Based on presentations by
Dr. Marlene Wong, Los Angeles Unified School District
Dr. Larry Macaluso, Red Lion School District
This article is brought to you by The Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI). Visit their website: www.riskinstitute.org
Note from Symposium Moderator Lauren Eib: Betsy Thompson was originally scheduled to present a paper for this symposium but was unable to participate because of her very busy schedule. We regret not having her insight in the discussion today regarding the recovery process.
However, I have had the pleasure of talking to Dr. Marlene Wong about recovery. Dr. Wong is the Director of Crisis Counseling and Intervention Services for Los Angeles Unified School District and Director of the Trauma Services Adaptation Center for Schools and Communities (Los Angeles, CA). She participated in a panel discussion during the White House Conference on School Safety held in October 2006. I am including a summary of Dr. Wong’s comments at that conference. I have also included some comments from Dr. Larry Macaluso, Superintendent, Red Lion School District (Red Lion, PA), who also participated in the conference. The information that both of these experts presented at the conference is directly related to what we are taking about today - if an event happens in your community, what is the recovery process?
Below is a summary of their comments from that day, with a little editing to adapt the remarks for readability. Full transcripts and video from the panel discussions at the White House Conference on School Safety are available at http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/education/schoolsafety/. Cathy Paine who presented a paper during our symposium discussion yesterday was also a panelist for the White House conference.
SUMMARY OF DR. WONG’S COMMENTS
My work in this area began in 1984 when Los Angeles Unified School District experienced its first incident of the community crime coming on to a school campus. On a February afternoon in 1984, a mentally ill man — as we later learned with many, many weapons — lived across the street from an elementary school in a second floor apartment building. As the students came out of the school that afternoon, he opened fire and held the school under sniper fire for about an hour and a half. In the end, two children were killed and several others and staff were injured.
I suspect that many people who have experienced these tragic events, these school shootings in which there’s injury and death of innocent people are probably sitting in the same place as we were in 1984 which was what do we do, and how does this affect children.
Since that time, we’ve had many other incidents that have occurred, but we also have had the privilege of working with the U.S. Department of Education in responding to terrorist events in Oklahoma City, New York, and Washington, D.C., working with those chancellors and superintendents of schools in their school districts, and also to many school shootings.
The science of child trauma is very, very young. Most of what we’ve learned about traumatic stress and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been from war. Even as far back as the Civil War, soldiers who survived the bloody and deadly hand-tohand combat, simply withdrew or they had terrible relationships with their families. At that time, they called it “soldier’s heart.” And over time, what more we have learned about PTSD came from war as well.
But in 1984, when this incident occurred, there was a great debate in the psychiatric community about whether or not children could really experience the full effects of post-traumatic stress and stress disorder. And, what has been learned is that they can — in fact, in ways that are much more debilitating because they are younger and their main task is to learn. As the symptoms of post-traumatic stress (which after three months, becomes post-traumatic stress disorder) are looked at, we see that children, students — whether they are kindergarten or in high school or in college — don’t want to return to school.
In Oklahoma City, the schools themselves were not directly affected by the bombing, except for one, which was directly across from the Murrah Building. Yet, 35 percent of the children did not return to school, and the perception is that they fear it would occur again. So, the number one concern is the fear of occurrence — that the exact same thing will happen again no matter what it is. After Hurricane Katrina, there was the fear that another devastating hurricane would happen and after school shootings, very specifically, that another school shooting would occur.
Children not only go through the fear of returning, but also a re-experiencing. In fact, the school then becomes a traumatic reminder. A lot of what schools need to do is what they have done in the past. Columbine is a perfect example of changing the way a certain portion of the school looks because when we see something that reminds us of the tragedy of that magnitude, we don’t want to go there.
In addition to that, there were other kinds of reactions, including avoidance. If you ever hear someone come home and say “I don’t want to talk about that,” that tends to be a clue that they have been overwhelmed by an experience, and it can be a traumatic response to a specific event.
The third is hyper-reaction, where sights and sounds and smells can cause us to jump and be startled. When we think about all of those things, what brain research has told us is that it’s another part of the brain that is operating. It isn’t the part of the brain that takes in new information that modulates our emotion; it is a survival part of the brain. So, recovery has become a very, very important part of what needs to happen after some of these tragic events.
Recovery Perceptions and Myths
One on the things we have learned is that educators are very concerned about recovery because they are so committed to education. There is a concern that if they enter this arena, they will never get out of it. In other words, if they open the door to talking about our child’s trauma, that it will never end, and they fear that. And also they don’t have the background for it. There isn’t a class in their preparation period that even speaks to this.
But, as we look at the last 15 years, the culture of education has really changed. We have had almost 600 school shootings. That’s a tremendous number since 1990. And it isn’t that I question that schools are safe — I believe they are and I think every single adult in the school is dedicated to that. But, we have to look at the perception. Many, many educational foundations have asked the students “do you think this could happen in your school?” and the perception is that it could. Not that it will, but it could. And so, how do we then talk about the perception.
I believe this is where the mental health folks become important to the school, the school psychologists, counselors, social workers, community mental health people. They can really provide a service to education and help these children get back into school because what they know is a calm routine. It is important not to close the school if it can be helped. It is important that students be able to be back in school and have people help them cope. It isn’t therapy in schools. It is teaching children and helping children to cope. Crisis counselors ask questions — What is it that you are afraid of? What are you afraid will happen? What will help you stay in school? What would help you in terms of just talking about that experience and processing it?
I think that, with good reason, educators have been fearful of talking about recovery and having crisis counselors come into the school. Early in this whole area, crisis counselors would go in and ask children “well, how do you feel” and “what happened to you” and “draw a picture”. Then we would say thank you very much. And that was wrong. That was just the first part of it.
The second part of it is what will help make things better, what can we do to help? What can you do as a student? What can I do as a parent? What can you do as an educator? And together, what can we do together because that constructive action takes us out of being a victim into being a survivor.
SUMMARY OF DR. MACALUSO’S COMMENTS
We’ve had two violent tragedies within our school district in the last six years, but the most recent is the tragedy in 2003 when one our eighth grade students came into the school with three firearms in his backpack and went into the cafeteria before proceeding to class where a number of the students were before class began, opened fire, shot and killed the junior high school principal and then subsequently shot and killed himself. And this is while hundreds of students witnessed this incident.
We’ve had a remarkable recovery, but I must say the healing process never ends. The Amish school shootings, of course, brought back to our district the sense of reality and the return of some of the trauma that we had gone through. So we are prepared to deal with that all of the time.
I think we’ve had a remarkable recovery because of the many activities, events and strategies that we put in place. I think the first very important piece is to provide for immediate briefing and information to staff and parents. And to get them in there, as hard as it might be, to get them into the schools — at another location perhaps at that point — to provide them with information from the police, from the school superintendent and other people.
The next piece that I think is extremely important is that we must provide extensive support to the staff because they have to be ready to return to normalcy as soon as possible.
Then, of course, you think about the re-entry plan, and how will we get those students back in school. A very effective strategy is to have an open house before you reopen the school, to bring the parents and the students back in while staff members are there ready to receive them and to try to share with them how safe and warm this environment can be. And, of course, taking that a step further, getting them back into the room or the area where the shooting may have taken place. We were able to do that on the night of the open house by providing refreshments in the cafeteria. On the first day of school, when students returned, we had those students go by class in the morning if they were ready to do that, to place their hand print on the wall as a temporary memorial to the slain principal. So, that was very effective in getting students back to those locations.
Working with the Community
It is very important to develop relationships with community groups so that. in the event you need to bring them into the schools, it can be an effective coordinated effort. We had a great response from our mental health community, from our faith-based community, from law enforcement, and the emergency management community. As they came in to provide help, because we had a relationship with them, we were able to coordinate their efforts and to be at the highest level.
FINAL THOUGHT: TRAINING AND SKILLS
During the question and answer session that followed the panel discussion (the comments above were from Panel III), an audience member asked the following question:
Question: “One of the themes in all three of the panels is the need to address some of the mental health needs of students and the impact that has, whether that is in prevention efforts. …We have heard about being prepared, having the staff prepared to deal with these issues, and now we are hearing about the recovery and how important it is for staff to be prepared for that… What should we be asking for our teachers and school administrators and school mental health providers to have as base skills before they enter the workforce? What pre-service training and skills are important?”
Response by Dr. Wong: “I think it’s a great need to have special training now and inclusion of child development … [I]n certain areas, there tend to be more children who have been exposed to community violence, and as a result have some very deleterious health and mental health effects, not because of their own personality, but because of the environmental stresses that they are exposed to. So I think that that’s a very special need that must be met in the urban center.
However, with respect to some prevention activities, I just want to say that some may not be aware of the fact that President Bush convened the President’s new Freedom Commission, and out of those came some really excellent recommendations about enhancing and expanding mental health services in schools. And his Commission head, Dr. Mike Hogan from Ohio, said our children’s mental health system is broken. It isn’t even in place. It’s just broken, and that we need to begin building it to meet some of the needs. We have more children who are depressed. And what we’ve learned about these school shooters is that suicide and homicide were two sides of the same coin. And that they all in some ways express the wish to die.”
In January 2006, PERI held a free online symposium to explore strategies for addressing violence in our nation’s schools. The program, entitled “Confronting Violence in Our Schools: Planning, Response, and Recovery,” offered practical advice for dealing with school violence — not just the high profile incidents that make headlines but the real issues of school violence that schools and communities face everyday.
The Public Entity Risk Institute (PERI) is a nonprofit research organization that provides education and training resources on topics related to risk management and emergency management. PERI’s website, www.riskinstitute.org, offers free E-Training programs and a Publications, Tools, and Resources library with information on emergency planning and response, disaster recovery, school safety, workers’ compensation, and other key topics in risk management. PERI’s also maintains a national database of public sector liability and workers’ compensation claims data for benchmarking and performance measurement. The Data Exchange is a voluntary program that allows participating organizations to compare their liability and workers’ compensation losses with their peers and learn from other jurisdictions.
