How do school shootings like Lamar and David K. Sellars affect kids’ mental health?
Every time Lamar High School in Arlington goes on lockdown, counselor Stephanie Jurgens notices months-old anxieties begin to resurface in students.
Many students at Lamar were at school last March, when a teenager fatally shot 16-year-old Ja’Shawn Poirier and wounded another student. They remember going into lockdown for hours as police searched the school building and the area around it, Jurgens said. They remember not knowing what was going on outside, or whether they were safe.
Lockdowns aren’t the only trigger, Jurgens said. When the shooter went on trial last month, it dredged up the same feelings for many students and staff members at the school, she said. Many ended up in her office, looking for a safe place to process that trauma.
“We still deal with the anxiety sometimes,” she said. “I’m not saying daily, but frequently, we still have students who bring that up.”
The shooting at Lamar was the first of two slayings at Tarrant County schools this year. On Oct. 11, cafeteria worker Yolanda Gibbs was found suffering several gunshot wounds in the back parking lot at David K. Sellars Elementary School, a Fort Worth Independent School District campus in Forest Hill. She died at a hospital that morning.
In each shooting, only one person was killed, meaning the incidents didn’t attract the same level of national attention as last year’s massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde or the 2018 mass shooting at Santa Fe High School in Santa Fe. But mental health experts say smaller-scale shootings can also leave students traumatized, so parents, teachers and school counselors need to be ready to help students cope with that trauma.
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Forest Hill, Arlington school shootings each leave one dead
On Oct. 11, Forest Hill police say Gibbs’ boyfriend, Anthony Harris, shot her several times as she arrived at David K. Sellars before the school day began. Harris, 58, was found dead two days later on a public sidewalk in the 1200 block of East Rosedale Street in Fort Worth. The Tarrant County Medical Examiner’s Office hasn’t yet released his cause and manner of death.
When parents arrived at David K. Sellars to drop students off on the morning of the shooting, they found streets blocked off and school staff diverting people away from the parking lot and toward other entrances.
On the morning of March 20, Arlington police say Poirier and another student were sitting outside Lamar High School waiting for classes to begin when another student pulled a shotgun from his backpack and fired into a crowd of about 20 students. Poirier was taken to a hospital, where he died. Shrapnel struck another student in the face. The shooter, whom the Star-Telegram hasn’t identified because he was convicted as a juvenile, received a 40-year sentence in connection with the killing.
Arlington ISD counselors offered care after Lamar shooting
After the Lamar shooting, counselors and social workers from campuses across Arlington ISD came to the school to help, said Jurgens, the school counselor. Classes at Lamar were canceled on the day after the shooting, and counselors met with the district’s director of counseling services to talk about how to help students and staff process what happened, she said. For about a week and a half after the shooting, counselors set up a space in the school library where students and staff could come talk with a mental health professional, she said.
Jurgens said she saw students react to the shooting in a wide range of ways. Most had a lot of anxiety about being at school and going to class, she said. Some tried to act like everything was normal. A few said that campus shootings are such a common feature of American education that they weren’t surprised when one happened at their school, she said.
Whatever the reaction, counselors tried to normalize students’ feelings and explain to them that feeling anxious and upset after something as traumatic as a school shooting is normal, she said. They talked students and staff members through coping techniques to help them deal with anxiety, she said, and in some cases to help them deal with the grief of losing a classmate.
Jordan Caver’s daughter was one of the hundreds of students who had to shelter in place after the shooting. She’s a student at Arlington Collegiate High School, and was waiting for a bus to her school when she got caught in the lockdown at Lamar.
Caver said his daughter was apprehensive on her first day back at school after the shooting. But seeing heightened security at the campus when students came back was comforting, he said, as was the support students got from the staff members both at Arlington Collegiate and at Lamar.
Although the shooting left his daughter with some feelings of anxiety for the few days that followed, Caver said she’s been able to return to life as normal since then. He thinks that’s in part because the shooting wasn’t a mass killing, in which the shooter tried to take as many lives as possible. The family’s Christian faith was also a source of comfort and strength, he said. He also gives his daughter credit for being resilient in the face of a scary situation.
“She’s a survivor,” he said. “She’s tough.”
Small-scale school violence can leave scars, expert says
Sonali Rajan, a professor of health education at Teachers College, Columbia University, said scientists don’t know how the mental health impacts of killings like those at David K. Sellars and Lamar compare to those left after larger-scale shootings like Uvalde. But what’s clear, she said, is that violent incidents of any scale can constitute what researchers call adverse childhood experiences, traumatic events that can impact children’s development all the way into adulthood.
Speaking this month on a webinar with journalists, Rajan said those kinds of experiences can affect kids’ brain development. They can also affect students’ sense of safety and stability at school, leading to poor health outcomes and academic struggles, she said. Ultimately, those experiences can make kids more likely to adopt high-risk behaviors like drug and alcohol abuse, she said.
Rajan said school leaders can prevent those kinds of effects by offering mental health support in the aftermath of the shooting. But those leaders need to know that the incident doesn’t need to be a large-scale event to be traumatic, she said. In cases where a shooting leaves one or two people dead or injured and not dozens, many students will still need to work through the experience with a counselor, she said, so school districts need to make sure those kids have access to those services.
“It should not only be the children who experience and survive mass shootings,” she said. “We should be thinking about that support in a broader way.”
FWISD counselor says early intervention is crucial
Ashli Abernathy, director of student well-being in Fort Worth ISD’s Guidance and Counseling Department, said the district’s immediate goal after the David K. Sellars shooting was helping students and staff members process the trauma so they could get back to the stability of their school routines as quickly as possible. The district has a team of crisis-trained counselors that officials can send into schools to provide support after a crisis, she said. At Sellars, that team set up separate spaces for students and staff to come talk to a trained counselor, she said.
Each crisis is different, Abernathy said, which means the response needs to be different each time. So the way Fort Worth ISD provided support after the shooting at David K. Sellars is different from the way Arlington ISD responded to the shooting at Lamar, she said.
“There’s really not a one-size-fits-all strategy for crisis,” she said.
After kids experience something traumatic like a school shooting, Abernathy said, parents need to know that anxiety, behavior changes and disrupted sleep are normal. But if those changes last beyond a couple of weeks, she said, it’s time for parents to seek professional help for their kids.
When kids are dealing with something traumatic, Abernathy said, early intervention is key. The longer a student continues to have problems, the more those problems compound on themselves, she said. If a student is dealing with untreated depression or anxiety over a long period, their grades could begin to decline, giving them one more source of stress and anxiety, she said.
“There’s just more to untangle the longer the period of time,” she said. “So, early intervention is really key to a lot of mental health.”
