As the school year unfolds, I sometimes get the same question from several people, and one that has come up already this year more than once is what to do about the deaths of students who graduated last year or the year before that. Difficult to know where to draw the line sometimes, and there are lots of options. The key is remembering to be consistent and what you do for one, you will do for all unless there is a compelling reason not to do so.
Often a student who graduated last year is much better known by teaching staff and those on teams s/he was on than the new class that has just entered the high school, and yet if a student from that new class died, you'd do the whole response process. So what to do?
It seems pretty safe to bet that, for three years (if yours is a four-year high school) there are students in the building currently that may have known the student, and some may have known the student quite well. It would be perfectly acceptable to have teachers read an announcement that would be similar to those modeled after the Crisis Resource Manual's guidelines, stopping at the end of the cause of death and then going into some of the reflections and discussion. It is likely that you'll be able to tell whether you would need a Safe Room. It is likely that more students would use a Safe Room for a recent grad than for a new student, so why not have one? The function of the Safe Room is to get students who are grieving out of the classroom (thereby allowing the teacher to move into academics without students who are grieving diverting their attention) so if there are likely to be students who will struggle with the loss, providing a Safe Room will likely be a great help.
Having students create a Life Tribute? That's a little more difficult. It isn't likely that you'll want to do one of those for every student who dies who has graduated in the past three years, so perhaps in general, you may lean away from that.
Students may still want to do some kind of fund-raising or something special for a family, which is terrific. Those are the kinds of things we need to teach our youth - to respond to the needs of others in difficult times. Great teachable moment.
But there are no rules on this. Just the reminder that what you do formally for one (like a Life Tribute) you probably need to do for all. Fund-raisers and student-generated ideas are a little more fluid. So think about the precedent you're setting and listen to your gut in making these decisions.
Hope you're having as beautiful a fall as we are in Oregon!
Cheri
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