On May 14, a white teenager armed with an assault rifle and body armor fatally shot 10 Black people inside a Buffalo, New York supermarket in what authorities described as a racially-motivated attack.
The next day, Tiffany Lewis, CEO of Confident Girl Mentoring Program, Inc., held a “restorative practice circle” for roughly 50 local children ages 5 to 11 years old to help them begin to process the unthinkable — a mass shooting in their community.
“The following day, it just felt numb,” Lewis recalled. “The stillness of it all. I can’t explain it.”
Some of the children were ready to talk about it. Others stayed silent and just listened. Some cried. A few kids recounted times they’d seen a person shot before. They all grappled with why someone would do such a thing.
“Being so young, it’s hard for them to process the ‘why,'” said Lewis, who is trained in trauma-informed care and adverse childhood experience. Confident Girls provides mentorship programming during the summer and after school to about 500 young girls each year in Buffalo, and virtual programming in Memphis, Tennessee and North Carolina.
The pandemic emphasized the important role afterschool and summer programs can play in supporting kids with their social and emotional well-being. Some programs are putting those same skills to work in communities devastated by mass shootings.
But experts say adults who work with children both inside and outside school need more explicit training in grief and bereavement — before tragedy strikes.
“The lack of training has been the major barrier to why educators don’t talk with children who are grieving, though they know they’re in their classroom and struggling,” said Dr. David Schonfeld, director of the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
“It’s not that they don’t care,” he added. “It’s that they don’t know what to say.”
Mass shootings haunt communities
While mass shootings account for just a small fraction of firearm deaths — now the leading cause of death among American children — they cause lasting, communal trauma and anxiety, not least of all for children and young people.
Various agencies and organizations define mass shootings differently, making it difficult to quantify trends. There have been 496 mass shootings so far in 2022 according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as having a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including the shooter. A Federal Bureau of Investigation analysis found active shooter incidents have become more common since 2000.
In addition to the shooting in Buffalo, this year was also marked by an elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 elementary school children and two teachers were killed.
In the wake of the Uvalde school massacre, After-School All-Stars, a national organization with a chapter in San Antonio, expanded its programming into the grieving city to help the school district with its afterschool waitlist.
“Let’s make sure that every single family in Uvalde … is not turned away, does not go on a waiting list and that there is a space for every child in afterschool, because we believe that the students are safer with us than home alone,” said Grace Aguirre-Garcia, the program director.
Aguirre-Garcia, who grew up in Uvalde, said it took two months to build a program from scratch. On Sept. 26, the program opened its doors to all 78 elementary school children who had been waitlisted across three of the district’s schools.
Aguirre-Garcia said the kids have been in good spirits, laughing and playing and eager to participate.
“You wouldn’t know that something that’s terrible happened in their hometown,” Aguirre-Garcia said. “They seem like typical children in afterschool.”
The program includes arts and crafts, sports and homework help, following the Girl Scouts’ “Becoming Me” curriculum, based on the book by Michelle Obama, the former first lady. Soon, the team will launch a social-emotional learning program focused on resilience, where Aguirre-Garcia said she expects feelings of grief and sadness to bubble up.
Jenna Courtney, executive director of the Texas Partnership for Out of School Time, said such programs are “a remarkably good space to help kids and families process through any number of traumas,” including mass shootings.
Courtney said in the wake of Uvalde, officials in other states have reached out to her asking if she has advice or resources to help them prepare in the event that a mass shooting in their community.
For now, there isn’t a national playbook for how afterschool programming can address mass shootings. But violent events this year have sparked a conversation about what resources out-of-school time programs need to respond, Courtney said.
Art heals following El Paso Walmart shooting
Children’s programming has already been deployed in another Texas community rocked by gun violence.
On Aug. 3, 2019, a shooter allegedly targeting “Mexicans” killed 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso.
Following the shooting, a local organization, Creative Kids, launched an art program focused on resilience that serves kids directly or indirectly impacted by the shooting. It offers a separate class for adults as well.
Courtesy of Raquel Rodriguez
Marisa M., 9, says she has benefitted from art classes offered through the local nonprofit Creative Kids in El Paso where 23 people were killed by a gunman at a Walmart.
The program is designed to provide a safe space for students to express their feelings and thoughts through art, according to Executive Director Andrea Gates-Ingle. All the art supplies are free, and the program has a combined waitlist of 75 children and adults.
“We’re not art therapists, but art is therapy,” said Gates-Ingle. “We’re not diving deep into what happened on August 3. That’s not what we do at all.”
But often the feelings about that day come out in the children’s artwork, she added, and that is why the program has a child therapist on staff or can refer children to the El Paso United Family Resiliency Center, which was created after the Walmart shooting to help the community receive support services. The most recent collection of artwork is currently on display until February in the Creative Kids’ 16,000-square-foot gallery in downtown El Paso.
Marisa M., 9, is among the children who say they have been helped by Creative Kids. Youth Today is not publishing her last name at the request of her family to protect her privacy.
During the Walmart shooting, Marisa, then 7, was shopping with her grandmother next door at Sam’s Club.
Afterward, Marisa grew anxious. She began picking at her nails. She was jumpy, and loud noises terrified her.
She was referred to Creative Kids by the El Paso United Family Resiliency Center.
“I learned how to trust people,” Marisa said of her experience in the program. “I learned how to express my feelings through art and colors.”
She explained that for her, teal isn’t just a combination of light green and blue — it represents celebration. Grays and black, conversely, mean darkness.
Courtesy of Raquel Rodriguez
Marisa’s paper sculpture of a wolf in shades of blue and pink.
This year, Marisa and other kids created “alebrijes,” Mexican spirit animals. Marisa made a part-lion, part-giraffe alebrije out of foil, toothpicks and paint. She also made a paper sculpture of a wolf, painted in shades of blue and pink, howling at the moon.
“When people see it,” Marisa said of her wolf, “They will see sadness, happiness, excitement.”
Lack of training hinders response to children’s grief
Community reactions to mass shootings have evolved organically, but those working in out-of-school time programs say many afterschool programs likely already have some resources at their disposal that they can draw upon. A program might already adhere to a trauma-informed care model, and many programs since the pandemic now address the social and emotional wellness of the child.
“Social-emotional learning is a huge part of out-of-school time programming, so ideally it’s not a huge shift for the agencies and programs that we work with to find ways to have conversations with young people about the incident,” said Wil Green, regional office director at New York State Network for Youth Success.
For Green, though, the real value of out-of-school time programs is that they’ve already done the hard work of building relationships and trust with young people.
“If people don’t trust you, they’re not going to open up with you enough to even share how the incident has impacted them,” Green said. “You got to connect to the kid before you can even get to the clinical aspect of healing.”
Schonfeld, with the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement, said that any school or program that works with children would benefit from training educators and staff on how to talk to kids about death.
It’s especially important to be proactive because it’s ideally not the kind of training that can be done in the immediate aftermath of a disaster, when adults are dealing with their own grief and trauma, he added.
Schonfeld said that only about 15% of educators report that they’ve received training on how to talk to a grieving child. This is part of why the National Center for School Crisis and Bereavement has released online resources for how to talk to kids about mass shootings and other tragedies.
Schonfeld has worked with the New York Life Foundation on developing grief training materials for teachers. Schools that participate received a grant to help cover the costs of training. Currently, the foundation is working on tweaking the training for out-of-school time program staff and hopes to launch a pilot sometime next year.
A lack of funding is certainly a barrier, Schonfeld said, but, for him, it’s not the main reason such training isn’t more widespread.
“To be quite honest, I think people are uncomfortable with this topic,” Schonfeld said.
Lewis, of Confident Girl Mentoring in Buffalo, hasn’t shied away from the topic. She said her program focuses on helping young people move forward and heal.
“Our goal is always to provide as many trauma-healing exercises as possible while granting our children a safe and trusted space to be open about the state of their mental health,” Lewis said.
In one of her healing circles on the topic, she asked the students how violence has impacted their community.
“One of the children responded, ‘Violence brought us together,'” Lewis recalled. “I just said ‘wow,’ and choked up.”
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Brian Rinker is a San Francisco-based freelance writer and journalist. He covers public health, child welfare, digital health, startups and venture capital. His work has been published by Kaiser Health News, Health Affairs, The Atlantic, Men’s Health and San Francisco Business Times. Brian received master’s degrees in journalism and public health from UC Berkeley.
