This study investigates whether students experiencing difficulty adapting to parental loss also feel they have little or no control over life events; whether an inability to adapt to the stress of parental loss surfaces as a school adjustment problem; and whether these relationships are stronger for students losing a parent through death than through divorce. Subjects for the experiment were 840 middle school students in a suburban New Jersey community. Selected from this group were 18 students with histories of parental death, 18 students having experienced parental separation or divorce, and a control group of 18 students who had experienced no loss. Instruments used included a demographic questionnaire and the Nowicki-Strickland Locus of Control Scale, both completed by the students, and the Classroom Adjustment Scale, completed by teachers. A measure of association, lambda, was calculated for three contingency tables representing each group. The author states that, although the lambdas were rather small, knowing a student's locus of control enhanced the ability to classify the student as having a school adjustment problem or not. Accuracy increased as the stress associated with the loss of a parent increased. (Author/MLF)