"Don't Post Selfies, Mommy — You Might Take Pills and Go to Heaven."

Aaron Silva
9 hours ago
8 min read

What a 9 Year Old Carried Home from Eanes ISD This Week.

A Suicide Video Shown to 4th Graders Without Notice or Consent. A Predator in the Classroom Met With Silence. A Child Punished for Racism She Didn't Commit. This Starts at the Top.

By Aaron Silva, Eanes Parents Unite & Texas Education Project 103

When we were children, our parents went to work every morning with confidence. Confidence we were safe at school. Confidence that the teachers and principals in their lives were reinforcing the values being built at home — not replacing them. Confidence that if something went wrong, parents and teachers would solve it together, because parents were treated as the customer.

That deal has been broken.

On Monday, March 23rd — the first day back from spring break — a video was shown to 4th grade students at Bridge Point Elementary as part of an anti-bullying program. No parents were notified in advance. No consent was obtained. What happened that morning is not an isolated mistake by a well-meaning teacher and principal. It is the latest entry in a documented pattern of an institution that has decided it knows better than you what your child should see, think, and feel — and that your right to know in advance is a courtesy, not a requirement.

What Was Shown to Our Fourth Graders

The video is titled "Words Hurt." You can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9D2PFD7nTI

A teenage girl is cyberbullied into crisis. The harassment escalates until she is told to kill herself. The film then shows her alone in her bedroom in extreme distress. She picks up a bottle of sleeping pills. She opens it. She pours a handful of pills directly into her palm. The camera lingers. Her intent is unmistakable. The screen fades to black. Suicide statistics appear.

That is what was shown to 9 and 10 year old children on an Eanes ISD campus.

The CDC and American Academy of Pediatrics are unambiguous: depicting the specific method of a suicide attempt to a young audience is a documented clinical violation of safe messaging standards. Showing a specific method to vulnerable young children does not warn them — it instructs them. A 9 year old who has never connected "too many pills" with "a way to make pain stop" may make that connection for the first time watching this video. That bridge, once built, cannot be unbuilt.

The video shows no parent. No teacher. No counselor. No trusted adult. No help-seeking behavior of any kind. The only exit from the pain is the pills and a fade to black. For a 9 year old brain still learning cause and effect, the lesson is not "cyberbullying is bad." The lesson is: "when the pain becomes too much, here is how."

I have heard from multiple Bridge Point parents since this story broke. Two of them stopped me cold.

The first told me that on Monday night — after the video had been shown to her daughter that morning — she was laying her child down to sleep with her stuffed animals when her daughter asked her: "Mommy, explain what suicide is."

The second parent learned about the incident when she picked her son up from school that afternoon. He told her: "Mommy, please don't take any more selfies and post them on Facebook — because if someone says you're ugly, you might take pills and go to heaven with grandma."

Read that again. That is what a 9 year old boy processed and carried home from Bridge Point Elementary on March 23rd, 2026.

There are no words adequate to describe the failure that produced that moment. But I am going to try.

The Letter That Arrived After the Damage Was Done

After the video was shown, Principal Sheri Bryant sent a communication to 4th grade families describing the upcoming lessons in the future tense — students "will be participating" in bullying awareness lessons. It references TEKS standards. It closes warmly. It reads like a thoughtful advance notice from a caring principal.

It was sent after the children had already seen the video.

The district's own 2025–2026 Student Handbook and Texas Senate Bill 9 are explicit: parents must receive written notice at least 14 days before sensitive instruction is provided. Parents have the right to preview curriculum materials.

No 14-day notice. No consent. No preview.

The children saw the video. Then the parents got a letter written in the future tense.

This reads less like communication and more like damage control.

This Is Not the First Time

I wish I could tell you this was an isolated incident. It is not.

Zachary Barnett, Cedar Creek Elementary. In February 2025, a music teacher at Cedar Creek Elementary was arrested following a Texas DPS investigation. An affidavit confirmed he possessed hundreds of files of child pornography depicting children under 10 years old — and had taken photos and videos of his own clothed Eanes students at school, which he then edited to create explicit content. In June 2025, a Travis County grand jury returned 17 indictments against him including Sexual Performance by a Child and multiple counts of Possession of Child Pornography. He had passed every Eanes ISD background check. His guilt is a matter for the courts. [Read the full story here.]

Has the district made a single public announcement about supporting the families and children whose images were exploited by this scumbag? Has there been a task force? A community update? A formal review of campus security policies by our district police chief? No.

Trustees Diane Hern and Laura Clark — who are seeking re-election in May — have been on this board throughout this entire episode. This community deserves to know why there has been no public action, no public accounting, and no public comfort offered to the families affected. We are still waiting.

The Eye Black Incident, Bridge Point Elementary. I know this family personally. They are close friends of ours and this story is well known to many in the community. Because a child is involved I will not identify them — but I will vouch for every word of what follows.

A young girl at Bridge Point Elementary wore eye black as part of a football costume worn during Bobcat Day. As children do when they sweat and play, it ran down her face. A school administrator determined this constituted racist behavior — blackface. Before her parents were contacted, she was required to apologize — verbally and in writing — to teachers and counselors for racist behavior she had no concept of committing. A formal complaint was filed and resolved to the family's satisfaction exactly never.

This child was in third grade. Third graders do not know what blackface is. They know what football is. They know their Chaps heroes wear eye black on the field. They do not understand the history of racist minstrelsy in American entertainment — because they are eight years old. Another great example of why we dance on the grave of the DEI movement today.

Three incidents we know about. There are many more we will never know about. Parents have been voting with their feet for years — quietly pulling their children from Eanes and enrolling them in private schools. They don't file complaints. They don't write blogs. They just leave. And the district wonders why enrollment keeps declining.

Trust has been broken. It has been broken for too long.

The Adults Who Can't See the Irony

The adults who have overseen this district for years — the same board culture that produced the Westlake Smear Cartel, a group of community misfits who get off weaponizing anonymous social media accounts to cyberbully and destroy private citizens and their families who dared to run for school board — decided that the appropriate way to teach 9 year olds about cyberbullying was a video demonstrating that the exit from online harassment is a handful of sleeping pills (see photo above).

Trustee Kelly Marwill — the current CEO of the Westlake Smear Cartel — and her Cartel soldiers have spent years using the exact same anonymous online harassment tactics this video was supposedly designed to warn children about. They deployed those tactics against Jennifer Stevens, Nigel Stout, Jay Lamy, Jim Withers, and me. Adults. In positions of public trust. Cyberbullying private citizens.

You cannot model the disease and claim to be the cure. You cannot operate a smear campaign with one hand and hold up an anti-bullying lesson plan with the other and expect this community not to notice.

If Trustee Marwill decides to pipe up with concern about this incident, the community should feel free to remind her of the hypocrisy.

Less, Not More

Eanes ISD currently spends $3.3 million per year on more than 35 counselors and mental health professionals. I understand the argument. Children are struggling. The post-COVID mental health landscape in schools is real and serious.

But here is the point nobody in district leadership seems willing to make: we do not need to increase the mental health budget or hire more counselors and mental health experts. What we need is to stop doing stupid things and creating the very problems we claim to be trying to prevent. Less, not more.

Because choosing to show a graphic depiction of suicidal intent to 9 year olds — without parental consent, in apparent violation of your own handbook and state law — while simultaneously spending $3.3 million on mental health services is either a breathtaking failure of institutional self-awareness or something worse.

I do not believe for a single second that anyone at Eanes ISD is cynical enough to manufacture student trauma in order to justify the existence of their mental health staff.

What I am suggesting is something that may be almost equally troubling: Are they really just not thinking about it at all?

Here is a thought that I suspect will be uncomfortable for some to hear but needs to be said anyway: the last thing Eanes ISD needs right now is more mental health expertise on the board of trustees or in the admin. We need less of that thinking — not more. We need financial discipline, legal accountability, and the business experience to stop creating the problems we keep paying people to treat. A therapist in the boardroom will not balance a $5–6 million structural deficit or stop suicide training.

The Safety Council That Didn't

Eanes ISD maintains a 32-member School Safety and Health Advisory Council — the SSHAC — [link here] whose entire purpose is to review sensitive curriculum content before it reaches our children. What happened?

This Starts at the Top

Culture in any institution flows from the top down. What happens in a 4th grade classroom at Bridge Point Elementary on a Monday morning does not happen in a vacuum. It happens inside a culture set by leadership — by the board of trustees that establishes priorities, enforces accountability, and sends a clear signal to every administrator, every principal, and every teacher about what is and is not acceptable when it comes to the children in their care.

The incidents described in this blog did not happen despite the leadership of Diane Hern, Laura Clark, James Spradley and their Smear Cartel CEO Marwill. They happened on their watch. Inside a culture they have helped shape for years. A culture that trusts the administration and rogue librarians over the parents. A culture that acts first and notifies later. A culture that has confused the school district's role with the parent's role — and paid the price in declining enrollment, broken trust, countless lawsuits and a community that has been quietly walking away one family at a time.

The SSHAC exists. The handbook exists. Texas Senate Bill 9 exists. The policies are there. What is missing is the leadership willing to enforce them — and willing to stand up publicly when they are violated.

Hern and Clark are not that leadership. They have proven it. And they are asking this community for three more years to continue proving it.

Haven't they done enough?

Early voting: April 20th–28th, 2026. Election Day: Saturday, May 2nd.

If you or someone you know is struggling, please call or text 988 — the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Aaron Silva is a Westlake parent, successful business entrepreneur and CEO. Follow along at silva4eanes.com/blog