After Thomas Bonine committed suicide in June 1998 while attending Eastern, his father wanted a way to keep his son’s memory and educate others about suicide.

“Ending the Silence: The Third Annual Conference on Suicide and Depression” has been the ongoing attempt of Bonine’s father, Tom, to further suicide prevention, intervention and “postvention” while making sure high schools have appropriate response plans to suicides and suicide attempts.

“People in education are on the front lines and need to know how to deal with (suicide),” Bonine said.

Several members of Survivors of Suicide, a group geared toward helping parents who have lost children to suicide heal, recounted their ordeals, explained how their children’s schools dealt with the deaths and offered suggestions on how schools can better crisis intervention.

“It’s too late for our children, but this is preventable,” said Kimberly Brown, a Survivors of Suicide panelist.

Panelist Barbara Stidwill said she felt a great deal of “bitterness” and “anger” toward St. Charles High School after her daughter Meghan Ford overdosed on medication in August 1995, two weeks before school went into session.

“The school did nothing,” she said. “We never heard a word from St. Charles High School.”

Stidwill described the school as “ritzy” and “full of itself,” complaining that many teachers and faculty were never notified about Meghan’s death, the school never contacted the family and students were not given the opportunity to mourn. She said the school did not want to recognize that a suicide could actually happen there.

Stidwill was upset because no one contacted her about how to deal with Meghan’s death. Meghan’s 14-year-old sister, who wanted to keep her regular school routine to allow her to mourn, was very upset when counselors pulled her out of class, said Stidwill.

“There was no communication between us and the school,” she said.

Maureen Anderson, whose son Sean shot himself in December 2000, relayed a similar story after Romeoville High School failed to prevent her son’s suicide and also did not notify some teachers about the event, even though Sean’s younger brother still attended the school.

“Romeoville High School failed my boys,” she said. “The school needs to be aware of surviving siblings and needs to make sure everyone involved knows.”

Anderson said an employee’s “disregard” for her son contributed to Sean’s death.

A school employee misinformed Sean, whom Anderson said was already clearly upset, that his girlfriend had transferred to California and he would “never see her again.” Upon hearing that information, Sean easily left school without permission and shot himself, Anderson said.

Sean’s girlfriend only planned to transfer for a semester and returned to school only a month later. The school employee repeated information that was both wrong and confidential, she said.

The disappointed parents worked through tearful memories, but panelist Kimberly Brown’s story shed hope on high school crisis intervention programs.

Brown said she was satisfied overall with the way Aurora Christian High School handled her daughter Erin’s suicide.

When the news of Erin’s death first reached the school, she said the administration wanted to keep things low key and wanted to shy away from the issue. However, the Brown family remained very public and open about their daughter, who killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning one week after her boyfriend died in a car accident.

“We were very willing to get involved,” she said. “We took the opportunity to educate because the school wasn’t going to.”

While Erin was remembered somberly with yellow ribbons at graduation and a speaker from Suicide Prevention Services spoke at her funeral, Brown said she was careful not to glamorize her daughter’s death.

Bonine said he was pleased with the way Eastern handled his son’s death and was especially thankful to the school for helping him organize the conference every year.

“The bright spot of the tragedy is this conference,” he said. “This conference began to educate future generations about suicide.”