Youngsters Karis, Creighton and Cortland Cooper lounged in their living room on a hot summer day watching Lego Star Wars -- with photos of their late...
Teachers and counselors will once again be on the front lines in addressing kids’ grief this school year. They are often the first to recognize when a child’s behavior changes or if a student has trouble learning and interacting with others.“We have an entire system that’s absolutely exhausted,” she said.
At times, they’d cling to their mother worried about losing her too, especially after she was weakened during a bout with COVID-19. She wasn’t sure what to do. “There was a huge, huge change,” Cooper said. They saw other kids going through similar challenges, learned how to express their feelings and remembered happy memories about their family members lost.
Shannon Cooper is pictured with her mother Laurie Walker and her kids Cortland, 5; Karis, 9, and Creighton, 8; at their Fort Worth home. They lost four family members within weeks of each other due to COVID-19. Counseling has helped the children navigate their grief.Crowley, like many districts, hired additional staff to help students bounce back academically and emotionally.
Fort Worth also leaned into its partnership with Communities in Schools as well as additional organizations, including ChristianWorks and The Art Station. The district connects students with them through a handful of family resource centers across FWISD. “We have to talk about, in the coming school year, how this might be coming up more frequently than because maybe kids weren’t ready to talk about their loss, but they are now,” Benitez said.Even before the pandemic, growing demand for mental health and grief support for students had Dallas-area school districts turning to outside nonprofits for help, such as ChristianWorks and Mind Above Matter.
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