Death on Campus: Creating a Plan to Support Your School Community

On October 17-19, I attended the California Association of School Counselors (CASC) 2018 conference in Riverside, California. During these three days I met and learned from wonderful school counselors that are truly charting the course of our profession by supporting students, families, schools, and communities all over our state.

In addition to listening to the inspiring presentations of keynote speakers Senator Barbara Boxer, Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, and, now California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tony Thurmond, I joined several workshops in a wide range of topics relevant to the school counseling profession. One of these workshops was Death on Campus: Creating a plan to support your school community facilitated by MelissaGillespie and Emily Ritchey, current school counselors at Calabasas HighSchool. I decided to attend this workshop because I want to expand my knowledge about crisis response in schools, particularly around topics of grief and loss. I fortunately have not had to deal with a death in school during my time training as a school counselor, but I understand death is a part of life, and I would like to be prepared to support my students, families and staff if I ever face a crisis of this kind.

Case Study

The presenters opened the workshop by sharing about a tragic event they recently experienced in their school: one of their freshman students and his father passed away in a plane accident (the father was the pilot), while his mother and sister witnessed it. This happened during the weekend, and the news were shared with the counseling team on Monday morning right before the first period bell rang. During that moment, the counseling team of Calabasas High School realized they did not have a crisis plan for such event, and had to develop one in thirty minutes. 

The rest of the presentation described common grief responses in teens, the crisis plan they created and implemented, as well as suggestions and insights the school counseling team gained from this experience.

Common Grief Responses in Teens

• Full range of emotions: teens experience emotions just as adults, it is important to not minimize their feelings due to a “lack of experience”. We must validate all emotions experienced due to loss.
• Social dimension: loss can impact academics and extracurricular activities. We must be alert to significant changes in engagement and achievement. In addition, some teens tend to engage in “bullying by loss”, they can be mean to others because they have strong feelings and little to none resources to deal with them.
• Often rises philosophical questions: teens can start questioning the meaning of life and engage in spiritual quests.
• Exaggeration of normal adolescent behavior: higher incidence of risky behaviors such as experimentation with drugs and alcohol are common grief responses in teens.
• Leads to worry of surviving caretakers: teens might be fearful for the parent or adult that is still alive.

The presenters also introduced the term social grief as part of the new movement towards mourning and grieving in social media. They mentioned that utilizing social media pages, such as Facebook that allows turning an active account to a “memorialized” account, has become highly popular and can be a great space for young people seeking support and validation, as it tends to be easier for teens to share and connect through social media. 

The Crisis Plan

Creating and implementing a crisis plan proved to be a multitasking team effort. The counseling team at Calabasas High School had to divide responsibilities by tapping into the strengths of each school counselor, and the following steps to implement their crisis plan were adopted:

1. Connect with the affected family to ask what information the school is allowed to share: Taking this step is vital, as it is really important to only share facts and have the family’s permission to share. This gives the family a sense of control about their story, and it allows the school to offer support to the family and share resources they may need.
2. Contact district and sister schools to request support (as needed): school counselors and other members of the counseling team of various schools in the district were asked to go over to the affected school to provide support in the grief center.
3. Inform teachers of the death: all teachers were called to the multi-purpose room (MPR) and were given the facts (only what was approved by family and administration). The school counseling team offered support for teachers and checked for teachers’ comfort level to share the information and process with students during first period.
4. Create and monitor grief center: the GYM was turned into a grief center with various activities students could participate in such as creating a care tag for self-care or writing to the family in a post-it and adding it to the memorial board later shared with the family. In addition, counselors were ready to offer one on one support to those that wanted to talk about the situation. Finally, students that did not feel like being in a large classroom at the moment could go there to work in their academics independently in a quiet and comforting space.
5. Provide in-classroom support: teachers that did not feel comfortable sharing the news with the students requested a school counselor to join their first period to talk to the students.
6. Principal to send letter to families about the death: this letter included the same facts shared with the teachers and students, in addition to community resources that can be accessed for support as needed.

Suggestions and Upgrades to Creating a Crisis Plan

The counseling team at Calabasas High School provided the following document to guide other school counselors in creating a crisis plan.

Some of the things they would upgrade, do different, or include in their crisis plan are: 

• Keeping data: include a sign-in sheet in the grief center to be able to follow up with those that sought individual support or participated in the grieving activities.
• Provide emotional support for staff: this could include having substitutes or other people to give teachers a break throughout the day if they wanted to access the grief center. Provide teachers with a list of resources they could seek for support after school hours, as well as self-care activities for immediate and long term.
• Creating short document of “how to talk to kids about death”: this could be beneficial for teachers and families, as most people do not know what is appropriate to tell or not tell to kids that are grieving. This document should have specific examples of what to say and what not to say.
• Counseling team follow-up: having space and time to debrief about the situation (both personal and professional) and evaluating crisis plan to make adjustments as needed.
• Crisis plan follow-up: create a crisis plan that is written in policy, and have all materials needed ready and stored. Think about the crisis long-term, what will the counseling team do for the anniversary of the event or the birthday of the student? Some suggestions include having an honor announcement for the family with a minute of silence, having students write comforting letters to the family, or hold a seat for the student during their graduation class.

Overall, I thought this presentation was very informative and grounding. The experience of death in schools is often unexpected, but having a crisis plan to address the situation and support the school community is something all school counselors can do to be prepared. I can foresee myself using the tools and insights shared by the presenters to develop and improve current crisis plans in my fieldwork site and any future schools I have the honor to serve.

Resources

• The Coalition to Support Grieving Students
• Comfort Zone Camp
• The Dougy Center
• The Moyer Foundation
• Our House Grief Support Center

Written by Anahi Amador

                  San Diego State University

                  Graduate Student