DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum What the heck is wrong with high school students?

This is sickening:

MENTOR, Ohio – Sladjana Vidovic's body lay in an open casket, dressed in the sparkly pink dress she had planned to wear to the prom. Days earlier, she had tied one end of a rope around her neck and the other around a bed post before jumping out her bedroom window.
The 16-year-old's last words, scribbled in English and her native Croatian, told of her daily torment at Mentor High School, where students mocked her accent, taunted her with insults like "Slutty Jana" and threw food at her.
It was the fourth time in little more than two years that a bullied high school student in this small Cleveland suburb on Lake Erie died by his or her own hand — three suicides, one overdose of antidepressants. One was bullied for being gay, another for having a learning disability, another for being a boy who happened to like wearing pink.
Now two families -- including the Vidovics -- are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it. The lawsuits come after a national spate of high-profile suicides by gay teens and others, and during a time of national soul-searching about what can be done to stop it.
[Related: School-yard bullying: A survivor's tale]
If there has been soul-searching among the bullies in Mentor — a pleasant beachfront community that was voted one of the "100 Best Places to Live" by CNN and Money magazine this year — Sladjana's family saw too little of it at her wake in October 2008.
Suzana Vidovic found her sister's body hanging over the front lawn. The family watched, she said, as the girls who had tormented Sladjana for months walked up to the casket -- and laughed.
"They were laughing at the way she looked," Suzana says, crying. "Even though she died."
Click image to see more photos

AP/Amy Sancetta
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Sladjana Vidovic, whose family had moved to northeast Ohio from Bosnia when she was a little girl, was pretty, vivacious and charming. She loved to dance. She would turn on the stereo and drag her father out of his chair, dance him in circles around the living room.
"Nonstop smile. Nonstop music," says her father, Dragan, who speaks only a little English.
At school, life was very different. She was ridiculed for her thick accent. Classmates tossed insults like "Slutty Jana" or "Slut-Jana-Vagina." A boy pushed her down the stairs. A girl smacked her in the face with a water bottle.
Phone callers in the dead of night would tell her to go back to Croatia, that she'd be dead in the morning, that they'd find her after school, says Suzana Vidovic.
"Sladjana did stand up for herself, but toward the end she just kind of stopped," says her best friend, Jelena Jandric. "Because she couldn't handle it. She didn't have enough strength."
[Related: Cyber-bullying: When enough is enough]
Vidovic's parents say they begged the school to intervene many times. They say the school promised to take care of her.
She had already withdrawn from Mentor and enrolled in an online school about a week before she killed herself.
When the family tried to retrieve records about their reports of bullying, school officials told them the records were destroyed during a switch to computers. The family sued in August.
Two years after her death, Dragan Vidovic waves his hand over the family living room, where a vase of pink flowers stands next to a photograph of Sladjana.
"Today, no music," he says sadly. "No smile."
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Eric Mohat was flamboyant and loud and preferred to wear pink most of the time. When he didn't get the lead soprano part in the choir his freshman year, he was indignant, his mother says.
He wore a stuffed animal strapped to his arm, a lemur named Georges that was given its own seat in class.
"It was a gag," says Mohat's father, Bill. "And all the girls would come up to pet his monkey. And in his Spanish class they would write stories about Georges."
Mohat's family and friends say he wasn't gay, but people thought he was.
"They called him fag, homo, queer," says his mother, Jan. "He told us that."
Bullies once knocked a pile of books out of his hands on the stairs, saying, "'Pick up your books, ...,'" says Dan Hughes, a friend of Eric's.
Kids would flick him in the head or call him names, says 20-year-old Drew Juratovac, a former student. One time, a boy called Mohat a "homo," and Juratovac told him to leave Mohat alone.
"I got up and said, 'Listen, you better leave this kid alone. Just walk away,'" he says. "And I just hit him in the face. And I got suspended for it."
Eric Mohat shot himself on March 29, 2007, two weeks before a choir trip to Hawaii.
His parents asked the coroner to call it "bullicide." At Eric's funeral and after his death, other kids told the Mohats that they had seen the teen relentlessly bullied in math class. The Mohats demanded that police investigate, but no criminal activity was found.
[Related: 6 signs of cyber-bullying and what you can do about it]
Two years later, in April 2009, the Mohats sued the school district, the principal, the superintendent and Eric's math teacher. The federal lawsuit is on hold while the Ohio Supreme Court considers a question of state law regarding the case.
"Did we raise him to be too polite?" Bill Mohat wonders. "Did we leave him defenseless in this school?"
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Meredith Rezak, 16, shot herself in the head three weeks after the death of Mohat, a good friend of hers. Her cell phone, found next to her body, contained a photograph of Mohat with the caption "R.I.P. Eric a.k.a. Twiggy."
Rezak was bright, outgoing and a well-liked player on the volleyball team. Shortly before her suicide, she had joined the school's Gay-Straight Alliance and told friends and family she thought she might be gay.
Juratovac says Rezak endured her own share of bullying — "name-calling, just stupid trivial stuff" — but nobody ever knew it was getting to her.
"Meredith ended up coming out that she was a lesbian," he says. "I think much of that sparked a lot of the bullying from a lot of the other girls in school, 'cause she didn't fit in."
Her best friend, Kevin Simon, doesn't believe that bullying played a role in Rezak's death. She had serious issues at home that were unrelated to school, he says.
After Mohat's death, people saw Rezak crying at school, and friends heard her talk of suicide herself.
A year after Rezak's death, the older of her two brothers, 22-year-old Justin, also shot and killed himself. His death certificate mentioned "chronic depressive reaction."
This March, her only other sibling, Matthew, died of a drug overdose at age 21.
Their mother, Nancy Merritt, lives in Colorado now. She doesn't think Meredith was bullied to death but doesn't really know what happened. On the phone, her voice drifts off, sounding disconnected, confused.
"So all three of mine are gone," she says. "I have to keep breathing."
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Most mornings before school, Jennifer Eyring would take Pepto-Bismol to calm her stomach and plead with her mother to let her stay home.
"She used to sob to me in the morning that she did not want to go," says her mother, Janet. "And this is going to bring tears to my eyes. Because I made her go to school."
Eyring, 16, was an accomplished equestrian who had a learning disability. She was developmentally delayed and had a hearing problem, so she received tutoring during the school day. For that, her mother says, she was bullied constantly.
By the end of her sophomore year in 2006, Eyring's mother had decided to pull her out of Mentor High School and enroll her in an online school the following autumn. But one night that summer, Jennifer walked into her parents' bedroom and told them she had taken some of her mother's antidepressant pills to make herself feel better. Hours later, she died of an overdose.
[Related: Stop bullying by complaining – in writing]
The Eyrings do not hold Mentor High accountable, but they believe she would be alive today had she not been bullied. Her parents are speaking out in hopes of preventing more tragedies.
"It's too late for my daughter," Janet Eyring says, "but it may not be too late for someone else."
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No official from Mentor public schools would comment for this story. The school also refused to provide details on its anti-bullying program.
Some students say the problem is the culture of conformity in this city of about 50,000 people: If you're not an athlete or cheerleader, you're not cool. And if you're not cool, you're a prime target for the bullies.
But that's not so different from most high schools. Senior Matt Super, who's 17, says the suicides unfairly paint his school in a bad light.
"Not everybody's a good person," he says. "And in a group of 3,000 people, there are going to be bad people."
StopCyberbulling.org founder Parry Aftab says this is the first time she's heard of two sets of parents suing a school at the same time for two independent cases of bullying or cyberbullying. No one has been accused of bullying more than one of the teens who died.
Barbara Coloroso, a national anti-bullying expert, says the school is allowing a "culture of mean" to thrive, and school officials should be held responsible for the suicides — along with the bullies.
"Bullying doesn't start as criminal. They need to be held accountable the very first time they call somebody a gross term," Coloroso says. "That is the beginning of dehumanization."
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Middle School and High Schools have this problem and I suspect it has gone on throughout all history.

I just think that at that age people have a serious lack of empathy and compassion. Due to their own insecurities they find it funny and/or comforting to make fun of/bully others.

It's an awful thing, but for kids of that age there's very little notion of anything else other than themselves. Essentially, the world revolves around them, instead of them being part of the world. This was one of the biggest realizations for me when I moved on to college (may be because I was an only child though). Because of that, they have very little concept of the feelings of others

Kids just don't realize that it's not cool to hurt other people's feelings (especially when there is no reason for it at all)

my highschool

I just can't believe, even at high school age, anyone being that awful toward others.

It's sad but that's the way kids handle these situations sometimes. We have to wake up and realize the younger generations are not the same as we were. Times change and sadly this is the norm nowadays.

I'm 37 and I accept this is the way the world is now. This is how they react.

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This is how they react.

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Unfortunately, many react this way, because their parents shelter them from any negativity. It's all about making kids feel good and hiding them from the realities of life such as disappointment, failure, and rejection. While those things are obviously bad, having them hidden from students makes things 10 times worse when something negative does happen.

We have kids receiving trophies for being on last place teams because they participated. We have students with IEPs (individual education plans) passing a full year course on "goals and objectives" even if they can't do a third of the work in class.

There's too much enabling, protecting, and making sure kids feel good all the time instead of allowing them to experience negative emotions and teaching them how to deal with them.

My kids are 9 and 6, and while I hope they're never subjected to the types of bullying above, I also want them to know that success, satisfaction, and a positive feeling come from hard work, dedication, and from learning from mistakes and negative experiences.

There are kids these days who don't even know how to go outside and play. They can't make up games with a ball or a can or a hill of dirt. When 2 kids have a disagreement about something, the parents are right there to solve it, instead of letting it play out to a certain point to see if the kids can figure it out. They truly can't function without the TV, computer, ipod, or cell phone. How many kids pick up a book and just read?

Protecting kids from abuse is one thing, but it they never experience anything negative, they'll never know how to deal with negativity.

OK, I'm down off the soap box!

Sladjana, meaning sweet or lovely in my native Bosnian, the birth country her and I share, gave up her life because of the cruelty of these people. As someone who grew up in Bosnia at the same time she did, I know the things she's seen in her early childhood with the war that consumed our youth. Emigrating into America, the land of opportunity, should have been a blessing, but instead what she received was cruelty and ridicule. To top it off, people laughed at her funeral. Sometimes things happen that just make you wonder what exactly this world has come to. RIP to Sladjana and my condolences to the Vidovic family.

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Sometimes things happen that just make you wonder what exactly this world has come to.

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Ditto that. Even with how rational and unsurprised I tend to be about anything, the lengths of cruelty and ignorance humanity can reach are shockingly disheartening to say the least. That was a tough, gut-wrenching read.

Kids can be vicious. They will keep pushing and pushing until someone breaks---and then, they will go on with their merry little lives.

This is unfortunate---but its the reality of the day in age where we live.

Some kids just don't care. And other kids just can't handle the torment.

When we were in school---if someone bullied you---you punched them right in the nose and they stopped messsing with you. Sure, you would get in-school suspension....but the punks wouldn't try bullying you anymore.

And another difference was back when I was young---you didn't kill yourself over something someone said to you. Name-calling was just banter---and you just called them a name back. Or you ignored it.

With the way technology has taken hold of the way kids socialize---it has made things much more difficult to handle. Constant barrages of email, txt mesages, aim's, facebook, twitter---it all can make the hate seem totally encompassing.

Its a shame---but kids need to toughen up. Some people are jackasses---and you gotta live your life and screw what some idiots have to say about you.

Personal, and public image has become soo important that kids are killing themselves over how they think they are being perceived by the outside world.....that is pretty scary.

This has been going on since there have been kids.

I grew up a freckle faced red headed kid. My family was poor. I was the "smart kid", who turned in entire paragraphs on the "use this word in a sentence" homework. We didn't wear the latest styles in clothing, because we got a lot of our clothes second hand. Believe me ..... I took a TON of abuse in school, until I learned to deal with it, and turn it around on those who would try to bully me. One convenient black eye on a kid who, along with his buddies, used to torture the hell out of me put an end to almost all of it. After that even his friends stopped bothering me, and even told him to knock it off. It is almost like kids like that serve a purpose of forcing certain kids to stand up for themselves. I doubt I would be who I am today if I hadn't learned that lesson as a kid.


Life will always put someone in our way for us to overcome. It can be a classmate, a neighbor, a co-worker, or a flat out bully. Learning the lessons in dealing with such people is part of growing up. It would be nice if we lived in a operfect world, with perfect people, where no one was ever harrassed or bullied for any reason ..... but that world simply does not exist. Parents and teachers need to be able to help kids overcome bullying ... but they can't do 100% of the job. Parents and teachers should be aware of physical threats and violence against kids .... but teasing and such will always exist.

I agree that bullying is as old as the day is long. We've all been picked on, and I'd guess that all of us did some bullying of our own. Let's not pretend we're all totally innocent.

I was a very small kid. Probably about 4'10" and about 80 lbs. when I got out of elementary school. So, I got picked on. Luckily, I was good at sports, so that helped.

But, there were fat kids or dopey kids that I made fun of. It was the classic totem pole. The kids "above" me made fun of me, and I made fun of the kids "below" me. Doesn't make it right, and I really feel badly about that now and have reached out and apologized to those kids when I've been able to find them.

But, I think the difference now is that there are venues that you can torment kids 24/7. Think about it. Did you have facebook and myspace and twitter? Youtube to show the world a video of the "nerd" acting goofy? Now, this kid isn't just being made fun of at school, it's across the world.

I think THAT'S the difference.

It isn't that these kids need to buck up or anything like that. Yeah, sometimes, you need to let things just slide. Because, eventually, high school is over.

But with these new ways to torment, these things can carry on way past the school day and past when the kids graduate.

My son is 13 months old, but I will be damned sure that I instill in him very early that picking on kids is NOT a good thing. If I ever find out he's being mean to a kid, even just slightly, I will come down extremely hard on him.

And if he's being picked on, I'll work with him to figure out how to deal with it. Is it meaningless that, if he just doesn't react to it, it will go away? Or is it malicious that he needs to either go to an authority figure or, as a last resort, protect himself physically?

There are mean people in the world. As some people above have said, you shouldn't shelter your kids from that. You should be willing to work with them, and I'm thinking that the ol' "just suck it up" isn't good enough.

But I think some of these kids take it above and beyond, and that's what's truly sad.

I guess I look at it this way.

What if it was YOUR kid who was laying in that casket? Would you feel satisfied with "he/she should have been tougher and sucked it up."

Or if YOUR kid was the bully? Would you feel ok with "my child's treatment caused this kid to commit suicide"?

You can't believe it? Think back to your high school days. Seriously, think about some of the things that were said and done.

On another side of this dilema, I cannot remember how many times I ended up in the principals office because I would take a swing at one of the bullies because they were picking on the special kids. It got to the point that when a teacher would walk up and see me in a fight with a boy, the teacher would grab the boy and take him to the principals office. The whole while he was protesting that he didn't do anything that I had attacked him. The teacher would then ask why I attacked him and he would end up busting himself.....every time. I was picking on the retards. Bullying is bullying. I stood up to the bullies when they were picking on the special kids but would let them get away with saying nasty things to me. I had a thicker skin and could deal with it better because I knew that those bullies wouldn't all grow up to be bullies.

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But, there were fat kids or dopey kids that I made fun of. It was the classic totem pole. The kids "above" me made fun of me, and I made fun of the kids "below" me. Doesn't make it right, and I really feel badly about that now and have reached out and apologized to those kids when I've been able to find them.

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That's kinda like how I was around the junior high age, to be honest. I'm not proud of it now - I picked on others sometimes and I got picked on by others, so I gave and I got.

Kids will always pick on others to some extent, it seems the social media makes it so much worse these days. Tougher for girls maybe, but I don't know that for sure.

Hey girl how's beach life ?

I grew up way back in the day , way back ..lol .. We had several male teachers ( most Italian ) and they ran the school not the students .. We had a Girls assistant principal and she was no body to fool with ; young lady or boy !!! We where the smallest City school in Cleveland back then ... We had are share of bad ass jerks but they never got away with much .. Guys on the sports teams ( football/basket ball ) were always asked to step forward , and believe me we did..

I'm telling ya , that never would have happened ...

Well said, sir.

In my tiny school, we really don't have physical bullies, but the mental ones can be terrible. I have been picked on just as much as, if not more than the average kid. And I admit that I have wrongly picked on others. I always try to make up for it in some way when I realize what I did, but it's no excuse. Most of the jest given out is in good fun, but there are some kids who get a sick pleasure out of really going after someone. However, no one I know would ever go as far as the kids in this story did. I can't even imagine something like that happening.

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You can't believe it? Think back to your high school days. Seriously, think about some of the things that were said and done.

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I think my high school experience was much different than most. There was picking and bullying going on, some of which I received, but it was very minor, especially compared to this story.

The Assistant Principal for Student Affairs, I think now they call it the Dean of Discipline, was not someone you wanted to mess with. He always said "It's not a good thing if I know who you are."

More than the picking on people, there was a lot of camaraderie. It was more of a positive experience.

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Now two families -- including the Vidovics -- are suing the school district, claiming their children were bullied to death and the school did nothing to stop it.

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I'm curious what the parents did to stop it.. did the girls parents not know she was being bullied? I have a hard time believing she could pull off the normal teenager act while contemplating something like this... and on the other end, are the parents of the bully kids not aware that their sons and daughters are little *#$%#@*'s to other kids?

More kids just need a good ol' fashioned out-behind-the-woodshed ass whoopin at the hands of other kids, parents, somebody...

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I have a hard time believing she could pull off the normal teenager act while contemplating something like this...

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I don't have a hard time believing that at all, DC. Trust me, from personal experience - a good friend of mine took his own life when he was 19.
No one saw it coming, no one could look back and say "why didn't I see the signs?. because there were none. No one knows "why? he did it" to this day.

I'm doing a research paper on antisocial personality disorders and its looking more and more like I need to take a trip back to high school for some subjects.

(btw antisocial personality disorder doesn't mean shy or not social, it means pscyhopath/sociopath)

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I'm doing a research paper on antisocial personality disorders and its looking more and more like I need to take a trip back to high school for some subjects.

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Have you thought about tickets in the Dawg Pound?

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You cannot beat intolerance out of somebody.

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I agree, that is something they learned primarily from their parents and you can't beat it out of them.. but you can damn sure beat them until they learn to keep it to themselves...

Not to desensitize or lessen this discussion, but I graduated from Mentor High School in 2000 with roughly 900. The school has gotten smaller over the past decade because of $ problems but say there are 600 a class now. That school has 2400 students a year and over three years that is almost 4000 different students shuffling through a school..... are 3 or 4 suicides a departure from the normal levels found elsewhere?

Further, the first friend I made in the Mentor schools (I moved there in 5th grade), a very intelligent individual, good looking, and athletic ... committed suicide 5 years ago....out of depression...not in any way because of bullying.

Look I am not saying that bullying didnt have a part in the suicide in this story, I am simply saying that there are other sides of the story when considering it as part of a bigger picture.

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With the way technology has taken hold of the way kids socialize---it has made things much more difficult to handle. Constant barrages of email, txt mesages, aim's, facebook, twitter---it all can make the hate seem totally encompassing.

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Back in my day being bullied stopped at the school door for the most part and you didn't have to deal with them until monday but now it is 24/7 . I knock my family ALOT for being a bunch of hard hearted S.O.B.'s but I learned at an early age the value of standing up for myself .

I remember a kid on the wrestling team bullying a kid one day in school, the kid was sort of a geek and had no chance of defending himself against a county champion wrestler... the wrestling coach happened to stumble upon this in the hall and he jerked the wrestler away from him and shoved his arse against the lockers and held him there by the neck with his feet about 6 inches off the floor and said, "See what it feels like when somebody bigger than you gets in your face?" The bully kid had 3 or 4 wrestlers standing behind him too..

Now my best friend was a wrestler (actually went to Ohio State on a scholarship).. and he told me that their coach absolutely went off at practice that night, called all of those guys out in front and just went off.. It was a long time ago but the one part that I do remember was him saying that picking on a kid half your size/strength.. and doing it when you have 3 or 4 guys for backup and he has none is the absolute epitomy of being a damn coward... There was a noticable shift in the behavior of the wrestlers after that.. they were nice to everybody.

You do realize, if a teacher did anything near that today, they would be in a blender by morning.

Too bad, we could use more coaches/teachers like that.

No, if I had a problem with a teacher at school, you can bet it was 10X worse when I got home. No explanation necessary.

I actually had a teacher parent meeting a few years ago, the teacher said my oldest daughter didn't focus on her classwork and was constantly making a mess around her desk. She was folding paper, tearing paper, bending paperclips, pretty much what ever bored kids do. So I asked the teacher something about how she responded when she was asked to stop and pay attention. The teacher said, oh, I didn't ask her to stop, I didn't want to interrupt her creative process, she makes such pretty things from paperclips. That was the last one of my children that had her for a teacher.

Some bullies are horrible. Eventually you learn why down the road (for example, one dude who insisted on being THE alpha dog in our high school by verbally bullying did it because his dad was basically a jackass who did the same stuff to him). I think everyone is on the receiving end of bullying at some point in their lives...some attract it more than others for whatever reason (going against social norms, for example).

If I could tell middle and high school kids anything, I'd tell them that everything gets so much better when you go to college. People are a lot more chill there.

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I actually wonder why they went to the funeral.

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Yeah my B.S. meter went off on that as well . Even if these dumb kids do that how do the parents not just go ballistic over that offense ???

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I actually wonder why they went to the funeral.

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Seems like it was to gloat... I know it's fairly normal for most teenagers to be self-absorbed but to actually gloat that a kid is dead and you may have been part of the reason for driving them to it is just over the edge..

I think a coach could potentially get away with it more than a teacher, especially a football or wrestling coach, even these days. There seems to more of a bond, a greater deal of respect given to a coach over a normal teacher. But, it all depends on the student too. Good story though.

To a degree maybe, but some notoriously tough coaches at very high levels have fallen in the very recent past. All it takes is one loudmouth parent, teammate, assistant coach or whatever and the school can't/won't take the heat. I'm not saying coaches should be able to beat someone down or lock them in an equipment shed, but throwing around some furniture and shoving a little bit is fine in my book.

My daughter is 12, she's the only girl I'm aware of in the orange county youth football association. It's her first year at this level, and my town plays at a pretty high level. I was watching her at practice one day, she was getting coached up at linebacker and the coach would grab her pads once in a while and shove her where she needed to be. Guess what, she survived. He was tough, but now she's the 4th linebacker and sees a lot of playing time with a bunch of older established boys. I think that's a little better for her self esteem than what goes on elsewhere.

I also went to Mentor... Graduated in 2001... The district has a problem, period. I don't care how big the school is...

When I started grade school back in the late 80's, the school system was thought of very highly... Now, I know there would be no chance of my parents sending kids through it... They would probably have moved...

There have been a ton of changes since I left in 2001 (elementary schools closing, 9th grade now being at the HS instead of Jr. high, etc.), and I don't really think any of them have been for the better...

My Mom has worked at one of the elementary schools for a long time, and I just don't seem to be getting a vibe that things will get better...