Qns. school epidemic of ‘suicidal thoughts’
Kids aren’t talking about soccer or English class in the halls of JHS 189 in Flushing, Queens.
They’re talking about killing themselves.
Sixty students have expressed suicidal thoughts in the past year, Principal Magdalen Radovich told a recent gathering of nearly two dozen elected officials and community leaders. The Department of Education claimed Radovich “misquoted” the figure but refused to give The Post any data.
None of the children followed through on their threats, and parents were contacted in each case. But shocked local lawmakers are calling it a crisis.
“If 60 kids on the Upper East Side talked about suicide, Mayor de Blasio would be there interjecting himself,” Assemblyman Ron Kim fumed of Hizzoner, whose wife, Chirlane McCray, has made mental health her signature cause.
“Sixty . . . is a staggering number, but even one is too many,” said City Councilman Peter Koo, who attended the Feb. 7 legislative breakfast at the school along with Kim and John Choe of the Greater Flushing Chamber of Commerce.
Just the mention of the 60 cases — about 8 percent of the Daniel Carter Beard School’s roughly 740 sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders — sucked the oxygen out of the room, the men said.
The movers and shakers had even been scheduled to tour the school but ran out of time because they peppered the principal with so many questions about the suicide talk.
“It is shocking to me that central DOE has not yet communicated this data with us,” Kim said. “How could DOE have dropped the ball in addressing these issues?”
Radovich brought up the figure after she asked the group’s buy-in for a mental-health and wellness center on campus.
“She was trying to make the point that she had never seen anything like this in her years of being an educator,” Kim said.
The principal went on to lay out all the efforts that JHS 189 is taking to deal with the crisis, Koo said — from student emotional-health surveys and one-on-one meetings with families to an emoji mood meter and small-group talk sessions between students and staffers. In addition, according to the DOE, staffers have been trained in suicide prevention and students can talk with a social worker, a school psychologist or a consultant who works for ThriveNYC, the mental-health program launched by McCray. “We have made unprecedented investments . . . to identify and prevent risk,” DOE spokeswoman Katie O’Hanlon said in a statement.
Kim isn’t satisfied with what he described as a “whole range of short-term answers to put a BandAid” on the emergency.
Sixty . . . is a staggering number, but even one is too many.
— Councilman Peter Koo, on the number of JHS 189 students expressing suicidal thoughts