers, in almost all if not all cases resulting in the return of the juror to the jurors' assembly room. How any of this was interpreted or dealt with by the parties was totally undisclosed to us. We were sent off to lunch, and those of us who hadn't been in that first 25 were finally called back into the courtroom, the first 25 were gone and another 25 candidates were chosen. I was no. 24 of this group, and by the end had a pretty good idea my services weren't going to be required when, beyond my nerve-racked responses to the judge's questionnaire questions (you wait and wait for your turn, and then it's more or less blind panic as the portable microphone is put into your hand), neither lawyer got as far down the row as me to ask even the most perfunctory question, like "Will you promise to do your best to be objective?" When they can't be bother to ask even that meaningless a question, you have a reading of their interest level in you.

Now I don't and didn't take this personally. My thinking about the jury process is that if the attorneys want me, fine; and if they don't, fine. I know I would make a pretty attentive and fair juror, but that just isn't my call to make; I'm just there to be available. What's more, given the time frame for the case outlined by the judge, I was mostly relieved not to be chosen, though again that wouldn't have been a factor if they had wanted me -- again, I was just there to be available. Still, it's hard in human terms not to feel that your time has been wasted rather egregiously by having to sit through all of this to, it turns out, no real purpose.

But that's not why I bring it up. I was, as I said, the 24th person in the group of 25. Sitting to my left, at the far end of the row, was Ms. No. 25, an older woman who wound up taking up quite a lot of the court's time with, as I suggested, one of the strangest exchanges I've witnessed in the jury selection process. The more she talked, the more it seemed that she was either desperate for attention (perhaps seeking a way of getting off the jury? if so, it worked) or just kind of nuts.

It began, reasonably enough, I suppose, with a question on Ms. No. 25's part, about some terminology used by the lawyers and by the judges. In the questioning of the first 25 prospective jurors, the two lawyers had come to some disagreement about the role we were to assign "life experience" in evaluating the evidence. One said we were not to consider it, the other that we were. They weren't talking about the same thing, of course. The one who said we weren't to consider it meant actual real-life experiences that might be in some way, in our minds, related to the circumstances of the case, and she meant that we were not supposed to consider those real-world situations rather than the one presented by the evidence. But as both sides agreed, we were certainly to use our common sense, the product of our life experiences, in our evaluations.

And it was over this question, not of life experiences, but of common sense, that Ms. No. 25 raised a question with the judge. She was uncomfortable, she said, about this business of using common sense, but especially about promising to. If you've ever been through jury selection, you know that both the lawyers and the judge have frequent recourse to asking prospective jurors if they can "promise" varying things -- to listen to all the evidence, to consider only the evidence, to be guided exclusively with regard to the law by the judge's explanations and instructions, to consider all the evidence impartially. Now I consider myself about as persnickety as they come in matters of fairness and appropriateness and propriety, especially as it extends to questions of nuance, and I'll be damned if I can discern any imaginable objection to being asked to "promise" any of these things. I would consider that anyone who refuses to do so without a darned good explanation should be subject to some kind of charge of obstruction of justice, or willfully failing to make him/herself available for jury service, or something.

But Ms. No. 25 was acting as if she was resisting being coerced into . . . something. I still have no idea what. The judge was patient in her explanations of all the terms and concepts, and kept asking Ms. No. 25 if that helped, if she understood better, if she was OK with it, and all she got back was skeptical replies that suggested Ms. No. 25 saw through the con that was being pulled on her, stuff like, "Well, I see your opinion," or "I understand what you think." It seemed pretty clear that nobody could make her promise to use her common sense and mean it.

END OF DIGRESSION

Somehow as I think about the Fairfax County business, I keep flashing back to that whole concept of using our life experiences and common sense to fulfill the function of being, as jurors are, judges of the facts. And I hear Superintendent Dale intoning confidently, "The connection between teenage suicide and discipline policies is erroneous." And I keep thinking, not only do I not believe I word this man say, I can't understand how such a person can be allowed to have any contact of any kind with children, indeed with anyone under, say, age 18.

And the story is filled with people like this. True, I can't vouch for the evenhandedness of Ms. St. George's reporting, but it seems pretty trustworthy, and the testimony of the participants is pretty one-sided. There's a strong impression of Nick as a pretty darned good kid, really motivated, with no history of disciplinary problems ("Nick's previous Fairfax disciplinary history, according to school records, included two infractions: using a cellphone and copying a friend's work in class once"). Both his parents are retired Army lieutenant colonels.

Nick really did research this substance he was foolish enough to buy and from everything he could dig up found it to be not only legal (which the schools people freely acknowledge) and harmless, and was horrified to discover that he had inadvertently committed an infraction of any kind, let alone what must have appeared to him like some sort of hanging offense, and wound up engulfed in a persecution without end that to him must have felt worse -- more assaultive and more hopeless -- than anything Kafka's Josef K encountered in his Trial.

No one is saying that, one-to-one, the Fairfax school bureaucracy drove young Nick to suicide. St. George writes:

Suicides are never associated with a single cause, experts say. But Nick's difficulties - based on interviews with family, friends, experts and school officials, and more than 100 pages of case documents - allow a close look at how consequences intended to help a student correct course instead can fuel a growing despair.

His story follows patterns described by parents in at least a dozen other Fairfax cases with similar disciplinary consequences. Even first-time offenders are out of school for long periods - a month, two months, longer if an appeal is filed. When they return, more than half are not returned to their original schools and can face difficult transitions - new teachers, new friends and new classes.

Later she writes:

Fairfax parents tell stories of going into the process without an attorney and finding their children under fire at adversarial hearings. These families contend there is no impartial judge but instead a presumption of guilt. They say there is little discussion of a student's well-being, psychological state or the cause of the misconduct.

"The parents feel very often that they are in the middle of criminal prosecution - that there is no balance or context and the facts are skewed to the negative," said Bill Reichhardt, a Fairfax lawyer whose firm has handled more than 100 school discipline hearings in Virginia.

All this time Nick was barred from setting foot on school property. He was, and was made to feel like, a pariah. It wasn't just his own school that was barred to him. He was banned from --

other school system property during that period - no weekly Boy Scout meetings, no sports events, no driver's education sessions, all held on school grounds.

He felt stigmatized and grew isolated, his parents say, as the teen rumor mill produced exaggerated versions of why he'd been suspended. Some friendships slipped away. His sense of accumulating unfairness rose.

And he had to face the shame in the face of a mother on a ventilator dying of ALS, no longer able to communicate by voice with her family (Nick had been the last one to be able to understand her speech) and was thought to be clinging to life to be able to see her only child graduate from high school. Well, the Fairfax school persecutors relieved her of that concern.

Here's Nick's football coach:

Nick approached Trey Taylor, his football coach, with visible regret. "It wasn't, 'Poor me, I can't dress for the last game,' " Taylor recalls. "It was, 'I feel like l let you down. I feel like I let the team down.' "

Nick was "always doing the right thing," Taylor said. "I would never believe in a million years that he would have been in this position."

Yet the superintendent's "lead hearing officer," Dana Scanlan, tells St. George that the goal of the process is fact-finding.

"We want to put the situation into its proper context," she said, in order to determine the consequences. Hearings can be emotional, she said, but "I don't believe our hearings are adversarial or confrontational."

Do you suppose she really believes this? If so, it appears she's dangerously delusional.

There's a great deal more, and it just gets more horrible, and more incomprehensible, except in terms of some crackpot idea of "tough enforcement" cooked up by somebody who has never spent time in the real world with real human beings, let alone real children. I kept thinking of what might be an appropriate way of dealing with these people, these officious bureaucrats, and it gradually occurred to me that society should treat them as every bit as unfit for contact with minors as the sex offenders who are required to register themselves on offender lists.

If the county can transfer them to other employment that will not bring them into contact with minors, fine -- as long as they're properly supervised to make sure this condition isn't violated. Certainly if any of them have minor children in their care, the proper authorities should be required to initiate proceedings to ensure their safety and well-being. This may involved many months of "fact-finding," at least as intensive as what they put poor Nick Stuban through.

It's true that at the moment people like Superintendent Dale and hearing officer Scanlan are suffering some community embarrassment from the fallout of the Stuban suicide. I'm afraid, though, that that will pass. Unfortunately it didn't for Nick, and I'd like to see that it doesn't for them either.

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