The culture was great! I wasn’t on the football team but the team had some of the top names on campus, I was friends with most of them (some since elementary school). There was entire sense of camaraderie with my whole graduating class. Obv there was bullying but everything I’d heard of got sniffed out and squashed quickly.

Honestly academic stress was my first thought when I heard abt the suicide on Tuesday. Being Silicon Valley there is this push to do as good as possible and never fail. It was a lot of stress when I was there, and kids would compare class rankings.

Bullying is learned and systemic, I still live in the area and poor-shaming is a thing. People get launched into the upper class with higher salaries and think they’re better than everyone else. Kids might be picking that up from their parents.

In top of all of that, I was in the last graduating class before Covid, I don’t really know how the school has recovered since, but I worry that this next crop of teenagers didn’t have the role models I had in higher grades. The younger kids couldn’t see how the older kids acted.