Tough year underlines need for school crisis training

Posted by Ross Arrowsmith on Friday, May 16th 2008 under School/Campus Violence

New Brunswick has so far been spared from some of the horrors schools in other areas have had to face — school shootings for one — but there has certainly been no shortage of tragedy and grief, this year in particular.

Over the last few years, schools in District 2 and around the province have been working to develop plans to help them deal with crises when they occur.

Allen Marr, a psychologist and learning specialist with District 2, which administers English language schools in southeastern New Brunswick, had been working towards bringing the premiere school crisis training team in the U.S. to the province to work with administrators and school psychologists for the past two years, but when things finally began to fall into place early this fall he couldn’t have known just how relevant the training would seem when it came.

First, District 2 lost four students in a car crash in September. Just seven weeks later, four more young men died in a crash in Kent County, then in January national attention was focused on Bathurst when seven young men from the same basketball team and a teacher were killed when the van they were riding in slid in front of a transport truck.

For three days this week, principals, psychologists, and district staff from District 2 and psychologists from several other districts in the province as well as the south shore of Nova Scotia converged in Moncton to take part in Prepare training.

It is the first time the training has been offered anywhere in Canada.

Prepare focuses both on prevention and response.

Melissa Reeves, a school psychologist and adjunct lecturer at Winthrop University in South Carolina, says prevention can encompass anything from anti-bullying campaigns to driver safety courses to helping students develop anger management skills.

Ted Feinberg, the assistant executive director of the U.S. National Association of School Psychologists, says one of the important components of prevention has been breaking what they call the “conspiracy of silence” where students hear something is going to happen but don’t want to “squeal” on their peers.

It’s a cultural shift for students, from one where tattlers are looked down on to one where telling an adult is seen as a social responsibility to yourself, your peers, your school, your family.

“A number of incidents have been averted because kids have really embraced this,” he says.

And yet, the Prepare trainers recognize you can’t stop all bad things from happening.

“You look at what you can do to prevent, what you can do to mitigate and how you can prepare for what will happen,” says Frank Zenere, a school psychologist and crisis management specialist with Miami-Dade County Public Schools, which is responsible for 330,000 children. “There are limitations to what you can stop.”

But with appropriate training, when something happens there is less anxiety surrounding the event because at least people have a place to start in dealing with it.

“You have that template to guide you,” says Marr.

“It’s still tough work, but it goes so much more smoothly,” Reeves adds.

If a tragedy isn’t dealt with appropriately and in a timely fashion Reeves says it impacts on children’s ability to learn and can lead to further problems in the school.

“If we are not addressing the issues, they are not available for learning,” she says.

Feinberg says the idea of creating an intervention and training curriculum to teach people how to deal with schools in crisis came about after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

School psychologists were asked to offer assistance to families and children who had lost loved ones in the bombing.

“There was no formal plan or process in place,” he says.

The need for the training became even more apparent four years later when 12 students and a teacher were shot and killed at Columbine High School in Colorado.

Both Reeves and Feinberg were called in to help the community cope in the aftermath of the shooting.

Reeves says the biggest challenge wasn’t finding people with the right training to respond to the situation — the challenge was that all were working with different guidelines and speaking a different language, which made co-ordinating the response hard.

Prepare seeks to get everyone on the same page, so all are working toward the same goal and with an understanding of the special needs of a school community.

“The hope is we have professionals throughout the province with a shared knowledge and ability to work together so we can easily support each other,” Marr says.

After the Bathurst crash, for instance, staff from several school districts across the province travelled to the grieving community to offer assistance.

Feinberg says they now have a team in the U.S. that responds to very high profile tragedies, however there are many less high profile events that need to be responded to and the team can’t be everywhere. The idea of the training program is to equip people in every school and school district to deal with crises and then to train them to train others.