We Are With You

Dear SCRR community,

The two R's in our project are"recovery" and "renewal" - two words that signals something happens or continues to happen to require both.

This last week we held and witnessed so much pain and death: From the massacres in Buffalo to Orange County to yesterday’s heartbreak in Uvalde. Today is the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.

Pause. 

With all and more, our SCRR community - you - is made of beautiful and brilliant educators,  leaders, and community members who have experienced crisis, harm, and rupture either in our school communities or those that impact them.

We want to offer you:

• If you are activated and dysregulated, yes.
• If you are enraged, yes.
• If you are numb and just need to get through the end of the school year, yes.
• If you are scared and feeling deeply unsafe, yes.
• If you feel like you have to put your own feelings aside to teach today and support your students, yes. 
• If you have no idea what to say, do, or feel, yes. 
• If you know all too well what to say because it has been you in the past, yes.
• If you are feeling pressure to do do do and respond respond respond but need time and space to hold and be and feel the inhumanity of it all, yes.
• If you are held and sustained by the graduation of your students, the celebration of the end of the school year, yes. 

Yes, and. 

If you are feeling overwhelmed and are contemplating hurting yourself or know colleagues or students who are, we share the words of Nelba Márquez-Greene, LMFT, parent survivor of her child Anna Grace’s death (Sandy Hook):

“There is someone reading this and within my reach who is a short distance

from letting go. We live in a stew of horrible. I understand. I want to encourage

you to stay. Not because I can promise you better… but because not having

you here would make it worse.”

Crisis Text Line

Offers free, 24/7, high-quality text-based mental health support. Text SHARE to 741741 or reach out on Facebook. Account is monitored 9:30-5:30pm ET, M-F.

SAMHSA Disaster Distress Helpline

Call or text 1-800-985-5990 (for Spanish, press “2”) to be connected to a trained counselor 24/7/365.

• • • • • •

A Space for You: Life After [Too Much] Loss Educator Tables

Our SCRR Life After Loss table hosts Yesmina and Oriana will each be hosting space for anyone to come to be with one another. It might be a space for us to rage, to share ideas for how to talk to our kids about it all, to offer poetry. It will be the space it needs to be.

Join us

• Wednesday,  May 25th  at 3:30pm - 4:15pm PT •  5:30 pm - 6:15 pm CT • 6:30 pm - 7:15 pm ET (view in your time zone)

• Thursday, May 26th at 9:30 am - 10:15 am PT • 11:30- 12:15 pm CT • 12:30 pm- 1:15 pm ET (view in your time zone)

• Friday, May 27th at 12:30 pm - 1:15 pm PT • 2:30 - 3:15 pm CT • 3:30- 4:15 pm ET (view in your time zone)

Register to attend one, two, or all three

• • • • • •

Gentle reminders in these times of terror: Invitations from your SCRR team

• We invite you to practice loving consent: please ask a colleague if they have the space to talk about what you need to talk about, and respect them if they say no. Please feel permission if someone begins sharing with language that is activating to interrupt and advocate for what you need.

• We invite you as colleagues and leaders to compassionately be mindful of language we use and words we share on calls, in faculty meetings, on Slack (etc) and on emails that might activate our colleagues and community members who have lived experience with gun violence or active shooting experiences.

• We invite school leaders to offer moments of pause during meetings and with asks, be attuned that we as team members and colleagues might be carrying so much right now. It is ok to pause, to slow down and to make space. It is also ok to ask if people do not want to process and get consent to turn focus to the tasks at hand.

• Some of us may feel deeply impacted, and others more distanced. We want to affirm that whatever and however these experiences land, what you are feeling is yours to feel. Meaning, we honor the deep rage, heart break, and distress that might strain our space to focus and “do,” and we honor that for others, working is a way of coping. 

• Grief isn’t comparable and shouldn’t be minimized or fixed. Often as school leaders or mental health leaders, we’re trained to respond and fix. Sometimes, the work is to hold and hear. Providing advice and interventions will have its time. 

There are many resources to help immediate response. Some of us find comfort and support when receiving resources and some of us get overwhelmed and potentially further activated. We’ll keep our resource list short for now (our webpage on memorialization and commemoration and blog supporting grief awareness have more). 

• From our colleagues at LiberatED: Processing the Violence of Buffalo, NY with Students and LiberatED Resource Bundle: After a School Shooting

• From our SCRR faculty/teacher/colleague Alex Shevrin Venet: Teaching on the day after a crisis

• Resources from The Dougy Center on mass tragedy support (Dougy offers resources in Spanish, necessary right now for Uvalde) and What to Say and What Not to Say

• Grief Leadership: Leadership in the Wake of Tragedy, Coping with Stress Following a Mass Shooting and Leadership Communication: Anticipating and Responding to Stressful Events (Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress)

• The Facebook group Teaching on Days After: Dialogue & Resources for Educating Toward Justice

• School Leaders Guide to Create Healing Dialogue Space (San Diego County Office of Education)

We close with three quotes that bring our team and hopefully our community resonance in this moment and on this day: 

"We're not supposed to spend our time healing, we're supposed to heal to live."

Nkem Ndefo

“Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the

absence of an empathetic witness.”

Peter A. Levine

"We don’t heal only for the sake of feeling good. We heal so that we can act and organize. We heal so that we can use the lessons gained through the

wounds of our trauma to make necessary change in our world."

Prentis Patrice Hemphill

SCRR Community, We mourn the lives of the teachers and children of Uvalde and the elders and community members of Buffalo. We mourn Black lives and Trans lives murdered. We mourn Native & Indigenous lives disappeared. We mourn students and educators killed in past shootings, faded into the past of our national consciousness but present in the hearts of their loved ones. 

We mourn the amount of mourning our culture and systems demand of us. 

If we see you at our Life After [too much] Loss Tables today, tomorrow, or Friday, beautiful. If we see you later, beautiful.  

Feelings that emerge in the immediate may require different needs than what might come up later on. We all process differently. It is 100% ok and invited to seek support next week, weeks later. Years later. Any time. Needs are not linear, and our support is constant.

With you,

Leora, Oriana, Livia, Geri, Jen, Bri, Alica, Francesca, Antoine, Darryn, Gigi, Yesmina and our whole team

The SCRR project staff is comprised of team members from a partnership between The Center for Applied Research Solutions and Trauma Transformed.

Contact School Crisis Recovery and Renewal Project

Toll-Free: (888) 597-0995  Email: [email protected]

Website: schoolcrisishealing.org