 This broadcast is brought to you in partnership between the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation. Tornadoes, suicides and violence are all events that any community can fall prey to, as can any school. Hello, I'm Ken Stewart, your host for today's program on critical incident stress management in schools. Because schools are integral parts of our communities, they are at risk from all of the natural and human disasters. That issue, however, is the fact that traumatic or disastrous events can impact a school's mission for years after the event, hobbling the learning process and reducing the effectiveness of the resources committed to education. Today, we're going to be looking at a system for addressing effective recovery from disasters in schools. Joining us will be three members of the team at the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, as well as participants at the Emergency Management course for teachers on earthquake preparedness being held at the Emergency Management Institute, and a number of special guests. On this program, we're going to look at an introduction and overview of critical incident stress management. We're going to consider the reasons to intervene after a crisis. We'll look at the system and the obstacles to implementing it, and we'll also address administrative concerns. We're going to start the program with Dr. Jeffrey Mitchell. He is a clinical associate professor of the Emergency Health Services Department at the University of Maryland. He's a senior author of several books, and he is the founder of the International CISM Network. Jeff, thanks for joining us today, and let's start the program. Thank you, Ken. Okay, I've had a number of years of experience as an educator. I started off in an elementary school environment, and then moved on to working in a college environment at the University of Maryland. And I have found over the years that there have been enormously powerful traumatic events that have happened. They've done a lot of damage to people, and in the early days, we basically had very little to nothing to do to support them. And at one point, I developed a crisis counseling program for a Catholic school where I was teaching in the elementary school, and that was the first time ever that that particular school district or school environment had had anything to support the children who were going through that program. So I've had some experience with that, and I want to start off by three different events and give you an idea that we talk about disasters in school settings, but they don't have to be big disasters with a lot of wounded people and a lot of dead people. Some of these disasters are on a much smaller scale, but they're a disaster in their own right because they overwhelm all the resources available to people. When I was teaching a sixth grade elementary school class, one of my fellow teachers was rushing to work one day, and she was running late and as she was coming towards the school, a child cut from between parked cars. She hit this child and killed the child, and I can tell you that that staff person never ever recovered again. Never went back into the classroom, lost a very fine teacher. She had trouble even in her own family taking care of her own children. The guilt response to that was enormous. And that was the first of many incidents that I went through. About a year after that I had a homeroom class, which again was the sixth grade. And one of my children went home from school that afternoon, and when he arrived home he found his mother in a very serious nosebleed. This little boy was a Boy Scout. He called for 911, called for the ambulance, did things like putting an ice pack on her forehead, an ice pack behind her neck, had a lean forward and helped her to keep the blood coming out of her nose while he was waiting for the ambulance. And before the ambulance arrived, she bled to death in his arms. And that was a profound impact on that child. For a period of time it was a profound impact on the classroom. But that child never fully recovered from that loss, suffers to this day. It had a huge impact on him in his education, his learning ability, had an enormous impact on his psychosocial development, and it continues to plague him to this day. The third incident was one that occurred when I became a university professor. At the University of Maryland I teach in emergency health services. And about seven or eight years ago, we had one of the brightest students that I have ever met in my entire career. Straight A student, beloved by fellow students, beloved by faculty, respected by all, always willing to lend a helpful hand, tutoring other people with difficult subject matters, extremely well liked, lots of girlfriends, lots of success in school. If you were to make a list of every possible student in the University of Maryland system, and rank order them from most likely to commit suicide to least likely to commit suicide, he would have been at the bottom of the list. And he had a very embarrassing argument with somebody who was perceived by him to be a very special person. And as a result of that, he ended up committing suicide. He knelt down on the railroad tracks, took a train in the top of his head. And later that year, that was the first day of the semester. Later that year we had a faculty meeting at the end of the semester, sort of a wrap up faculty meeting, get ready for the next school year, find out what we did right and what we did wrong, what to do better. And I was sitting there waiting for the meeting to get started, and I had my roll book with me and I was looking through it, and I kind of made one of those hmm comments. And the faculty member next to me said, what's hmm mean? And I said, both my classes this semester were the lowest averages I've ever had teaching the same course over and over again for 18 years. And he said, that's interesting. And he got up and he went and he got his roll book and came back, opened it up, and his three classes were the lowest averages he had taught in his entire career. And then we compared notes with all the other faculty members and guess what? Every single one of us experienced the same thing. Lowering of grades stayed low throughout the whole semester. So the suicide of that student had a wide reaching effect on the other students in our university, especially in the emergency health services department. These kinds of events are happening on an everyday basis. And we cannot afford to be looking at these things and saying, oh, we have a social worker or we have a school counselor. That's not enough. What we need is a sophisticated team approach where every teacher, where every school nurse, where every administrator in the school, where every person, including the janitor, is part of a team approach to reach out to troubled kids, to reach out to children in pain, and to get to them before catastrophes worsen. They're facing the catastrophes every day. So it's a sophisticated team approach. It doesn't mean every single member of the school needs to be on a critical incident response team. But they all need to be aware that there are troubled kids and there needs to be an outreach program to them. So critical incident stress management in schools is of an extreme importance to us. And the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, which I serve as the president for that foundation, we have made very strong efforts over the last few years to make sure that we get a critical incident stress response program for schools. We now have a specialized course in that. I want to talk about critical incident stress management, but the best thing to do is to start talking about the critical incidents. A critical incident is defined as a turning point event, an awful, traumatic, overwhelming grotesque, frightening, disgusting event. A thing that can happen in any school. It's not only the shootings that you see so much about in the news media now. It's the tornado. It's the bus accident. It's the auto accident. It's the terrible child who does the suicide. And those things are widespread. So a critical incident is a horrible, terrible, awful grotesque, overwhelming, frightening, disgusting event. Some awful occurrence, it's the event itself. Some occurrence that gets underway. The next thing to look at is the stress response that goes along with that. The stress response, the critical incident stress response is a normal and natural response of normal healthy people to terrible, horrible events. It's a normal response. The crisis response is a state of acute arousal. And it has three characteristics to that. One of those is that the event has caused psychological disruption to normal balance. Number two, what we find is that the usual coping mechanisms are not working anymore. And the third thing that's really important is that there's evidence of impairment. Evidence of impairment. What does evidence of impairment mean? It can be mild, like you can't remember things. You have problems on a test, things like that. Or it can be more severe in that you dysfunction, that you freeze up. It can go all the way through the gamut. Sometimes when you try to dial a phone number and you can't remember what the numbers are, and it's your phone number at home that you call all the time, and you're in stress and you can't come up with it, that's what a condition called cortical inhibition happens to all of us. That's part of what happens when you have a significant stress response or a crisis response. Crisis intervention is what we do about those things. Crisis intervention is psychological first aid. It's getting in to kind of stabilize the situation. It's also designed to lessen the impact of the event. The next thing it's designed to do is it's designed to help people mobilize whatever available resources they may need to carry out, to handle the situation, carry out their mission if you would. And then we're trying to normalize the experience so people don't feel it's crazy that they understand it's a normal response and normal people to an abnormal event. And finally what we're trying to do is get people back to adaptive function. If you were in a school, back to class, back to going to your sports events, back to doing normal life things. Now, crisis intervention is not psychotherapy, nor is it a substitute for psychotherapy. If someone needs psychotherapy and you give them crisis intervention and you finish, you may have done a great job but you still need to refer them for psychotherapy. So it's important to recognize that that's not something that is going to substitute for any mental health professional you already have in your system. We will not be eliminating social workers and psychologists and school counselors. They're still going to have an important role to play and they need to be incorporated into the critical instance stress management program into the team. Those things are important to have there. Crisis intervention is short term action during periods of intense distress. Short term action in terms of really intense distress. You're looking for things to get in, do the job and move on. There are two major features to it. It's action oriented and it's temporary. You got to get in and do the job and you can't stay there forever, you got to get the job finished. So that's what crisis intervention is all about. Again, it's emotional first aid. Critical instance stress management is a subcategory of the field of crisis intervention. Crisis intervention is a really big field. You can have crisis hotlines. You can have programs for people who have trouble with drinking behavior. You can have programs for people who have suicidal ideation. You can have programs for children who are subjected to violence in the home. You can have crisis programs that deal with family issues. So it's a very broad field of crisis intervention. There's a smaller field, critical instance stress management, which is what do you do for a specific organization or group when they have been exposed to some tragedy. That's critical instance stress management. Critical instance stress management is a comprehensive, systematic and multi component approach to dealing with traumatic stress. Comprehensive in that there are things that you do before an event ever hits. There are things that you're going to do while events going on. And there are things you do after the event is over. So comprehensive, it goes the whole spectrum of crisis care. In addition to looking at before during an anthem, let me give you examples of before. Before you have a crisis, develop some policy. If your policy is to do nothing, you're in trouble. Okay? And we find wherever there are school systems or organizations that have not put some energy into policy development, when it hits, they don't know what to do with it. There is no format for them to work with. So policy is important. Planning is important. That's very, very important stuff to get the plan set. What do we do if? If this occurs in our school, do we have a plan for it? And review the plans that are already there because sometimes you've already done some work. Okay? So it doesn't mean like you're starting with zero in all cases. A lot of times that the planning is already there. So make a good plan. Educate the entire system to needs and issues and what needs to be done so that everybody knows what their roles are in a crisis. And provide specific training to crisis response teams. I would also say another thing that should happen before the crisis occurs is there ought to be a program of linkage to the community beyond the school walls. So if there is an existing crisis intervention program or team in your area that you link to them, that you link to police agency, that you link to fire agency, that you link to emergency management. You don't want to be alone in the midst of one of the big ones. And I'll tell you, schools focus on education. And now they're having to focus on security issues and having to focus on emergency management. And that's stuff that they're not familiar with. So why do you want to try to do that yourself? Let's link to what's out there beyond the walls of the school. Okay? Now when you're dealing with stuff during, there's crisis management services. And it's a broad spectrum of services that can be brought to the school to assist administration in making decisions, to assist specifically traumatized people in recovery and management of the situation as it's going on. So support services, advisement, consultation, there's a wide range of stuff. Dr. Johnson will go into some of that a little bit further. And then after a situation hits, there needs to be interventions for individuals. And I can tell you from experience that individuals is the greatest number of interventions we do, is one-on-one. You also have to have interventions for groups. And there's a number of different interventions for groups as well. And you have to provide services for families. And schools say, well, our job is to deal with the children. That's fine. But you know what? That child's going home to a disrupted family. And if you're not providing services beyond the walls of the school, again, if you can't think outside the box, you're going to have trouble. So you've got to think outside the box. And we have to have programs to help the organization, to help the system itself recover from the turmoil produced during a crisis event. So before, during, and after. And to summarize that, we need to have issues of planning straightened out in advance, training in education in advance, and then when an event's going on, advisement and consultation while it's happening, support services while it's happening, and then aftercare once the situation ends. And make sure you're not stuck thinking just within the box. And I hope that these remarks get you to think about what you're doing in your school, how your school is functioning with this stuff. Because we don't need to be in the situation anymore where we're helpless and don't have a plan and we don't have a mechanism. Systems have been evolving for over 25 years now to specifically intervene in these things. We have a vast array of experience in fire rescue police services. We have a vast array of experience in the military experience. And we have a vast array of experiences in industrial commercial areas. And school systems are coming on board better now than they have been before. But there's much to learn, as much as many miles to go before we sleep on this one. We really have a lot of work to do. So this program is a good starting point for where we need to be in developing, planning and working out education for this. And so at this point I'm going to say one other thing. You do need to have referral mechanisms because crisis intervention is helpful as emotional first aid. But you will in fact identify certain individuals, staff members or students within your school system who will need more than what the crisis intervention can actually do for them. So the last linkage is to make sure that you are linked to where do you refer them to now. And if the school has the responsibility for that but they don't have the staff to do that, they don't have the appropriately trained and credentialed staff, then you need to look outside. You've got to have some system, a referral to the next level of care beyond what crisis intervention can do. So at this point I'm going to ask my colleague Dr. Kenneth Johnson to step forward. And Ken Johnson has written a wonderful book called Tram in the Lives of Children. He's also written another book entitled School Crisis Management. And Ken Johnson has not only been a classroom teacher and remains a classroom teacher, he's also a therapist and a specialist in the field of crisis intervention and stress management. So back to Ken Johnson. Thank you, Jeff. Good morning. There's a few things I'd like to talk to you about, not just from the perspective of a therapist, but also from the perspective of a classroom teacher, which is my first love and where I belong and where I like to be. There was an incident which occurred at my school which prompted me to begin the more systematic study of how to manage crisis in the classroom. Years and years ago, before most of you were born, the spacecraft challenger blew up carrying with it a teacher. And in my school, most of the classrooms were watching this event. This is a high school setting. It wasn't little kids. But we were watching this with great interest because this was educators' big step into this natural arena. And when it blew up, we were stunned. Students were stunned. Faculty members were stunned. And I began walking around to some of the other classrooms to see what was going on. And in the aftermath of this event, for hours afterwards, the televisions were left on. And people kept watching this thing explode over and over and over again. And I thought to myself, you know, the reason this is happening is because some very simple lessons haven't been taught to the very people who can stabilize the school the most in the event of a crisis. The teachers. And so I started thinking about what teachers could do. And I worked at that level for a while and then started ratcheting it up. What could administrators do? Ratcheting it up farther. What can policymakers do? And then lately I've been looking at what Jeff was alluding to, this vast array of crisis response helpers in the community who interestingly enough don't get asked onto campus after a crisis. And I think, gosh, how silly. As a former firefighter, I've worked with teams like this. I know that they're very skilled, have a lot of understanding. And I know that it doesn't take much to shift gears for them to see the unique setting of a school with its different culture, different set of priorities. And realize, you know, there's things that we do in the community that can be done here given the developmental adaptions necessary and given the contextual differences of the school as opposed to the public safety environment. So lately I've been focusing on that. How do we build the bridge between what schools can do and what community crisis people can do? And there's a lot of sub-questions that come up like, why don't we allow, quote, outsiders onto our campuses. And partly is the outsiders don't have much appreciation for some of the subtleties of the politics involved and the lines of authority and that sort of thing. And so we're working at devising a way to make that transition possible. Okay. I'd like to speak to the educators in the crowd first and address the area which is keeping us from moving forward. And that's why should we respond in the first place. If a crisis comes, why should we not simply keep doing what we always do? And in fact, there's good reasons why we should keep doing what we always do. Stability is very, very important in children's lives and routine is the source of stability. If we ignore that and fly into a panic mode ourselves about dealing with it, then we simply add to our children's distress. It's a little bit like a little child who goes through a family emergency and looks to the parents for the guidance on how to feel. Having not been through that before, it's the adults that give the cues. In the school, it's a similar situation. Students look towards the leadership to provide the cues of the meaning of the event. So in part we want to maintain routine. But on the other hand, if we strictly maintain routine and do the same thing over and over again, we're going to miss some needs. And those needs have to do with two areas. One is the learning needs of students after crisis and the second area is the organizational needs of schools after crisis. Let's start with the learning needs of individuals. This becomes a kind of a complex discussion very quickly. And on the chart that's going to come up, I want to show you something of the response to crisis that occurs so we can start getting a handle of how this is going to affect learning. We have an incident, an unusual event which is overwhelming. Typically, we as adults and as children have an initial reaction to that. The initial reaction is expected and it might involve strong emotions and it might involve alterations in our behavior. Most of the time, we naturally recover from that, that those symptoms are basically transitory. Sometimes, however, they lead to a whole set of secondary reactions. Those secondary reactions are what we're going to look at next. However, know this, that those secondary reactions don't exist in a vacuum. We, as individuals, having a secondary reaction end up creating a negative impact on our environment. If, for example, we as adults decide that we can't stand the strong feelings that are associated with what we've been going through, we begin drinking to self-medicate, what effect is that going to have on our workplace and our jobs and the feedback we get from our supervisors and peers, that itself will become an additional stressor and it will reinforce those secondary reactions. So I want to focus on what these secondary reactions are. Now we move into the business about the neurological and biological change that occurs in the brain following crisis. And our next slide will see how this works. At the time of an incident, we can overreact or underreact. Now this is a very interesting thing because in this whole business about school crisis management, remember back with a challenger, if we go around and tell the teachers to turn the stupid televisions off, suddenly we settle the place to a great extent. A simple understanding can lead to simple actions that can create a tremendous stabilization in the school population. Knowing a little bit can go a long ways. Here's a tool you can give teachers and by giving them this information you can turn that teaching staff into a powerful monitoring system that can identify students who as individuals are having distress and then refer them to help. Typically we have an underreactive reaction or an overreaction if we're having an extreme reaction to crisis and extreme reaction we call an acute stress reaction. On a clinical level it's called acute stress disorder. Now we've learned to recognize agitated appearance, extreme emotions and hyperactive behavior. We know that. These are our kids who are just falling apart. Now I ask this at a known number of your teachers. If something big has hit the school and your classroom, what students are you most concerned about? The screamers, the kids that are really disruptive, correct? Because what's your responsibility? Your responsibility is to guide those 30-some kids through this experience with minimum disruption. The five or six who are being very agitated are easily identifiable. You don't need to tell a teacher to watch for those folks and refer them. You don't need that at all. However, there's a whole second kind of reactions in which the appearance is shocked. The feelings and emotions are blunted and the behavior tends towards a depressed behavior moving to immobility. Now I ask you as a classroom teacher in charge of the well-being of your students, do you normally seek out kids who are behaving too well? Of course not. You don't want those kids to move. They're doing fine. But suppose somebody came to you before you went in that class and said, listen, look for this particular group because they are more profoundly at risk for a subsequent post-traumatic stress disorder than the first group. What's the teacher going to say? Oh, what do I look for? You look for those things. What do I do? You send those people over there. A simple, simple set of tools which result in tremendous and profound monitoring and response capabilities and that people who know the kids the best are teaching staff. That's at the acute stage. Later on, when we get into the secondary reactions, we see the next group. Some specific things happen in the brain both on a chemical level and a structural level. Very briefly, we have during crisis which ends up causing, the imbalance of these chemicals causes the acute stress response you just saw. We see a flooding of a set of chemicals, chemicals which are natural exciters, chemicals which are moderators and chemicals which provide an anesthesia and an emotional buffer from the situation. These chemicals allow us to cope and to survive and adapt to the changing circumstance. They energize our system. They keep that energizing from getting out of control, manifesting in panic or hysteria. They keep it focused and then they keep us from feeling the physical pain or the emotional pain that we're going through and they allow us to focus our attention to survive. That chemical wash happens at the time of the crisis. However, one secondary reaction is a repeat of that chemical washing during subsequent psychological processing of what's going on. You have a child who's sitting in a classroom. You have a reading lesson. We're trying to focus. Somebody drops a book on the floor. Now, teachers, have you ever had extraneous noise in your classroom? Oh, heavens. What happens when that noise hits? That noise hits. The startle reaction. The startle reaction can kick off this flooding all over again. There goes concentration. It even gets worse. This plays out on a structural level so that we have that part of the brain, the amygdala, which screens incoming sensory information and lets us know if we have a problem or not. That part can often become enlarged, physically enlarged and over functioning. It sees crisis where there isn't any. That's when that part goes fire and hits the red button and our system goes up for 20 minutes, an hour, two hours, perhaps the rest of the day. Another part, the hippocampus structure, is involved in taking that information that's come and then screened for threat. Then it partials out that for short-term storage and then later reprocessing cognitively. That part of the brain often becomes dysfunctional because of the wash of the cortisol. Okay, do you see where we're going in terms of school learning? We've got a major problem on the horizon. In the final area, the Broca's area is involved in taking private speech and putting it into public discourse, languageizing. Well, what happens if we can't retrieve memories because of a dysfunction here? What if we can't access and retrieve our memories? What if we can't articulate experience? What's that going to do in the classroom? How is that going to affect the child's learning? What are we concerned about in this particular moment in history educationally? We're concerned with raising test scores, right? Now, a lot of what we do about crisis intervention is about helping kids emotionally cope, but I'd like to point out a whole different direction. If our concern is to make significant progress academically in areas of reading, math, writing, and we have significant difficulties going on, what's that going to do to that educational program and what's going to happen to those test scores? Is this not a general problem that goes beyond individual feelings? This is an educational problem that has to do with schooling. Okay, there's several effects, main clusters of effects. It gets more complicated than this, but in general, the over arousal caused by a wash of an exciter chemical because of perceived threat when there may not be any threat there and the kid may be having flashbacks or may be preoccupied with memories about the incident. That wash of exciter chemicals ends up trashing focus and concentration. The part of the chemical wash involved with the endogenous opioids, the part that helps us not feel pain, that part numbs us and pulls the child away from the learning task. When the child is hit by that set of chemicals, then we have difficulty with short-term memory, either coding it and storing it correctly or retrieving it for higher processing. If that's happening, we're not making the connections on a cognitive level that we need to be making in order to retain material and process it correctly and turn it into educational product. The memory retrieval problems frustrate retention. We cannot retain material if our central processing unit is dysfunctioning. And this is very, very ironic that in the service of trying to keep our schools going and the learning process going in the face of disaster, that we would turn around and ignore the thing that's basically frustrating, the very process we're trying to keep going and that's learning. And then there's a social dimension too. Some of the post-crisis responses are regressive or reenacting trauma or avoiding the school. And what we do as school people, as clinicians we look and we say, ah, post-traumatic stress difficulty, as a school person we say, ah, conduct disorder. Ah, this person has an attitude problem. Ah, they don't want to come to school. And we begin to think, okay, what are we going to do now? We have a personality problem. It's not a personality problem in many, many, many cases. We end up labeling it. We as teachers and the peers end up labeling folks in this way. Ah, this is all on the individual level. We move beyond the individual level to its effect on the larger system. The school dynamics themselves are affected. The administrator is responsible to keep the unit together as a unit to try and build consistency and cohesiveness with that educational unit. How about if attachment relationships, affiliative relationships where we decide that we are part of a particular school, how about if the values and goals and beliefs are affected? That's another way that schools are affected as a school system, not just as individuals. Both the content and the process can be affected in different ways. We can have arguments contractual, not in the labor sense, but in the sense of just ordinary understandings between people. Those ordinary understandings can be obscured. People can become rigidified in their roles and lack of flexibility necessary for functioning on a school level where adaptability is the name of the game. We have an increase in resistance to change following crisis and a tendency of groups to polarize and stand apart from each other. And I don't have to describe what that can do in the contemporary classroom. Those are all system level effects of crisis. Here's the way this plays out. After the crisis, the school as an organization tends to go through an immediate decline of its ability to work together as a team. Later on in the process of recovery, we go back and forth along these various dimensions in that recovery process. Finally, it settles out. The school usually ends up either at a higher or a lower level of cohesiveness and ability to work as a team as a result of this. What we can do in school crisis management is front load that process by early intervention tending to get the school to end up this process at a level of greater rather than less, cohesiveness and organization. That's the why we fight. Later on, we'll talk about how. Thank you. Barb Erdle has worked for years as a school counselor, is involved with team leadership in Pennsylvania on crisis teams and is going to address issues related to her work. Thank you, Ken. Good morning. My job is to kind of talk to you about if we know all of this information about the effects of trauma and the effects of crisis on individuals and on organizations, then why is it that we as educators and we as school systems are so reluctant to embrace a comprehensive system of response? And there are many reasons for that. But I want to focus on, again, what was said previously in terms of what is the mission of the school? Crisis violates the basic mission of education. That is helping our students to gain basic skills, to learn problem solving, to learn and grow in both a social and emotional and an academic means. So crisis interrupts that. The method or the system of crisis intervention that Dr. Mitchell referred to, critical incident stress management, addresses each of those. And so it's important that we really take a close look at what it is that we need to do after a crisis hits our schools. And I want to emphasize that it's when a crisis hits our school, not if. It's a matter of time. It's happening all over. And as Dr. Mitchell said earlier, a crisis doesn't have to be something that everyone in the nation sees on TV. It could be that favored teacher that dies in a car accident. It could be that prom accident where someone winds up paralyzed or it could be that basketball incident where one of our students winds up in a neck brace for a very long time. Okay? We experience those kinds of incidents on a regular basis. So again, it's when our school experiences an incident, not if. But getting back to obstacles as to why we as districts are somewhat reluctant to embrace this idea of crisis intervention upfront. I want to refer to the first slide. First of all, every school in every school district has a history of how they've taken care of incidents in the past. As long as there have been schools and as long as there have been teachers, there have been people getting hurt one way or the other. And so why is this an issue right now? Why are you folks and folks like me that work in school districts being encouraged to do something different? But let me tell you why that is. Over the past 50 years, there's been a great deal of research. There's been a great deal of looking at what is effective. And effectiveness is something that's real important to us as educators. Something that's been proven, not some theory. And so right now, we're looking at things that are effective in terms of turning those kinds of symptoms that Dr. Johnson talked about around making education work in spite of the kinds of incidents that are going on. And so we need to be aware of the research. We need to be aware of new technologies as they apply to our environment. Critical incident stress management is something that's been around for several years. As Dr. Mitchell says, it's something that evolved out of emergency services. It was proven effective there and we've seen that. We know that it works. And so it's something that we need to be looking at in terms of our schools. But schools are inherently different than emergency services. And so when we look at what kind of things work, we need to be aware of those things that are specifically unique to schools. Like, does this method or does this system of intervention have developmental considerations that go along with it? Surely we're going to handle a preschooler or a kindergarten person much different than we're going to deal with a police officer. So does the system, when you look at systems, does your system of intervention take into consideration things like where kids are at? Okay. So new things, new components of looking at crisis intervention need to be incorporated into decisions on how do you intervene with your kids. That's why you need to be looking at changing. That's why the old methods aren't working necessarily as effectively as they did before. We have new information. That's key. Okay. Pride. We spend lots and lots and lots of man hours building a loyalty, building a pride to our school building and to our district. You know, in my area right now, we have a major district that's looking at having uniforms for all of their schools. And one of the issues in that is building that idea of cohesiveness, of group loyalty. It's one of the issues. We spend time, we spend energy, we make conscious decisions about making school a special place. What happens in a crisis? In a crisis, all of that equilibrium, all of that's kind of thrown up in the air. And now we're in a situation of how are we going to maintain what was good before? Well, sometimes it's a matter of bringing in outside folks because that's the right thing to do. Okay. But also, it's a matter of making sure that the people in our schools, even in the case of a crisis, have the information that they need in order to make good decisions. And so when we talk about crisis intervention in our schools, we talk about these overwhelming disasters. It's important that we do things like pre-incident planning or pre-incident training with our staff that says, hey, you know, a normal reaction to something that's pretty traumatic might be this, this, and this. And so if you see it in your students, this is what you do. Okay. So it's real important that we begin bringing people in to reinforce that sense of pride, that we're no longer strangers, that these folks out here are now the enemy because they don't know who we are. We need to bring folks in from the beginning. Another reason is the perceived need to protect the public. Now, a lot of times schools are pretty territorial. Okay. What goes on inside our doors is what goes on inside there and you keep it quiet. And there are good reasons for that sometimes in terms of, you know, if we have a problem that's endemic to our building, sometimes it does become very frightening if the public knows it. But sometimes, again, it's the public, people out there that may have information that can help resolve something in our schools. So this is kind of an old way of thinking that we need to protect people out there. What I'm suggesting to you is that we don't protect people, we partner with them. That information is a powerful tool for both the people on the inside of the school and the people on the outside. And that two heads are better than one when trying to resolve issues and problems. The same is true in crises. Now, I do want to qualify that in saying that two heads are better than one if you're on the same page. Okay? We do know incidents where people have other agendas that suddenly, you know, there's a forum for it. And so when you're looking at outside resources, you look at people that have the same kind of training, the same perspective in crisis response as you do. Okay? So an old obstacle can be a nice opportunity for partnering with the community. We're also afraid of something called the contagion effect. Now, in many, many years of working within the schools, one of the most frightening things to me as a school social worker is a school, is a student suicide. It just, it challenges every belief that I have as an individual. Kids aren't supposed to die and, you know, for goodness sakes, they're not supposed to want to die at their own hands. And yet as a mental health professional, one of the things that I hear all the time is don't talk about that. You know, if you talk about suicide, you give people ideas. And this is true in other kinds of crisis, but suicide is probably the most blatant one. But if you talk about suicide, you're afraid other people are going to commit suicide. That's a fallacy. We're educators. One of our missions is to help students to get beyond those bumps in the road. If you don't talk about the bumps in the road, they never learn how to get beyond that. The same is true about the reactions to crises, normal reactions to abnormal events. Okay? We need to teach that. We need to teach that to our students. We need to teach that to our family members. We need to teach that to our staff. Talking about things do not make them happen. Prevention is a very big part of crisis intervention in terms of making sure that further ripples, further bumps in the road don't occur. So we need to talk about things like that. Fear of losing control. Many, many incidents that I respond to, one of the things that comes up is that, you know, we don't plan for this. We spend many, many hours in terms of, you know, how to present certain material. But a crisis happens and we're out of our element. And one of the biggest fears that I have administrators saying to me is, you know, when all, when the sand is shifting, kids can take advantage of situations. And that's a reality some kids do. But you know what? We as adults need to have the confidence and need to have in place systems that put the balance back in place. Make sure that there's, there's blocking to that foundation of shifting sand. We need to make sure that we have people and places to go when kids and staff need help. We need to have that pre-designed so that when everything is out of whack, we can begin to kind of close the gap here. We can put some structure back into an environment that may be chaotic. We need to do that and we need to be conscious of that from the beginning. Okay? So some of these things that have been cited as obstacles, we can use to our benefit in putting systems in places in our schools. There are other issues that come up in terms of obstacles to why you would embrace a systematic method of dealing with a crisis. And one of these is that there isn't a whole lot of knowledge or, yes, there's not a whole lot of knowledge for an educator or on part of most educators whereby you know clinical pictures, you know what the long-term effects of something might be. That's the job of somebody else. That's the job of your psychologist or of your counselor or of your social worker. If you wanted to be aware of that, if that was going to be your focus, you would have done something different. And so educators by and large don't have a good understanding that something that happens today may in fact have a very long-term impact on a person, not on just the student. As you heard with Dr. Mitchell's stories, some of the events that happened with a child in sixth grade is still impacting them as adults. Again, we need to become more aware of that. Am I suggesting that every teacher needs to be trained as a psychologist? No. Do you need to be familiar? Do you need to have a foundation as to why you do certain things? Yes. Another thing is sometimes a crisis that occurs in our school is really a reflection of something larger in our community. In one of my local school districts, we had a young man that died as a result of an alcohol overdose. And the way we treated the response, the school response to that was very much influenced by what the perception was of what was going on in the community, okay? So do we in fact ignore what goes on in our community because of something or in spite of something that goes on in our school? No. Again, the idea of partnering with our community folks comes in very, very strongly in dealing with some of these interventions, okay? And finally, there's a lot of confusion about what is appropriate in schools. How far do we as school people need to go in terms of our responses? Are we responsible for outreach to family members? I mean, is that within the scope of our mission? And there are other things. There are things like, okay, I make a decision to look at crisis response, creating the plan, creating an effective response. Where do I go and how do I learn all about that? If I just go to my community team, if there is a team, what they're trained to do, is that sufficient for what's appropriate in my school? Sometimes it isn't, sometimes it isn't. One of the things that we as educators need to be aware of is that there are standards of practice in terms of how you do crisis intervention with kids. There are standards that say these are appropriate methods. These are tried and true things to do that will mitigate the effects of a trauma or a crisis on kids. Critical Incident Stress Management is one of those. It's a national standard. You can go here in Pennsylvania or Maryland or anywhere across the country. And you will know that the people that trained you in Pennsylvania are training you in the same method in California. That's important. It's important in terms of liability. It's important in terms of knowing effectiveness has been researched. It's important in terms of selling it to your administrators and to your community when they're asking, hey, I want these test scores to be up but you're spending all this time outside of the classroom. Okay? As Dr. Johnson pointed out, you can't be talking about raising test scores and enhancing performance. You can't have all of these other things that are interfering with learning. And so, by being aware of the information like, this is why those test scores or these are why that semesters full of grades were suppressed because we didn't do something. May, in fact, help you in the next incident. That's the goal. To do things better because of the information you gained today than you did in the past. That's learning. That's what we're all about as educators. And so we need to move in that direction in terms of taking care of our kids, in terms of taking care of our staff, in terms of taking care of our system. We're in the business of educating. Let us be the best learners in terms of crisis intervention today. Obviously, much of the information really needs to be looked at in more depth than we're able to cover on our program. And so we do have a reference for you where you can get this information and if you'll call the International Critical Incident Stress Foundation, they're at 10176 Baltimore National Pike, Unit 201 in Ellicott City, Maryland. Their zip is 21042 and the phone number is 410-750-9600. They'll be able to provide you with information on training and resources that will give you a great deal more information about our topic today. But we need to keep going on and Ken, I think it's probably time to start talking about some strategies, don't you think? Absolutely. Okay, let's do it. I'd like to point out that the biggest fear schools have is that they're going to lose control in a crisis situation. So their temptation is to hold to what they know. And I'd like to point out that the goals of school crisis management assist that process rather than fight that process. The administration is in charge of the crisis at any time up until an outside authority has higher jurisdiction. Until then the administrator is always in control whether or not a crisis response team is involved in that crisis. School crisis management is a function of the school administration. There's a temptation to see crisis response teams as sort of a psychological SWAT team. Which is called in and you turn over some functioning of your school to an outside team who doesn't know you, doesn't know how you operate, what your priorities are, what the realities are, where you want to go, what kind of profile you want to keep. And they take it, do their thing, and then decamp. But that's not true. Crisis response teams function in the service of school crisis management goals and objectives which are a function of the school administration. There's various kinds of goals and objectives. They settle into about three main piles. In our first slide we see the first set of goals and objectives of what schools can do. The first overarching concern in a school crisis is to stabilize the crisis. That's an administrative concern. It's also a concern of all of the stakeholders in the school system. Parents are concerned with stabilization of the campus. The students are concerned with the stabilization of the campus. Teachers are concerned with that. This is nothing that is, runs counter to our normal mission in a school. Several ways that we can accomplish this. First of all, we can ascertain what security needs are necessary. Security is job one. That is our fundamental mission is to protect our children. It's sort of like the medical Hippocrates oath of do no harm. Our job is to do no harm and to allow no harm to happen to our students. Providing security means liaison with police or other public safety organizations and the wise administrator welcomes that opportunity. The question is what does the crisis response team have to do with this? Well only one thing to start with first of all the crisis response team can help an administrator think during crisis. Administrators are an enormously vulnerable condition. They are in a state of being vulnerable to political pressure on them, organizational pressure on them, coming from below, coming from above, coming sideways, every which way it doesn't matter what happens on the campus they are likely to be blamed for it be it a lightning strike or a wind storm. And it helps them to deal with the thought process and the possible options that they can take. Now a crisis response team leader can sit with the principal and raise some questions not provide answers but raise the questions that is necessary for the principal to think through but the objective is to provide security of whatever that takes. A second is to reestablish routine as I mentioned before at least the second most important source of security in a child's life the younger the child the more that security is necessary. If the home can't provide the security then the school becomes the most important source of security in the child's life. Routine is the foundation of security. Too much routine violates creativity however routine during crisis becomes doubly important and so reestablishing the school routine in the aftermath of crisis is a good thing and not in any way contradictory to the psychological needs of the child but rather supports it. Again how that is done just when classes are reconvened the details of this are the administrators responsibility a crisis response team consultant can help predict what the effects of the crisis might be on students what sources of threats to routine there might be the extent to which the students need more routine rather than less given a particular crisis they can provide information like that information control is critical to stability on campus the absolute most dangerous thing short of the chaos itself is our response to the chaos and the rumor mill following a crisis is a wildfire and whatever we can do to manage that that rumor fire the more stability we bring to the campus so we need first of all an official narrative of the event a comprehensive statement from the administration of the school as to what happened and for that to be a meaningful narrative it has to be two things it has to be current and it has to be accurate to the extent it's not then it becomes simply a symptom of an administration that is out of touch and would be perceived that way crisis response team the size up necessary to go into the official narrative to look to assist in developing it as a comprehensive narrative the official narrative then can be used in a number of ways one way it can be used is to get out notes home messages home or messages to the media that gives a understanding not only of what occurred the effects of it but also what the school is doing about it is being taken what ways parents and other adults can support students during this particular time what they can expect from the school in terms of change routines resources that are available for parents news can be a powerful tool for dispersing that information handouts can go home parent meetings can provide that information also but the control of information under the control of information requires intelligence it requires understanding what the rumors are how they're mistaken what kind of evidence has fed those rumors and what kind of clarification is necessary to counter those rumors and finally monitoring and supporting the staff is absolutely critical I won't go into that very much now because Barb is going to talk about that more in depth later suffice it to say that while we need good leadership during crisis the primary people responsible for stabilizing the environment are the teachers and the support staff they're the ones whose rubber hits the road they're the ones who interact with the students they're the ones who can meet back sources of dysfunction going on both individually and group what the needs are of the community they can give that information to people who are in the position to make the strategic decisions of what to do about it they're also the ones that convey the sense of stability to the students again to the example I mentioned before children and families look to the parents to help them whether they should be scared or not, angry or not whether they should take action parents give that information to the students not so much through what they say but through what they do teachers provide the same role so it supports staff through what they do the demeanor that they project the words that they use the directions that they give they convey to the child the meaning of the event they then have to be supported if we don't support our staff people then all of our strategizing at the leadership level is for not so in terms of stabilizing the campus security, routine control of information and the support of that student staff are all critical the second cluster of goals following crisis have to do with assisting students themselves at the moment of the crisis in a timely manner the way we do this varies widely given the situation that's presented with the students we may have a wide number of students that are affected in very deep and profound ways or we might have just been affected deeply in the period of time from 1992 to 1994 the Los Angeles area my hometown was wrecked by a number of very big scale incidents and they range from civil disorder in 92 through large scale firestorms and subsequent flooding in 93 to finally the earthquake that's now legendary in 1994 through this period of time we saw a swath of destruction going through highly populated areas of Los Angeles and the response by the Federal Emergency Management Agency included outreach to the schools and so a lot of folks were involved creating school outreach programs some of which was direct assistance to students and what we found was that a wide variety of approaches in dealing with students helped us do a lot of outreach with a limited number of personnel I mentioned before that identifying students at risk referring them correctly to support services and following up with them in the classroom and through follow up services including referral outside when necessary was a very critical and important part of assisting students directly and again the teaching and the support staff can be so useful in doing this we could bring Sigmund Freud himself in sit him down instead in front of a child and say what do you think hurt or not psychologically and Sigmund would say one thing well the reality may be something else Dr. Freud would not have the background baseline behavior of the child to go on and some of the students I teach if they paid attention in class and smiled and took notes I would be very concerned because it would represent such and have normal response on their part that I would refer them to a psychologist having a background behavior helps teachers are in the position of responses that they've seen day after day after day after week after week after month and they can see the differences in our students crisis and grief counseling can take a number of different forms ranging from casual conversation on the individual level to a more structured crisis intervention at the individual level to more group interventions group conversations in class that are unstructured through a specific technique of group intervention in the immediate aftermath of a crisis called a diffusing to more structured debriefings which can be adapted developmentally to fit the range of age of the child from very very young to high school age also the crisis and grief counseling we have to remember is not just limited to the kids we need to work at developing supportive classrooms and supportive campuses and this is often an enormous challenge there's limits to what we can do in terms of group interventions depending on how our students interact with one another a highly antigenistic class is not a good place to do a structured group intervention regarding a classroom but more than just in an interactive way day after day if people don't get the support they need the psychological support they need from their classes from their campuses they're without the support that they need to adapt to to whatever the circumstance is after crisis is a good time to instigate pulling other kind of kind of activities to raise that level of cohesiveness up at all levels we have assisting students is outreaching beyond the school into their homes and this can be done through the delivery of information it can be done through bringing the parents in it can be done through organized presentations it can be done through informal contacts but the point is it can be orchestrated and to orchestrate that brings the family into the healing circle and provides assistance and stability to families that need that assistance but also draws upon that stability of the families to the kids themselves in the classroom and to the whole classroom itself the final way is follow through we have to realize that the crisis does not end when the hose is put up on the truck and the truck drives away or the body is put into an ambulance and the ambulance drives away that's not the end of the crisis the crisis can last for years it's called a recovery period and the major work where we can address those areas of individual and group dysfunction that follow from crisis that affect learning and that affect the functioning of our schools the major work that we do there has to do with that recovery period this is a long process and takes orchestration through time and through learning of staff and students ongoing support in various forms that that can take and finally referrals out to services as we see they're necessary these are the goals and objectives of school crisis management they're not the tactics of a crisis team the crisis team functions in support of the school crisis management direction that is provided by the administration incidents are going to occur in schools and those incidents are going to have an impact on that school on the way it functions and on the learning environment and atmosphere but there is a way that we can take control back that we can return to the mission of the school and that way is critical incident stress management we can take the resources of the community we can address the needs of the administration and we can return to that environment where children can learn we can't do that just off the top of our head we can't just do it after the incident we have to plan in advance and we need resources for that and we need partnerships and in fact our program today is a partnership it's a partnership with the international critical incident stress foundation it's a partnership with FEMA and ENET and with our guests who are here in the studio that's the kind of cooperation you need to have if you're going to prepare to recover from an incident we hope today that you've been inspired and inspired to look at bringing your school back online after an incident we hope you've enjoyed the show and that you've taken away some information that you can use and now on behalf of the ENET staff our guests in the studio and all of the folks that have been working on the program thanks for watching we'll see you again