This article addresses very sensitive subjects in very blunt ways with language that… may make people uncomfortable. It reflects my (limited) experience and my thoughts only, so I don’t recommend reading this if you have been personally and/or deeply affected by recent events. I’d also like to disclaim that I have been lucky to remain largely distanced from the events in this article, so my opinion may be very removed from reality. I welcome (polite) discourse and am more than open to changing my views. Finally, my heart is with the people who are going through and processing things that I am afraid to even imagine. They are much more resilient than I.

I’m a senior in high school, which is a fancy way of saying that this is my fourth year here. And for four years, every year without fail, someone kills themselves. Four years, four people.^[1] My school is separated from the train tracks by a bike path and a chain-link fence, but there’s no fence where students cross the tracks every morning to get to school. Who’s surprised that this happens? Why are we surprised that when nothing changes, the same thing happens year after year?

After last year’s suicide, they took down the old metal fence and replaced it with the current chain-link fence. They even put barbed wire on it. I said, then, that nothing would change: there’s no fence at the crosswalk where students cross the train tracks every single day; there’s basically nothing preventing them from staying on the tracks when the train inevitably comes.

I don’t think the fence was ever the problem.

And today… it turns out I was right. A $50 investment in a sign that says “There will always be another train. There won’t be another life” (or the non-controversial way of talking about what happens after death) would probably do more to prevent suicide than that $100,000 performative project of a fence. The fence doesn’t prevent suicide: its barbed wire really only serves to remind us of what it’s there to prevent. But the signs will never get made. Why? The politicians and systems in charge of these decisions are scared—not of student suicide, as they should be, but of how they are perceived by the people they’re supposed to protect. That sign would be seen as too careless. Heedless, rash. Too insensitive. But the fence? It looks good in pitch decks and focus groups. It’s something the community can vote for.

And yet… while I was scrolling Twitter, someone died not 500 meters from me today. Does that mean we just have to try an even bigger fence?

I’m sorry if that—if I—sounded snarky. Consider me one pissed-off high school student. For too long, decisions have been made about what's best for students without actually asking the students. So I’ll say it clearly: the solutions that get put in place by politicians are ineffective and performative.

Last year, the student died in the morning, near the crossing. No fence involved. The school’s response? A taller fence, free tea from the Wellness Center, and—from time to time—pettable dogs from a nearby shelter. My opinion is just that, mine, but let me say it: petting dogs doesn't stop trains.

Art-and-crafts Study Halls will not fix the systemic issues at Palo Alto High School. Petting dogs on the Quad doesn’t stop the student body from decreasing year after year. But—they sure do look good on budget reports, don’t they? The truth is simple: the solutions we get are not the ones we need.

Not only are they in large part useless, they’re also commonly cheap replacements for literally life-saving programs.

Palo Alto high schools are known for their death rate. We’ve had this problem for years—in fact, it got so bad that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) had to investigate the school district. The 2010 investigation attempted to find a way of preventing suicides from becoming “contagious.” The events that prompted that investigation were referred to as a “suicide cluster”—a catchy, packaged way to refer to 4 people choosing to end their lives within the span of three months. Then it happened again in 2015. Between 2022 and 2026, seven students committed suicide (four from PAHS and three from Gunn). Out of those seven student suicides, seven were death by train.

Starting to see a pattern? With numbers so tragic… It seems, then,^[2] that students are going to commit suicide no matter what fancy new policy we greenlight, right? But what happens when we look deeper, when we look for the message hidden within the pattern? Well, in 2009, volunteers started “Track Watch,” a movement that placed human monitors (parents, community members, etc.) at railroad crossings during peak hours. Suicides went down. As Track Watch started getting replaced with AI-powered thermal cameras, suicides increased.^[3] And this makes sense: cameras can’t stop trains, they can’t push people out of the way, and they certainly can’t talk someone away from the edge. And yet, to save approximately $300,000 a year, Track Watch was replaced with AI cameras by the City of Palo Alto. Is this the price of a student’s life to you?

The truth is, we have to stop worrying about what our policies look like on paper and start looking for ways to save lives. A child’s life is not decided on paper: it is decided by the effectiveness of solutions to our haunting problem. Track Watch was an example of one potentially successful solution—though it could have been executed better—among many. If you want to come up with real solutions, here’s some food for thought: during the COVID pandemic, student suicides decreased. The easiest explanation for this? They weren’t going to school in person, which meant they weren’t crossing the train tracks every day—and remember how seven out of seven suicides were by train?

Imagine if every day, a few minutes away from arriving at work, everyone was forced to point a loaded gun at their heads for thirty seconds. Won’t people inevitably pull the trigger? And don’t think that this is a false analogy: two Caltrains pass the school in the ten minutes before the start of the school day. Every day. Give a man a fishing rod and lake, and he will go fishing.

I hope you understand how it feels to have real problems addressed by authority through measures like hour-long arts-and-crafts events. Free tea, believe it or not, will not convince someone who is done with life to keep living. I hope you understand, now, that I live in a world where my city government values people’s lives at around $75,000.^[4] Politicians and school administrators champion “wellness programs” that do too little and in all the wrong places. I live in a world where student perspectives get brushed over—where wellness programs look like Dogs on the Quad and barbed wire on fences. This is my reality, and as a result it’s impossible for me, as a student, to believe that administrators and politicians actually care about the children placed in their trust.

So when I look at my classmates in the hallways, the bike cages, the classrooms?

I see dead people.

I wrote this article because the Class of 2026 Parents group chat on WhatsApp was planning to hold a “peaceful rally” to show support for students. I don’t speak for everyone—I’m just me—but I do feel like that’s not what anyone needs right now. The instructions for the parents go something like, “Please bring signs with motivational messages such as You are loved and You matter to show support for students!”

You are loved? Yeah right, I’d think when I see those signs, You don’t even know my name.

In the past few days, a suicide note has been spread around campus, shared, even posted on Reddit. For lack of a better or more fitting word, do you understand how fucked that is? Nothing has been done about that. On a similar note, what did the PAHS or PAUSD administration do when videos of someone killing themselves were circulating around campus last year? The visible extent of Principal Brent Kline’s efforts on this front—well, he sent an email to students that goes,

Right. Please don’t share unconfirmed information. There has been no effort to address the deeply-rooted cultural issues that—in large part—lead to events like this. If you’re a parent and can vote, you can change this system.

Before you vote, ask yourself: when you send your kids to school, who do you trust their lives with?

On a brighter note, I want to say thank you to the teachers. All of my teachers, year after year, have all done an incredible job dealing with situations like this and giving the students what they need in very uncertain times.

Perhaps it’s from an abundance of practice.

Like Toy Soldiers,
Boris Nezlobin.