Crisis Response in the
Schools
The phone rings in the office just before school starts for the
day. Your secretary is informed that two of your students have been
involved in a serious accident as they were walking to school. What
do you do now? Who do you call? What effect will this have on your other
students? What about staff?
What you do does make a
difference, and the first 48 hours are the most critical. As in any
traumatic situation, it's during those hours that human beings attempt
to make sense of what's happened. Ideally, the goal of any crisis response
team is to return to the pre-trauma, "normal" state as soon as possible.
Delaying intervention increases the chance of long-term emotional distress
and possibly Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.
Violence and Trauma
We know that school violence, as well as the trauma resulting from
it, is increasing dramatically. Combined with the surge of violence
in society in general, it creates fertile ground for both students and
adults to have difficulty coping with everyday life. For students, this
translates into difficulty learning as well as other problems.
Additional to violence,
the incidents of accidental death or injury have sky- rocketed with
the increased use of alcohol and other drugs (AODs) among young people.
One young woman in high school reported losing 11 friends to AOD-related
incidents during her sophomore year. The AIDS epidemic is just beginning
to take it's toll on school kids, and it won't be long before every
high school student knows someone affected by AIDS. We can only speculate
on the effect this knowledge has on a student's mental and emotional
health.
Until recently, schools
have had to deal with only an occasional traumatic event or crisis.
Now, however, they are increasingly being caught off guard and left
saying "I never dreamed that could happen here. Thank Goodness it's
over and now we can return to normal." What many of these schools fail
to realize is that "normal" will never be the same again. Until now,
each school administrator has taken what he or she believed was the
best course of action for his or her staff and students. That course
of action often varied greatly from site to site. We now know that some
actions are helpful while others, though well intended, increase trauma.
Removing the belongings from the classroom of a student who has died,
for instance, may further traumatize his/her classmates.
Some of the questions we
ask ourselves aren't easy to answer. Should we allow students to go
to the funeral service? How flexible should we encourage teachers to
be in their classrooms following an event? What kind of support does
the staff need to more effectively meet the needs of kids? We now have
the answers to these and other questions and don't have to guess any
more. We know what to look for in the months following that might indicate
unhealthy coping mechanisms even though there may be no visible signs.
We know that people who
have been affected by trauma need places to acknowledge what happened
and to receive support from others. Allowing students and staff to attend
funeral or memorial services in some circumstances may provide a sense
of closure and allow healing to begin. Within a classroom, teachers
need to provide the opportunity for students to express themselves while
still maintaining a structure that is as close to normal as possible.
Staff also need places to express their own feelings of grief, sadness
and loss so that they can be emotionally available to provide support
to students and parents.
Develop A Plan
Schools need to have a proactive plan in place to deal with a crisis
before it happens rather than simply reacting and hoping for the best.
A complete plan includes an emergency management plan, a district-level
crisis response team that includes community mental health organizations,
law enforcement, etc., and a site-level crisis response team to take
the leadership role and make the decisions concerning the needs of students
and staff.
Site-Level Team
The site-level crisis response team should work in conjunction with
the student assistance program if one is in place and in fact might
include some of the same people. Team members should reflect all levels
of the school, from administrators, teaching staff, and classified staff
to parents and students, etc.
They would be responsible
for coordinating resources, planning and running staff information and
debriefing meetings, and centralizing communication between parents,
staff, students, district personnel, media and the community. They would
also be available to assist individual teachers with classroom notification
of the incident, provide a "safe" room for both students and staff to
come if they need extra support, coordinate all paperwork and record
keeping and refer individuals to community resources, the student assistance
program, employee assistance program, etc.
The team creates a specific
plan of action for the day, the next week, month and six months. That
plan includes an evaluation component of what worked and what needs
to be adjusted. This team also coordinates appropriate staff training
in areas such as suicide prevention, the grieving process, critical
incident stress debriefing, community resources, stress management,
etc. The primary goal of this team is to support each other so each
member can sup- port staff who in turn can support students.
Schools that have crisis
response teams are better able to respond immediately to a crisis by
implementing a plan already in place. They have a list of key personnel,
their day and evening phone numbers, and their responsibilities and
functions. Ideally this list is three to five people deep in the event
that someone on the list can't be reached or is a victim of the crisis.
Valuable time is not wasted in making decisions during the crisis about
who to call, where to reach them, and what to do now.
With a plan in place, the
team can immediately be mobilized to begin the process of confirming
the information and coordinating the systematic response needed to support
both students and staff to return to a pre-trauma state of "normal"
as soon as possible. The response is consistent and based on current
research and information of how to best cope with the particular situation.
By having a team in place, with an up-to-date plan of action, administrators
eliminate the guess work that would result from hearing the news of
a crisis and saying, "Oh no! I never thought that would happen here.
What do we do now?"
Mary Schoenfeldt is an educational
wellness consultant with Schoenfeldt and Associates in Foresthill, California.
She is author of numerus books including Crisis Response Teams, Lessening
the Aftermath and From Chaos to Control, School Crisis Response;
which was written for the California County Superintendents Educational
Services Association as the model to be incorporated by all schools
within California.
