I happened to sit down at my desk and check my email at 10:26 this morning. I had received this email from a student at 10:22. The student in question was not in school today, and if I remember correctly would have just left my classroom had he been there:

I’m sorry I can’t come in Mr. Siler I’m sorry that I can’t be a better student I’m sorry I can’t be good at math I’m sorry I can’t get my grades up I’m sorry I’m a bad kid

That is, other than changing my name, the message, word-for-word, and this kid has emailed me plenty of times before and he is not the type to leave out punctuation or write run-on sentences. For the record, he is absolutely not a bad kid, and that’s not me being all Have Faith In Your Students on you. I literally think anyone who spent ten minutes with him would recognize him as a good kid. Beyond the fact that he hasn’t been around much in the last couple of weeks, none of the things he is apologizing for are true.

I can’t say I’m an expert at such things, having never received one before, so tell me if you feel otherwise, but to me that reads a lot like a suicide note.

I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a position where it was absolutely critical that you get a number of things done very quickly and that, on top of that, you get them all done without anyone in the room realizing what you are doing. Because I need to at the very least get someone in touch with this kid or his parents right now, and if we can’t find the parents than someone from the school needs to be calling the cops and then heading to the kid’s house for a wellness check.

I forwarded the email to my assistant principal, the 8th grade counselor, and our school’s social worker and gave them exactly a minute to notice the email and write me back. When I didn’t get a response, I called the boss and told him to drop what he was doing and check his email immediately. To his credit, he read about half of the email out loud under his breath and then said “I’m on it” and hung up the phone, not waiting for a response from me. And then I had to basically just go about my life, doing my damnedest to panic off of my face, and I can promise you that 8th graders are never more annoyingly fucking perceptive than when you need them to not notice you.

I found a way to temporarily disentangle myself from whatever the hell I was doing with my class and emailed the kid back, trying to tread the thin line of sounding reassuring and calm without actually saying “dude don’t do anything to hurt yourself, and then just … waited.

I had a flurry of messages within about 20 minutes. First, entertainingly, another email from the kid saying that he was just upset and he wasn’t going to “do anything,” and then several messages in quick succession from the counselor and the AP saying that Mom had been contacted and was on her way home, so apparently the message scared the shit out of her too. The last I heard, she’d made it home and everyone was safe, and she was taking him to a local crisis center for an emergency psych evaluation. I’m currently sitting here hoping that they decided everything was fine and let him go. I would prefer this to be a big overreaction, because I’ve seen what those places are like and I’ve yet to meet an adult or a kid who feels like he was helped by being in an in-patient psychiatric ward on suicide watch. For all I know the kid is pissed at me, which I’m absolutely fine with. I’m trying to decide right now if I want to call the parent myself or not; I think I’m going to wait until I see whether he’s at school tomorrow and go from there. I’m not sure why he was home in the first place; he’s missed quite a bit of school lately but did show up for a day earlier this week.

This fucking job, man.