At about 6 a.m. on Friday April 27, 2001, Assistant Superintendent Carol Daynard received a call from another superintendent with terrible news. A bus of middle school students on a music trip to Canada had skidded off a highway and flipped several times. By the time Daynard had dressed, the superintendent called back. Four students had been killed. Dozens more were injured.

Daynard quickly drove over to Oak Hill Middle School in Newton, Massachusetts. As head of the districtwide crisis response team, Daynard had to put the school's crisis plan into action. By the time she arrived at 7:30 a.m., most of the school and city's crisis response team was at the school. They briefly met to figure out the first step. Parents, hearing the news on the radio and television, had come as well, anxious for information about their children.

First, the city and school team brought the children into the gym. The school superintendent and principal made an announcement, saying that there had been an accident with fatalities. Police had not yet identified the children who died. Then school officials sent the children to their homerooms and parents to the library, where clergy were available to talk with them. At the same time, people showed up to volunteer as crisis counselors. The Red Cross arrived and set up a table for volunteers to sign in and fill out a form, which was used to gather information on the background and qualifications of potential volunteers, as well as contact information. Team members chose only those volunteers whom they knew personally or by reputation.

The principal's office became the command center. At 10 a.m., the team learned the names of the students who had been killed. The school-based team set up notification teams to tell the families before making a general announcement. Each notification team included a clergy member, a school administrator, a counselor or school nurse, and someone who knew the child. Because this incident happened away from school and, in fact, out of the country, law enforcement officials were not part of the notification team, as is typical in other types of school crises. Working with the counselors, the team developed a statement that would be read to the students in their homeroom classes. When the teacher read the statement, a counselor or clergy member was available in each classroom to provide support to the teacher and the students. That meant sending 35 counselors or clergy to each of the 35 homerooms in the school.

The team set up counseling centers in the library, counseling suite and faculty suite for anyone who needed to talk. They made sure that each area had plenty of water and food. When people are traumatized, they have a physiological response that makes them very thirsty. In the end, a local water company donated about 5,000 bottles of water.

School superintendent Jeffrey Young was the chief spokesperson on the tragedy, coming out as often as every hour that first day to give reporters and others updates on the situation.

"He was just terrific," Daynard says. "He was open and clear and set a tone that we were taking care of the children, and we were being responsive. It was very comforting."

The school principal sent out a letter and e-mail message that day informing the parents about what had happened. He continued to send out daily updates for the next week. When there was a memorial service, he told students and families what would be appropriate to wear, depending on the religious traditions of the deceased students. For example, one student was Buddhist. In that tradition, it is customary to wear white to a funeral service. In crises that involve schools, police agencies, hospitals and other community agencies, a crisis team would typically hold a multi-agency press conference to coordinate the release of information.

The crisis team had been in place for several years and developed close working relationships with community organizations, such as the police and fire departments, and the local mental health hospital. Those relationships made it easier to respond quickly to unexpected needs, Daynard says. The team had to coordinate logistics with another country in getting information and making arrangements. The town mayor helped arrange flights back for the surviving students and chaperones.

While the team had prepared carefully for a crisis, they still ran into unexpected problems. "The kids' belongings from the bus were soaked in diesel fuel," Daynard says. "One of the crisis team members from the local hospital was able to arrange for the hospital to autoclave the belongings and return them. We also had to make sure that the belongings of the deceased were not among them. We did it quickly and got them cleaned up."

The afternoon of the accident, the team set up committees to deal with different aspects of the crisis. These included a memorial committee to plan and coordinate memorials and a counseling committee to set up counseling and provide materials on trauma and grieving.

"We discovered that we only had three phone lines in the school," Daynard adds. "We kept one open to Canada, and the other two to make arrangements for parents to fly up to Canada and, once reunited, for the students and parents to be flown back." Cell phones did not work because the school was located in a "dead zone." Daynard recalls that she and the mayor hung out of the school library windows with their phones, trying to get a signal.

The bus accident occurred on a Friday morning. School officials decided to keep the school open over the weekend for students, parents, and faculty members to gather. Team members made sure that there were shifts of seven counselors at all times. Crayons and paper were available for kids to draw and write messages for a makeshift memorial in front of the school. Some of the boys played basketball. Counselors held a group for parents on how to talk to their children about the tragedy and gave them handouts to take home. They also held a group for the survivors of the bus accident. Teachers also met in groups over the weekend.

The next week, four memorial services were held for the students who had been killed. Each morning at around 6 a.m., the team met to plan the day. The team arranged for substitute teachers so that faculty could attend the services. The school held its own memorial service for all of the students, parents, faculty and staff the Thursday following the tragedy. Families of the students killed and the surviviors were invited to a luncheon on the day before the schoolwide memorial.

At that point, the crisis team felt that the students needed some closure. After a week of attending memorial services every day, the next day, Friday, would be a regular school day. After the service on Thursday, team members gathered up the messages on the memorial area in the front of the school. Students and parents helped. Volunteers organized the notes and drawings into books for each of the families of the children who had been killed. By Friday, most outward signs of the tragedy were gone.

"At some point you have to get back to a normal life," Daynard says. "Sometimes it's better to let people go numb as opposed to hitting them hard right away with counseling. We tried to make it available and let people make choices as opposed to insisting that people process."

Afterward, the team held debriefings each week until the end of the school year with faculty, counselors, and staff. The staff included administrators, teachers, custodians, and those who worked in the cafeteria. It is easy to forget about those staff who can also be traumatized by a crisis, Daynard says.

The team also held debriefings to determine what they could have done better in the crisis. One thing was clear: The school team needed a representative from the parent-teacher organization to provide a clearer link to the parents. The team also met with the citywide crisis team on ways to make it easier to make phone calls during a crisis. As a result, a new phone system is being installed.

In the following school year, a social worker from a local mental health agency who helped during the tragedy came to the school one day a week to check in and counsel students and faculty. School counselors and psychologists made lists of children they thought might be particularly vulnerable. Those included children who had been close friends with those who had died and children who had suffered other major losses in their lives. Counselors kept a close eye on them.

It is critical to make sure that support systems are in place over the long term. Any crisis or trauma can produce stress and other difficulties that last weeks, months, and years. Some people will not realize that a crisis has affected them until months later. Then they will need support. For others, the effect will be immediate and may continue long after the initial crisis has passed.

Counselors, teachers and other school-based personnel in Newton and other school districts have found that concrete activities can help student recovery. Teachers can ask students to write about their feelings in journals after a tragic event. Students can mark on the front of the journal whether they want a teacher to read their entries. Adolescents are often more willing to write about their feelings than speak up about them. From those entries, teachers have identified students who are struggling and may need some extra attention. Teachers have also incorporated lessons that address specific crises, such as the September 11 events. They have included lessons that address racial and ethnic bias and teach students about other religions, such as Islam.

"More than a year after the tragedy", Daynard says, "we are still a traumatized community." The events of September 11 triggered further grief and other reactions among the students, parents, and school staff.

"We have to be much more vigilant watching the kids now," she says. "The bus accident was a trauma, and anytime you have another traumatic event, those memories can get rekindled. So you look for any change in affect, sleeping patterns, any kind of mood changes. Around September 11, some kids cried a lot. Many of them thought that they were jinxed -- two terrible things happened in their community. The thing to do is to let kids talk about it, give them places where they feel comfortable, where they can feel sad. But you also tell them that these are unusual things that don't happen very often."

To mark the one-year anniversary of the bus accident, a committee of Oak Hill students, parents, faculty, and administrators planned a memorial site on school grounds. They thought about installing a stone from Canada with the names of the students who had died. When planning any memorial, it is important to take into account the needs of the parents whose children died, Daynard says. School officials also realized that they needed to develop a policy on memorials. In the year since the accident, other students had died. Neither students nor school officials wanted to minimize those deaths. While the policy was still being developed, Daynard said that officials were leaning toward "living" memorials, such as scholarship funds, concerts, and book awards, rather than permanent memorials, such as stones and benches.

Please review the Day 2 Activity and then think about the following questions:

What role could you play as a middle school coordinator during a crisis at your school?

How would you involve community organizations?

As a member of the crisis team, think about how you would handle an unexpected situation during a crisis. For example, what would you do in the following scenario: At the Oak Hill School in Newton, one of the students who died was Buddhist. As part of his religious tradition, the funeral cortege, including the hearse, drove to the school. The hearse was opened to release his spirit. His family asked the school to open all of its doors as well to release his spirit from the school. The crisis team received 10 minutes' notice that the processional was coming. The funeral procession was to arrive just as the buses were scheduled to pick up students from school.

* U.S. Department of Education, Safe and Drug-Free Schools Program; The Harvard School of Public Health; Education Development Center, Inc., and Prevention Institute (April 23, 2002). The Three R's for Dealing with Trauma in Schools (satellite broadcast). Retrieved August, 2002, from www.walcoff.com/prevention/. (Copyright 2002: U.S. Department of Education and Harvard School of Public Health, Division of Public Health Practice.)