If he wasn’t in the field, he was on the couch watching his beloved New England Patriots on TV, his father, Jay, told CNN.
“Whenever the football season ended, he was on the up, winning or losing,” he said.
“He focused on strengthening his muscles,” said Smith, adding that his son went on a special diet and bought all the equipment he could, as well as cycling and running.
“He took an old tire … he tied a rope around it and cut a backpack. All the neighbors saw him dragging it across the lawn. He swept the grass almost all summer with that tire. It was full of grass.”
But when the pandemic dragged on and the school announced a shorter football season and then a switch to flag football, Smith said Spencer started to worry. After all, he was a defender, not a runner.
Ultimately, he left the team. He stopped working out and started taking more naps. A former honor roll student, Spencer also struggled with remote learning.
Looking back, Spencer’s father said there were signs that he missed his teammates, the barbecues and the spaghetti dinners on Thursday nights.
But nothing could have prepared him for that December morning.
Jay Smith received a message from his wife that Spencer must have overslept again because he missed class. He went to his son’s room. He was killed by suicide.
“I just asked, ‘Spencer, why?'” Said his father.
Stops coinciding with RE visits
An increasing number of families are like the Smiths – losing a child to suicide during the pandemic.
Youth suicides generally increased before the pandemic and it is too early to link an increase in deaths directly to school closings, said Katrina Rufino, associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston.
But she co-authored a study that found that there has been a significant increase in the number of visits to the emergency room at a Houston children’s hospital related to mental health since the coronavirus hit the United States.
In Houston, the rise in adolescents with suicidal thoughts and self-harm coincided with pandemic closures, including school closures, Rufino and his colleagues wrote in the article published in Pediatrics, the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics.
“Our analysis found that there were significantly higher rates of suicidal ideation in March and July 2020 – that’s where you really saw the effects here in Houston,” said Rufino of the study, which examined emergency room admission at Texas Children’s Hospital for young people aged 11 to 21.
“March was when things started to happen, things started to close. Here in Houston, we closed the rodeo, schools returned home after spring break. And then July is when we really started to see our raise here in Houston. “
Heartbreaking deaths
There are concerns across the country about students’ mental health. In Nevada, the Clark County school district, the fifth largest in the country, which includes Las Vegas, has been particularly hard hit.
The youngest son to die was only nine years old.
Superintendent Jesus Jara says he personally feels the losses.
“It is painful as a superintendent when you lose a child. It is painful as a leader,” he said.
Jara said that some children are struggling not to eat enough. For some, their parents may have lost their jobs or their children are having to take on new responsibilities outside of school.
The signs of trouble began in the early fall, when a warning system on laptops and tablets provided by the school, programmed to detect mental and emotional conflicts, showed an increase in alarming research.
“Children are researching ‘how to commit suicide’. You get alerts – you get four or five a day, “said Jara.
The Clark County school board has now supported a plan to resume face-to-face education for elementary students starting in March, which is good news for Jara.
“My teachers are working hard, but it’s that face-to-face interaction. You can’t take a noisy cafeteria for granted,” he said.
Face-to-face schools help students suffer together
Face-to-face schools can also help prevent more students from feeling oppressed after the loss of a classmate – a process that Rufino at the University of Houston calls “post-convention” and which she says is extremely important in conjunction with preventive measures.
“In a young person’s suicide, you really need to worry about things like contagious suicide or suicide groups, because they are quite common in youth,” she told CNN. “When a young person commits suicide, the school quickly implements a ‘post-convention’ plan. It provides students and teachers with the support they need, ”she said, adding that they could deal with the tragic loss together.
“However, if schools are not on campus, it will be very difficult to implement any kind of post-convention plan. And it is possible that this will leave parents confused, not knowing how to talk to their children.”
Spencer Smith’s parents believe that if schools and youth programs had been opened with adequate social distance, allowing the children to be together safely, he might not have died.
They urge other families not to take face-to-face interaction for granted.
“Check them out every morning, every night, no matter how old they are, if they’re at home,” said Jay Smith. “Always give them a hug, tell them how proud you are of them. I remember always saying that to Spencer. I think I should have told him more.”