Opinion: Who stood up for Jeremiah?

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When the Times published an editorial Monday calling for school leaders to open their eyes to the intolerance and meanness on their campuses before another tormented teenager was driven to suicide, no one on the editorial board could have imagined how quickly and tragically predictive those words would become.

That same day, 14-year-old Jeremiah Lasater shot and killed himself at his high school in Acton, a small community on the outer reaches of Los Angeles County. The school quickly rolled out the grief counselors. But where were the counselors for the kind of grief that Jeremiah suffered every day? As a big, gawky kid with a learning disability, Jeremiah had endured daily and daylong taunts, both at Vasquez High and his previous school.

According to people who knew Jeremiah, when he tried to fight back, he was suspended. So he stopped fighting. Teachers, students and some parents describe the schools that Jeremiah attended as places where he and other kids seen as misfits not only were the targets of teasing, but of thrown food and rocks as well. There’s no indication, though the information might simply be missing from the news reports, that anyone stood up for Jeremiah.

Somehow, it’s not surprising that school leaders disavowed any knowledge of such problems, even though Vasquez High has only about 600 students; no one, they said, reported such problems to them. A passive approach toward nasty behavior doesn’t work; it requires actively changing the school culture, and reinforcing the messsage every day, so that meanness isn’t tolerated by teachers, administrators or other students.

Vasquez High will probably undergo those kinds of changes now. But who is going to stand up for the other Jeremiahs at schools that have not had a mirror held up to the ugliness on campus?