Henry M. Gunn High School sits at the corner of Arastradero and Foothill, around two miles from the East Meadow Caltrain crossing and very near Stanford’s faculty row. Compared to the students at rival Paly, Gunn kids are stereotyped as being more academically intense, less spirited and sporty. Many are the children of Stanford professors; many more are the offspring of immigrants who came here for tech jobs and rapidly moved their families into the stable ranks of the upper-middle class. At lunch, kids speak Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese — nearly half the school is Asian. Sixty-four percent of the school’s 2015 graduating class had a grade point average of 3.51 or better at the end of their junior year.

To a person, Gunn students say that their school is unhealthily competitive. “If one person is succeeding, it means that someone else is falling behind,” says one senior. Sophomore Olivia Eck describes a culture of unbounded striving: “There’s no middle point for success. There’s no ‘I’m here and I’m happy with where I am.’ It’s always ‘I need to be up there,’” she says. The kids paint a picture of a sort of academic coliseum, where students look down their noses at peers in a lower math “lane,” guard their grade point averages like state secrets, brag about 2 a.m. cramming sessions, and consider a B a disaster.

“I am not OK, and I can speak for many

of my friends at school — we are not OK. I want to feel comfortable at school. I want to enjoy what I’m learning. Right now, I’m doing none of those things.”

Martha Cabot,

sophomore,

Gunn High

While they’re relentlessly pushed to chase higher grades and greater commendations, students say, they are simultaneously pressured to maintain an air of confidence and composure. Gaby Candes, a Gunn sophomore whose parents are both Stanford professors, refers to the condition as “Stanford duck syndrome”: “Everybody puts on a front of being super-relaxed and perfect, but under the surface they’re kicking furiously,” she says. “When all you see is calm ducks, you think that you are the only one who’s not perfect.” The attitude even bleeds into class activities that are intended to ameliorate stress. “We’re always doing exercises where they say, ‘We all have problems, and other people have problems just like you,’” says junior Hayley Krolik. “But nobody really believes it. This isn’t really an environment where people talk about being less than perfect.”

With everyone paddling desperately (but stealthily) in pursuit of distinction, pulling out in front becomes nearly impossible. “Everyone wants to be the one to stand out, because it’s really hard to stand out here,” says Hayley. Consequently, anything that gets you noticed — being gay, being Jewish, even being inordinately sad — garners social capital at Gunn. Depression is effectively “glorified,” a senior says, because it attracts attention.

That obsession with specialness extends to many parents. “Because we live in this extraordinary place that really has some singular qualities,” says Ken Dauber, a Palo Alto father and a member of the school board, “we think somehow that our kids are also singular and extraordinary. But they are just kids.” Dauber, a Google software engineer, and his wife, Michele, a Stanford law professor, are not immune to this overinflated feeling — or to its consequences. They lost their daughter, Amanda, to suicide in 2008, after she’d graduated from Rhode Island School of Design.

It was that event, and the subsequent spate of suicides in 2009–10, that incited Dauber to campaign for sweeping change. In what came “like a shot from nowhere,” as the Palo Alto Weekly reported in 2011, the techie with a sociology PhD called for new district leadership, deriding the “lack of urgency” in addressing the misery-producing school climate. Particularly enraging to Dauber was then-superintendent Kevin Skelly’s insistent denial of any direct connection between the Gunn suicides and the school. In response, Dauber launched We Can Do Better Palo Alto, an activist group that pushed for measures to reduce school stress and boost attention to the whole child. In 2012, he took a run at unseating several long-term school board members. He lost, narrowly, but continued to rail against the crisis of sleep-deprived, stressed-out kids, eventually scoring a board seat in 2014.

Change, however, has not come easily to Palo Alto. An agenda of school reforms was proffered in 2009 by a consortium that included faith leaders, the YMCA, Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and the Palo Alto police, among a dozen other entities. The ensuing Project Safety Net (PSN) proposed a dense deck of 22 initiatives to curb suicides and foster a more supportive environment. The project started with the low-hanging fruit: fielding a volunteer army of track watchers to monitor the most visible Caltrain intersections; instituting a new required course, Titan 101, that included a mental health curriculum; moving fall-semester finals ahead of winter break; and distributing books on stress relief and relaxation to faculty members.

But many of the project’s well-considered action items proved problematic. Some, like mental health screening, were significantly more complex than anticipated: Parental consent issues flared up, and inpatient services for those found to be at risk were wanting. Fall-semester finals were moved, but efforts to avoid “stacking” of tests and homework on an everyday basis flopped. A policy to limit homework was adopted — and overwhelmingly ignored. The bulk of school counseling is still carried out by unpaid interns — master’s students, mostly — who typically stay just one to two years, undermining the larger goal of tight relationships between providers and kids. As Kathleen Blanchard, whose son, Jean-Paul, was the first student lost in the 2009–10 cluster, chides, “A plan is not action.”

Crucially, some of the most widely accepted changes have been undercut by the students themselves. In 2011, Gunn’s start time was moved to 8:25 a.m., based upon research indicating that later-morning classes improve sleep, boost academic performance, and decrease incidents of depression. But students clamored for an optional 7:20 a.m. class, known as “zero period.” A recent push by the school to eliminate academic classes during zero period erupted into a showdown with students who desired more flex-time. (In April, Palo Alto Unified superintendent Max McGee finally settled the dispute by discontinuing AP calculus, chemistry, and other heavy academic courses at the early hour, but allowing “nonacademic” electives like gym to continue.)

Last October, the head of Palo Altos’s Office of Human Services warned that the PSN had entered “ a real time of paralysis.” The situation has only gotten shakier. The project is currently leaderless, having lost a second director in the past 13 months. Infighting has been a problem, according to an insider, and egos have repeatedly made progress difficult. PSN is now considering adoption of an alternate framework altogether. Dauber believes that the general state of inaction is the result of knee-jerk defensiveness on the part of the school district and some of PSN’s members. The earnest search for answers to a problem that nobody truly understands is manifesting as something much more pernicious: the shifting of blame.