Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the Postvention topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
After student deaths, Huntington schools share postvention checklist and supports for principals and staff
Summary
District nurse and crisis‑team leader Meg Friesen outlined a postvention response package — checklists, Google Docs folder, grief logs, email templates and teacher scripts — aimed at helping principals and staff respond when a student or community member dies; she recommended tabletop exercises and broader community coordination.
Meg Friesen told the board the district has built a postvention response package to guide principals and crisis teams after a death in the school community, focusing primarily on suicides but applicable to other traumatic deaths.
Friesen said the district has recorded three student suicides in the last four years and that those events prompted the creation and ongoing revision of a detailed folder of documents for school leaders. The package includes a step‑by‑step postvention checklist, a crisis‑team roles list (who does what), email templates for communicating with staff and families, a scripted suggestion for teachers to use during first‑period conversations, and a grief log so supporting adults can track follow‑up with students.
She described operational changes added after real incidents: opening the library or lounge as a supervised support space, logging students who seek support, tracking connections to the deceased student and scheduling end‑of‑day professional check‑ins for building staff. Friesen urged regular tabletop exercises to rehearse the plan and recommended broad community coordination (health care partners, parents) for medical‑exception determinations.
Board members thanked Friesen for the work and noted the district's communication timing and social‑media management as ongoing challenges; the chair praised Friesen's expertise and said the administration will rely on her guidance in future events.
