affirmative action

[Achebe]

Excellent post mortem suggesting I stick to rhyme, though the  poetry establishment frowns on it

I wish there was a 'poetry establishment'. Poetry is too insignificant, too niche, too inconsequential a club to support an 'establishment'. The heads of this purported 'establishment' would make less money than a 30 year old investment banker or (in Australia), a truck driver in the iron ore mines; and have less influence than a lifestyle columnist for the North Shore Times.
What you mean is that the modern trend is to eschew rhyme, but that is not true. What is true is that better poetry has been written in the last 150 years (since Hopkins or so) than in the centuries before, I mean in the English language, and much of this has eschewed rhyme. But the same is true of any other feat of human endeavour, such as athletics, cricket, or mathematics.
Whether English is suited for rhyme is a separate and longer discussion.

Coming to your poem, the chief problem is that it's a short, dramatic poem, and the merits or demerits of the drama overshadow any technical virtues of the poem itself. As a poem, I would say that with a few tweaks, it can be quite a decent poem up until 'campus', but you need to change the trajectory of the story after that to avoid aforementioned drama. The suicide is S2 is too sudden, and too melodramatic to be credible, given the sparse buildup and insufficient lack of motive therefrom.
If you want to stick to the suicide, then you need to provide more insights into the mind of the red haired guy, so that a credible motive can be discerned.

Best