This has been a sad week. We lost a beloved teacher to a year long battle to cancer. Her 3 children each attend one of the 3 buildings in our district. Thankfully we have a Crisis Team. If your school does not have one, encourage your administrators to put one together. . .before a crisis hits.
How do you deal with loss? Well, you cry a little, wrap your arms around the kids, and pull together as a team, a school, a community, and as a really, really big extended family.
After telling teachers, students, and parents of the news, we began working on helping everyone through the grieving process. We talked about how we could be supportive of the students that just lost their mom, and how we could be supportive of one another. We talked about what to say and what not to say. We made cards. We hung hearts. We have faith that we will heal.
As Valentines Day approached, my Lunch Bunch kids wanted to put up the locker notes that we had been planning to do. While we originally planned to hang up notes that said, “You are beautiful!”, we ended up changing the saying to “Love–Like Fire Is Catching” in memory of Mrs. T– which was one of her favorite quotes, and probably even more appropriate for the kindness message that we were planning to pass along to everyone. So we printed our message on post it notes, and made sure it was put on every locker.
The English classes also wrote out messages for the family and hung them up in the hallway. The Lunch Bunch group also made a box to put them in for the family to read when they were ready.
It has been sad, but we are beginning to heal.
As I scan in the resources we have from Hospice, I will add them here for resources to use.
