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September 28, 2001/Tishri 11, 5762, Vol. 54, No. 3
Educators help young people through tragedy
DEBRA NUSSBAUM COHEN
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 Locally, Jewish day schools helped children begin the healing process after the Sept. 11 attack. The King David School held a memorial service Sept. 14. Pictured, from left, are fifth-grade students Rebecca Andrews, Ariel Fabrega, Karen Urman, Jessica Stern and Rachel Groetsch singing "God Bless America." Photo courtesy of Ellen Lawson |
At the Solomon Schechter High School in Manhattan, students began keeping journals about their feelings. The faculty there heard the students say their parents needed them closer - a way for the children, whose adolescent bravado bars them from saying they need mommy and daddy at a difficult time, to justify the fact that they do, says Dorothy Bowser, the school's administrative coordinator.
And at Ramaz, on the Upper East Side, the focus was on prayer, where the middle- and high-school students gathered to recite psalms, which beseech God with perhaps more emotion than any other prayers in Jewish liturgy. The students also met in small groups with their advisers to talk.
Throughout New York City, in the wake of the terrorist attack, schoolchildren tried to cope in their own ways with the unimaginable. And their teachers - in this tragedy the first people called upon to help children - scrambled to find approaches to inform them and provide some sense of comfort.
Most schools broke the news to their students, in some cases initially telling the youngest only that a terrible accident had happened. As the days wore on, city schools had to help students express their fears and questions.
For students and faculty at one middle school, the Hannah Senesh school, in downtown Brooklyn, the crisis was terrifyingly immediate. They watched the conflagration and collapse from their fourth-floor classroom windows overlooking New York harbor, and debris rained on their building.
That school and both campuses of the Manhattan Solomon Schechter lower schools were evacuated on police order shortly after the attack.
Educators in the city struggled to quickly pull together the necessary resources to aid the children in what they realized would be difficult days and weeks ahead. Several groups rapidly gathered the information.
The New York Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services, which ordinarily provides trauma and grief counseling to schools where students have suffered losses, like the death of a family member or student, created a resource packet disseminated by hand and e-mail to social workers, psychologists, and public and Jewish schools. Its team of mental health clinicians also was quickly dispatched to schools, and six counseling drop-in centers were set up from Queens to Manhattan to Brooklyn.
The Boston-based Internet company Jewish Family and Life gathered its staff the day of the tragedy to see what it could do to help. By the end of the day its newest Web site, www.Jewznewz.com, was up.
The site provides lesson plans for educators, providing strategies for when "real life invades the classroom," for talking to students about terrorism and for helping students write their own prayers.
Also on the site is guidance for parents, information about ways to take action - through prayer, charity, rallies and public statements - discussion boards, news stories and links to groups taking donations, from the Reform movement to the Red Cross.
"We wanted to empower parents and educators to immediately address in a healthy and Jewish way this terrible, terrible thing," said company CEO Yosef Abramowitz.
When the terror struck, Jewish schools in the region called in their consulting mental health professionals to talk with staff, students and parents. But the schools also put their immediate emphases on a range of approaches.
At Hannah Senesh, which runs from kindergarten through eighth grade, the art teacher worked with each class on art therapy. The school also held a parents' meeting in which school parents who work as mental health, education and rabbinic professionals talked about strategies to help the students - and their fellow parents.
In the coming weeks, the school's teachers and administrators "will be watching the children very, very carefully," and possibly bringing in the consulting psychologists again, said principal Joan Warner, who was distributing dust masks to students and teachers Sept. 18.
"We have to look at each individual child and how they're coping with it," said Warner. "It's very trite for educators to say 'let's get back to normal.' I don't think America will ever go back to normal, and I'm not sure what normal is at this point. But what we have to give our children is a sense of stability. That's most important."
The school is also considering inviting in local Arabs to talk to students, so the children are not tempted to direct their fear and anger against all members of that ethnic group. Teachers at the Abraham Joshua Heschel School on Manhattan's Upper West Side found that their main task was to help frightened students separate "fact from fantasy," says the head of the school, Roanna Shorofsky.
At Manhattan's Solomon Schechter High, students added several new prayers to the usual morning worship - prayers for the sick and for the dead. The entire school stood to say Kaddish for those who had died, says Bowser.
For many students prayer turned into action. Even the youngest students in most schools were drawing cards and pictures of thanks to the firemen and police officers. Older students wrote letters of gratitude.
A couple of Schechter High students initiated a plan to gather needed goods and cash donations for the rescuers, which they planned to deliver.
Hannah Senesh middle-schoolers called each parent of a child in the school asking for donations of items and money.
At Ramaz, the 460 upper-school students came to school Sept. 14 with at least two sandwiches in hand. They piled the 1,000 sandwiches, 700 bottles of water and 100 pounds of crew socks into a car and drove it as far south as they could get before police barricades stopped them. A fire truck saw their predicament and took the aid to Ground Zero, says Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the school principal.
At SAR, a day school in Riverdale, the principal spoke to each class individually about the tragedy shortly after the attack. And on Sept. 14 everyone in the school stood at noon and, along with many others across the country, stood silently for one minute.
Debby Schloss's fifth-graders are eager to get back to their usual routine, she said. In Riverdale, "they still feel very far away from it because they haven't seen it in person," she says.
"They're not walking around in a daze. They want to go to recess, they want to go to lunch. It will be a thing they'll never forget, but I don't think it will be an ongoing trauma," Schloss says. "Kids are resilient; much more so than us."
For Shorofsky of the Heschel School, where "the students are clearly shaken by this," she says, the most difficult thing to deal with for educators will be the fact that the work of the terrorists is forcing everyone to confront undeniable evil.
"Evil has always been in the abstract before," says Shorofsky. "Now we have to deal with the balance between evil and hope. Even as we acknowledge the dark reality of evil, we cannot allow our children to grow up cynical or apathetic to the importance of developing courage and moral fiber."