Editor’s note: This story includes frank discussion of sensitive matters, including suicide.
On the first day of school during Cait Haynes’ junior year, her teacher asked students to go around the room and rattle off their names. Before she could utter a word, a classmate abruptly cut her off.
“Her name is Cait and she’s a nobody, so can we just move on?” the girl said.
That was among the last bouts of public humiliation for Cait, a 16-year-old at the time who tried for years to fit in at Montrose High School, only to face kids who threw gum at her, picked apart what she wore, iced her out during lunch and started false rumors that she had cancer, or that she was pregnant.
How to ask for help
988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Call or text. Chat online. Colorado Crisis Line. 1-844-493-8255. Text TALK to 38255. National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. 1-800-273-8255. // Nacional de Prevención del Suicidio. 1-888-628-9454. Crisis Text Line. Text 741-741 to reach a counselor. The Trevor Project. An organization for LGBTQ young people. Call 1-866-488-7386. Text START to 678-678. Chat online.The torrent of hateful comments stopped only with her death by suicide, in March 2015 at age 17.
“When I recount what she went through, I don’t blame her for giving up,” said her mom, Maya Haynes, who tried to help Cait by constantly checking in with her, comforting her and consulting her pediatrician when she spiraled into depression. “The way people treated her was horrible, and no adult could go through that. When you know what she faced every single day, the cruelty of these kids and how they take it so lightly. But for somebody, it’s life or death.”
Since the girl’s death more than a decade ago, her family has tried to pick up the pieces of her pain and their own. Through a nonprofit they formed with their community in the weeks following her death — known as PEER Kindness — they have come to the rescue of students harassed by bullies and worked to spare thousands of others from the torment Cait could not escape.
The group works to alleviate bullying and create a more welcoming environment for students across the state and country, and to prevent tragedies like the one that devastated the Haynes family.
The effort to confront bullying across Colorado schools has grown as the number of bullying incidents has risen, with the state education department tracking a 6% increase in reports of bullying between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. Bullying has also continued to rank among the top concerns fielded by Colorado Safe2Tell, an anonymous reporting system where students, parents and community members can flag safety concerns related to bullying, violence, mental health crises and other threats. Cyberbullying, in particular, has gained popularity among students, experts say.
Experts trace the prevalence of bullying in Colorado schools to the increasingly complex realities that complicate kids’ lives both inside and outside schools: tough classroom environments, economic insecurity, the enduring impacts of a global pandemic, and national leaders who resort to disrespect and hostility in the face of conflict.
“What we know about bullying is it’s not just that one-on-one interaction,” said Adam Collins, the Colorado education department’s statewide bullying prevention manager. “It’s influenced by everything from the school climate to what’s going on in the world.”
For many kids, life-changing challenges only stacked up during COVID, from struggles at home to the loss of loved ones and social isolation during remote learning. If children haven’t processed all their trauma, Collins said, it follows them to school and can encourage more bullying.
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser said he worries about what he calls the “coarsening of our culture,” criticizing President Donald Trump as “a model of bullying behavior” and social media algorithms that promote “outrageous and mean-spirited behaviors.” The lesson kids are learning: Bullying and picking on others is “OK,” Weiser said.
“That is a risk to our overall society because people who are mean to one another can find that negative dynamic becomes a vicious cycle,” Weiser told The Colorado Sun. “Negative behaviors have a way of rippling and continuing. It’s really important that we interrupt and stop those behaviors and that we change norms to, we care about everyone.”
The rise in bullying goes hand in hand with the stream of tips Safe2Tell receives from kids concerned about behavior they have experienced or witnessed. Bullying was the third top concern in Safe2Tell reports during the 2023-24 school year, when the call system tallied 2,832 reports related to bullying — the highest number, Weiser’s office said, in the program’s nearly 22-year history.
During the last school year, bullying ranked as the second-biggest concern, with 2,673 bullying reports passed along to Safe2Tell. Between August and December, the system recorded 1,185 reports tied to bullying, according to data provided by Weiser’s office.
“This is not a small issue,” Weiser said. “Each of these episodes is obviously someone who’s feeling picked on, who’s feeling preyed on, and we know from experience (with) bullying, when someone internalizes it and keeps experiencing it, it can go to bad and dark places.”
“She wanted to be like everybody else.”
The moment Haynes received the final text message from her daughter, she knew.
“I’m at home, mama. I love you. Don’t worry.”
It had not been Cait’s first suicide attempt. She had tried twice before, including one time after another student approached her during a school basketball game and, standing a couple inches from her face, screamed at her to get out of the student section in front of the whole school, Haynes said.
“And she would tell me, ‘Mama, you have to learn how to let me go. You have to let me go. This life is so hard,’” Haynes said. “So she was very open about how she was going to give up because she just didn’t know what to do.”
From left to right, Todd Haynes, Maya Haynes, and Ashley Freeburg hold a portrait of Caitlyn Nell Haynes during a portrait in Montrose Colo. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Haynes said she and her husband, Todd, did everything they could to equip their daughter with coping tools and to figure out alternative options to continue sending her to school. They had been supportive of Cait wanting to leave private school for public school in the seventh grade so that she could join school sports teams and have a sense of team cameradie. Haynes cautioned her daughter about how difficult kids her age can be, especially young girls trying to navigate cliques and find a sense of belonging, but Cait wasn’t deterred, confident she would make friends.
The bullying started almost immediately. Haynes watched her once-bubbly daughter, someone she remembers lighting up a room, begin fading into someone else. The school tried to slap Band-Aids on the problem, Haynes said. One teacher opened her classroom to Cait for lunch so she wouldn’t have to eat alone. The principal, meanwhile, permitted her to come to school late and leave early so she could avoid the kids who lashed out at her in the halls.
After first denying the family’s request to pull Cait out of school, administrators relented and allowed her to end the school year six weeks early after receiving a note from her pediatrician attesting to her worsening depression. She spent eighth grade as a homeschool student and talked to a counselor before returning for a few classes a day during her first year of high school while remaining a homeschool student.
She continued showing up for classes even as students continued picking on her, Haynes said.
“She wanted to try to be normal,” Haynes said. “She wanted to be like everybody else.”
Peer Kindness founder Maya Haynes sits for a portrait in Montrose Colo. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)Cait would come home deflated, beaten down by a small group of girls who would sit behind her in class and relentlessly mock her, taunting her about what she wore and telling her that she looked homeless, that she smelled.
Haynes said she contacted the mom of one of the students picking on Cait after that student had posted on social media bragging about bullying her. The mom said she would address her daughter but later messaged Haynes denying that her daughter regularly picked on Cait.
When Haynes and Todd noticed Cait becoming more fragile, her mental health deteriorating, they would take turns lying down beside her in bed to ensure she didn’t hurt herself.
“She was so tenderhearted, and the things people do to each other daily is so discouraging,” Haynes said. “And her brain wasn’t even fully formed. These kids, they don’t hardly have a fighting chance.”
“Not another kiddo. Not a single other kiddo.”
During the last school year,PEER Kindness worked with 6,000 students across 24 schools, most of them on the Western Slope, Haynes said.Montrose rallied to launch the organization in the months after Cait’s death, meeting in the back of a coffee shop with other parents after kids reached out wanting more support in combating bullying.
Haynes said it was critical to begin helping kids understand exactly what bullying is, how to intervene and how to seek help from a trusted adult, noting that more than 40 students reported seeing Cait being bullied one school year.
But nothing changed, Haynes said.
PEER Kindness — which stands for positive, encouraging, empathetic and respectful — teaches students five lessons that walk them through how and why bullying happens and the importance of empathy. Students learn the difference between conflicts and bullying — bullying is anchored in an “imbalance of power,” Haynes said, with harassment or assault that is often, but not always, repeated.
The nonprofit’s curriculum also teaches kids how to resolve conflict and what the “bullying circle” looks like, including bystanders who stay on the sidelines, upstanders who defend a person being bullied or report what they see and then the bully and their followers. Students then learn how to become an upstander and also dissect the “science of kindness,” Haynes said, in which they come to understand how acts of kindness translate into a boost of dopamine and endorphins.
PEER Kindness also runs a youth leadership program locally, which coaches students more in depth on how to spot signs of depression or thoughts of suicide in a peer and get them help and how to build up their own leadership skills and how they can be a part of change. And the organization is ramping up a training program for adults through which they can become certified to teach the organization’s curriculum in schools and youth groups.
In the years since her daughter’s death, Haynes and PEER Kindness have branched out to help kids in Colorado and other states and countries — California, Texas, Utah, Alabama, Ireland — so they’re not alone in finding a solution to stop being the target of bullying. Haynes shows up to help those students the same way she did for Cait. She listens to kids and asks them if they want to report what they’ve experienced to the school. She offers parents advice on how to respond, what details to give their child’s teacher and how to begin understanding state laws and school policies around bullying. She also coaches students on ways to mediate bullying and helps families create a plan, encouraging them to confide in a trusted adult at school and develop a strategy to keep that student safe.
Since her daughter died, Haynes has continued to see the emotional toll bullying takes on students. Recently, she noticed some girls laughing at a boy, saying he smelled funny. The boy said his family can’t afford new clothes for him.
From left to right, Todd Haynes, Maya Haynes, and Ashley Freeburg hold a portrait of Caitlyn Nell Haynes during a portrait in Montrose Colo. (William Woody, Special to The Colorado Sun)“It happens every day like that,” Haynes said. “Kiddos need to know that what they say and do matters. If you hold the door for someone and ask them if they’re OK, that may be what keeps them there that day.”
Haynes said she’s grateful for the 17 years she got with Cait, whom she remembers for her bravery and kindness, someone who drew smiley faces on customers’ sandwiches at the restaurants she worked at and traveled to 13 countries. Someone who belayed off arches in Moab and once invited a girl who lived in a travel trailer home to get ready for homecoming, lending her a dress and styling her hair.
Knowing there are many more kids who need someone to tell them they matter keeps Haynes going.
“Not another kiddo. Not a single other kiddo.”
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