He was hoping his grades and his performance on the field would be enough to get him into a good college. I was there to meet with Coach Stevens, who had also been wracking his mind trying to think of clues he hadnt picked up from Kooper. Over the course of the fall semester, about a dozen of the 70 staff members in the Denver City school missed time for quarantine, mostly after testing positive themselves, forcing the district to find substitutes no easy task, but not insurmountable. The initial response is not as difficult as something thats stressful, but over time, the anhedonia, the loss of pleasure, is going to drive you down a lot more., Even before the coronavirus arrived, teen mental health was a cause for growing concern. You cant use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements. March 8, 2021: Due to an inconsistency in data provided by the National Governors Association, an earlier version of this article misrepresented three states COVID-19 case thresholds for reopening schools. In addition to the CDC reporton the rising share of visits to emergency rooms by teenagers in distress, a University of Wisconsin survey of more than 3,000 high school athletes during the summer found that more than two-thirds reported high levels of anxiety and depression, 37% higher than past studies. The Davises were sufficiently attuned to the mental health challenges of the pandemic that they held regular family visits with a therapist, and Kooper had gotten a couple of solo sessions as well before he and the therapist decided that was no longer necessary. He joked about Kooper letting one of his sisters sleep in one of his shirts, his willingness to dress up as a baby during the church skit for the little kids, and how Kooper was the only one of the young people he knew who would actually call him on the phone sometimes, just to talk. The median age for COVID-19 fatalities in the U.S. is about 80. Is Biden leaving wiggle room in his decision to run for re-election? Nationwide, deaths by suicide in the 10-to-24 age group increased by half between 2007 and 2018, a trend that has been linked to multiple factors, from the growing availability of guns to the spread of smartphones and social media. Kooper was born in Hobbs NM on August 9, 2003 and spent his childhood in Lovington before moving to Hobbs with his family, Father Justin Davis, Mother Heather Davis and his younger siblings, where he was an honors student, athlete and student leader. Just a few miles away in Texas, students were back in school and teams were playing a full season of games. Meg Gleghorn, left, is a sophomore at Hobbs High School and has chosen to continue with remote learning, while many of her peers have opted to return to part-time in-person learning. The pandemic's toll on teens - Axios I arrived in Hobbs two days later, just in time for the memorial inside Christian Center Church. We are sad to announce that on December 7, 2020 we had to say goodbye to Kooper Davis of Hobbs, New Mexico. She had been writing and calling elected officials and state bureaucrats and finally, with the help of the local state senator, Gay Kernan, had gotten the state to provide some training for local teachers in recognizing youth mental health troubles. If you use canonical metadata, please use the ProPublica URL. Travis was born in 1972 in Hobbs to Patrick Collins and the late Marla Bood Weber. There would be no actual games. Kooper already had a highlight reel, and it included some nice-looking throws, but it was from his sophomore season on the junior varsity team. There are the brown highway signs alerting travelers to historical markers tucked away in the nearby scrub. Justin and Heather told me how much comfort they were taking in the outpouring over Kooper, especially among his classmates. Coach Stevens got the news from the school principal that afternoon. On Sunday, Dec. 6, as semester finals were getting underway for school, Kooper was at church as usual, dressed as a baby for a monthly skit he and Sam did for the little kids. Davis, during an October demonstration to reopen schools In December, Davis took his own life; the third Hobbs teen to do so in the last three months of 2020 alone. Kooper was very involved in and loved being part of his church family as well as being a Christian. steve dunn katu salary Nationwide, meanwhile, President Bidens push to reopen schools was explicitly leaving out high schools, leaving millions of teenagers with the likelihood of remote learning through the end of the school year. I had an open relationship with my son, he said. He wouldve had an adult standing next to him, a coach saying, Kooper, quit being a dummy.. Where are the students? Headed to Texas - Hobbs News Sun If normally lighthearted Kooper, despite a loving family and natural gifts, had been struggling so much, what about all the others? As it was sinking in with Kooper and his classmates that school would remain remote for the rest of the fall, they got word in early October of an additional setback on the sports front. Browse Hobbs local obituaries on Legacy.com. . A group of students from Hobbs, including Kooper, held a rally at the football stadium to call for the reopening of school. Koopers friend Zailor Lopez has noticed a change in her friends: I feel like the pandemic has kind of brought on a lot of anxiety for us kids.. Last summer the town was in the news when a despondent 11-year-old who had loved school and sports had killed himself. Clockwise from top left: Cutter Cruz, Colton Graham, Easton Kuykendall and Caleb Hedrick. Initially, practices with up to 9 kids were allowed, which meant they could do some drills, but in October, the state reduced that to four students per coach. Democrats Are Sacrificing American Kids' Lives To Get More Power Kinney said he and the Hobbs school superintendent had been talking a few days earlier about the need to get kids back in school. Ive blamed myself., She had done a lot of reading on youth suicide since Landons death, and had learned that rates were especially high in indigenous communities, like the Aboriginal community of Australia. The district, which offered daily and weekly tallies of cases on its website, determined that the vast share of transmissions seemed to be happening outside school, as research was finding to be the case in other places, too. That earlier pandemics victims tended to be in the prime of life, with mortality peaking around age 28. Koopers been Justins rock. She recounted all their morning chats together, after his workout sessions. A lot are stuck in environments they didnt choose. But the districts push to reopen was rebuffed by the state education department. You cant go to sporting events, you cant see your friends, you cant go to parties. These are kids without mental health issues, with good families, kids that are loved, she said. Help them. Making it especially tough, he said, was the nearby contrast. In New Mexico, Gov. Sports could start a few weeks after that, with masks and without fans. Justin, as I would soon learn, is a large and taciturn man, but he was eager to talk, and urged me to come to New Mexico to learn more about what Kooper and his friends had been through. If you like our stories, mind sharing this with a friend? The school did not administer coronavirus tests on its own, but if a student or teacher tested positive locally, the school conducted contact tracing to determine if any other teacher or student had been exposed to them for 15 minutes or more, unmasked, within six feet. After my meeting with Fuller, I went back to the church. Instead, he set his sights on Stanford, which excelled in sports and academics, and which he had visited for another football camp. Every weekday morning except Wednesday, he got up at 6:30 a.m., drank a protein shake, then drove to McDonalds for more breakfast, before arriving at school at 7 a.m. for a weightlifting session. They were among the strictest in the country. New Mexico's Hidden Tragedy: The Suicide Problem Plaguing Our Youth In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations in memory of Kooper to be made to Christian Center Church. (By contrast, Kentuckys daily threshold was 25 cases per 100,000 people and Oklahomas was 50 cases. On Sunday mornings, Kooper would be back at the church for his youth-group service and to help lead sessions for the younger kids. New Mexicos response last year was the opposite. No football means no video to show college recruiters. They didnt want to talk., But then she herself had gotten the virus she wasnt sure where and its severity had hit home, even before her partners death. Local governmental and educational officials the vast majority of whom arent epidemiologists or experts on indoor airflow have had to formulate policy under intense time pressure while being buffeted by impassioned constituencies on every side and facing the reality that any decision would impose costs on somebody. He was thinking about Stanford because it was a top academic school with a good football team. Meals cooked by friends covered the island in the kitchen. He had won over his ninth-grade English teacher, Jennifer Espinoza, with his willingness to engage on the. Schools in New Mexico partially reopened in February, after being mostly closed for nearly a year. The team in Seminole, 20 miles south, needed to cancel some games as the result of player quarantines, but Denver City managed to get through the fall without any cancellations, though there were some weeks where the roster got thin. Koopers father and stepmother, Justin and Heather Davis, left, and sister, Kynlee, 11. Posted on . But thats me being selfish. The coronavirus pandemic has been not only a health catastrophe, but an epic failure of national government. Martinez said hed be glad to have Kooper and that he was welcome to join one of their four-person practice pods that very day. Two Hobbs men were killed Tuesday morning in a rollover crash outside of Carlsbad and a third Hobbsan was injured. She took the coronavirus seriously, she said. His parents encouraged him to aim for the Ivy League, but he knew its football was middling. She had come to bring her teenage daughter to an outdoor kids workout session that had been arranged hastily a few days earlier, after the news of Koopers death. Doctors are still uncertain whether children who survived that syndrome will experience long-term heart issues or other health problems. Mom preserves Christmas tree her son decorated before his death After initially barring any schools from reopening in August, the state released gating criteria for districts that wanted to resume in-person instruction in the fall. Enter The Lost Year: What the Pandemic Cost Teenagers - ProPublica They eagerly did so, several dozen of them bunched together, beaming for the camera. In the same week as Lujan Grisham announced her reopening plan, I made another check of the coronavirus toll in Hobbs Lea County. In the large band hall, the band director showed me the dots he had taped on the floor to keep the 70-odd musicians spaced 7.5 feet apart even as they marched, and the cloth covers that one students grandmother had made, decorated with the schools mustang logo, to go over the tubas, to keep them from emitting moisture. Those weekends remain for me some of the only redeeming moments of an awful year. Few people were wearing face masks. I dont know who it is, but you need to help them. She talked about Justins love for his son: Thats his boy. Celeste Sloman is a photographer and director based in New York.