ABSTRACT
The goal of education is multifaceted: to nurture academic success; to encourage preparation for the workplace; to promote artistic, athletic, and individual potential; and to attempt to motivate students to achieve their intellectual capacity. Physical symptoms of grief include appetite and sleep changes, frequent sore throats, earaches, nausea, upset stomachs, anxiety attacks, headaches, and colds. When tragedy or crisis comes to school, the opportunity exists for school personnel to equip children with coping strategies that enable them to respond to the inevitable changes, disappointments, and losses that occur naturally in life. Teach healthy coping skills as options to unwise displays of aggression, to acting out, to excessive withdrawal, to recklessness, to apathy, to the use of chemicals, to sexual experimentation—all common adolescent choices for handling grief. The losses experienced by children and adolescents within the school environment increase the school’s responsibility to be prepared to deal with the immediate and long-range needs of the students impacted.
