The Las Vegas authorities want to speed up the reopening of schools, which have been closed since last March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular for fear of witnessing an upsurge in suicides among students.
The Clark County School District, which encompasses Las Vegas and the surrounding area, has already recorded nineteen suicides among its young people since the institutions closed.
This is "
twice as many as the nine cases recorded for the entire previous school year,"
told AFP the press service of the district, the fifth largest in the United States with some 320,000 students.
Read also: An upsurge in suicides is to be feared after the deconfinement
There are many factors involved in suicides, which can never be attributed to a specific cause, say professionals.
And official statistics do not allow us to conclude an abnormal increase in suicides among those under 18 in Clark County: ten cases were recorded there in 2017 but nineteen cases the following year.
However, studies have shown that the pandemic has weakened many Americans, especially young people who have dropped out of school, and found an increase in psychological disorders concomitant with confinement and the increase in Covid-19 cases.
“When we started to see a spike in the number of dying children, we knew we no longer had to focus solely on the Covid numbers
,
” the district official
told The
New York Times
, Jesus Jara, who has been campaigning for several months for the reopening of his establishments.
“We have to find a way to get closer to our children, to see them, to watch them.
They need to see that things are starting to move, that there is hope, ”
he says.
Read also: Why are Japanese women committing suicide so much since this summer?
In Las Vegas, the school district set up an alert program last summer to try to identify students at risk, in particular by scanning the texts entered in the tablets provided to the students in search of keywords relating to the suicide or ill-being.
More than 3,100 alerts were issued by this system between June and October, to the point that a 24-hour standby service had to be added, according to the
New York Times
.
The reopening of schools, like that of the economy, had become last summer a hobbyhorse of former President Donald Trump, who has increased the pressure in this direction, in particular by brandishing the specter of suicide. among Americans deprived of jobs and classrooms.
No date has yet been formally set for the reopening of schools in Las Vegas, but the district has given the green light for a partial recovery and the first students, the youngest, could return to their desks within a few weeks.