On their first day back from winter break last week, Niles West High School students found a few unfamiliar but friendly faces with concerned expressions roaming school halls.
In what is becoming a common response among schools locally and nationally, a crisis intervention team had been brought in to Niles West to counsel students disturbed by the unsolved strangulation of 15-year-old student David Chereck on New Year`s Day.
Kristy Sullivan, a 14-year-old freshman, knew Chereck from lunchtime and remembered his ”gorgeous” smile, but like nearly all other students she felt no need to seek a counselor.
Still, the mere presence of the 15-person Crisis Response Team, which included teachers, administrators, a school pyschologist, a media handler, outside volunteer social workers and a rabbi, was comforting.
”It`s nice to see that,” Kristy said. ”If I had known him better, I would have stopped by.”
The growing use of grief counseling in schools reflects the larger role educators play in an era when a decline of family stability is matched by an increase in students` exposure to tragedy.
The crisis teams usually are mobilized after the death or suicide of a student or teacher, a natural disaster, or an act of violence in the school or on its grounds. Grief counselors also try to help students with smaller, day- to-day problems.
Counselors point to the 1988 shooting rampage by Laurie Dann at Winnetka`s Hubbard Woods Elementary School as an example of the type of tragedy that has invaded schools that once seemed to be refuges. An 8-year-old boy was killed and five children and one young man were wounded in that incident.
”It`s a healthy way for the community to respond,” said Michael Kane, executive director of the Response Center of Skokie, who was one of the five outside counselors who volunteered to counsel Niles West students. ”It`s a good message for the kids to know, that there`s a community behind the school.”
But some experts acknowledged that while grief counseling has become more prominent in schools, and many schools have drawn up crisis response plans, they wondered if counselors always are needed or how effective they are.
”That`s a good question,” said Larry Barber, director of the center for evaluation, development and research of Phi Delta Kappa in Bloomington, Ind., a professional organization for 127,000 educators worldwide.
”There have been no formal evaluations of program effectiveness. It`s relatively new. At this point, people are operating more on logic: `We ought to be prepared than not prepared at all.` ”
Calvin Frederick, a specialist in psychological trauma and a professor of psychiatry at UCLA, said there is more than just counseling at work oftentimes.
”Call it a grief-counseling industry, or tragedy-counseling industry,”
Frederick said. ”It`s become business.
”You just don`t automatically assume that everybody needs help,” said Frederick, who has gone into some schools to counsel students after traumatic incidents. ”I think that`s important to bear in mind.”
Frederick said the trend in some instances has brought ill-trained and insensitive counselors into schools. Sometimes they can be intrusive, pushing help on those who have not sought assistance or misunderstanding perfectly normal reactions to traumatic occurences, he said.
”There are instant experts that abound these days,” he said. ”The people you bring in might be emotional ambulance-chasers. It really is unconscionable unless you`re trained. You can do more harm than good. At a time like that, people are wounded emotionally and are brittle and are open to influence or innuendo.”
Some say that beyond counseling for the occasional violent or shocking event, today`s students need regular counseling, or at least access to it, to grapple with climbing teenage-suicide rates, child-abuse rates, violent crime, gangs and drugs. Schools also have become counselers because of divorce and other family problems.
”What I`ve been seeing taking place is less and less of the traditional family unit, and the school becomes more of a family,” said Vic Zapatka, counselor at Chicago`s Montefiore School, who led grief sessions in September 1988 after a gunman killed four people, including a Chicago police officer, in the school building.
”We take on that role of support,” Zapatka said. ”The school is probably the most stable system in a lot of these kids` lives.”
Until recently, ”The schools have been kept sacrosanct,” said Barber.
”It isn`t anything that the kids have done. It`s the underbelly of society that is entering the schools. There are major indications that society holds children in shallow regard, and schools must step in to protect the kids.”
After Chereck`s death, teachers and administrators at Niles West turned to a five-page crisis response plan developed after the Dann incident, said Rebecca Gittrich, spokeswoman for Niles Township High School District 219.
But of 1,824 students, ”maybe 20” sought counseling, Gittrich said. Explaining the low turnout, Gittrich said many students probably had dealt with their grief during school break and added that hundreds of students visited crisis counselors last school year when a student was killed in a car accident.
Several students said their use of grief counselors would depend on whether they knew the victim.
Niles West senior Gus Galanis, 18, of Morton Grove said he did not visit a grief counselor, ”because I didn`t particularly know the guy. To the kids that knew him, it would be a good idea.”
Allea Paras, 15, a sophomore who knew Chereck because he was a classmate in her geometry class, related similar feelings. When a school counselor visited her geometry class Monday to allay any concerns, Paras said she didn`t bother to listen.
”I wasn`t listening. I was looking at the computer,” she said. ”For his close friends, it would be helpful.”
Many suburban schools have crisis programs drawn up for their counseling staff and are prepared to call or even hire outside counselors, but Chicago`s school system relies mostly on teams of special-education counselors already in place, as well as the full-time guidance and social workers assigned throughout the system.
The Chicago Board of Education employs 150 three-person teams, each composed of a psychologist, a nurse and a social worker, who regularly visit two to five schools apiece, said Lourdes Afable, coordinator for crisis intervention programs for the Chicago Board of Education.
Originally set up to monitor special-education students, the teams also have begun to handle crisis intervention counseling and can be called in to a school if needed.
”I`d say in the last four years, it`s become a recognized function, whereas before there were efforts but no pooling of information,” Afable said. ”Some of the those events were left unhandled. Nobody talked to the kids. Nobody talked to the teachers.”
Two years ago, for instance, when 16-year-old Chester Dunbar was stabbed to death in the middle of a 10th-grade classroom at Harper High School in Englewood, the crisis team assigned to the school devoted three weeks of full- time counseling every day, joined by the school`s five guidance counselors and three volunteers from a nearby guidance center.
Some counselors visited classrooms, while others were available throughout the day in the library if students wanted to drop in.
”It worked excellently, and to be honest, I never thought it could work that well,” said Principal Barbara Pulliam.
Guidance counselors at Robeson High School in the Englewood neighborhood have talked regularly with 17-year-old Ukela Shelton, a senior whose boyfriend, 17-year-old Gregory Archibald, was shot to death in August.
”I didn`t think I needed it, but I felt better,” Shelton said. ”I still think a lot about him. I don`t like to talk about it a lot. But I know I can come talk to the counselors about anything. Just if I want to talk.”
