'Unimaginably difficult': How Annunciation is rebuilding sense of safety at school after tragedy
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Weeks before Annunciation opens its doors to students at the start of the new school year, the halls are crowded with plastic bins of school items, stacked furniture and boxes of remodeling supplies.
“There’s just a lot of physically moving pieces right now,” says Annunciation’s dean of Academic Excellence, Sheila Loschy as she moves through hallways filled with construction materials.
The upheaval is a physical representation of the mountains Loschy and her staff have moved over the past year to support their students and community in healing and learning after tragedy disrupted their lives last August.
Close to one year ago, a shooter opened fire on Annunciation Catholic Church and School through the stained glass windows where children had gathered for Mass during the first week of school.
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Two students were killed that day. Many other children and adults were wounded - some critically.
Before school reopens this year, school leaders are moving preschool classrooms so that children who had to shelter in place in pre-K rooms under the church no longer need to return to those same rooms.
It’s not just renovations — Loschy said every day of the past year has brought new challenges for her, her colleagues and the kids at their school.
“It's been unimaginably difficult,” Loschy said. “We saw the whole range of emotions and needs from kids.”
She and her colleagues have seen students who responded to the trauma they experienced with a deep desire to return to normalcy and focus on academics. Others needed something else.
“There were kids who every day walking into this building was a hurdle, and there are kids who that still is a hurdle, and it will continue to be.”
The piles of bins and boxes that filled Annunciation’s hallways this summer reflect those needs and the work Loschy and others are doing to meet them. They’re not just moving preschool classrooms. Leaders are also installing permanent spaces for therapists from the Washburn Center for Children, a mental health organization, to take up physical residency in the school.
“At the time, it just felt like what we needed to do, right? Like an emergency center needed to be set up for families to get the resources they needed, and for kids to have somebody to talk to,” Loschy said. “We can't do this without professionals helping us.”
Jenny Britton is the chief clinical officer at Washburn. She and her colleagues have been on site at Annunciation since the first days after the shooting.
To her, a priority has always been supporting the staff and teachers at the school.
“(According to) all of the tenets of reestablishing psychological safety following a mass violence incident, it was just as critical for the grown-ups in the school, for the teachers and for the admin as it was for the students,” Britton explained. “What will help students and what will help teachers is to actually get back to learning, to find a way to have some of those ordinary eight-year-old experiences, those ordinary…teacher experiences.”
Washburn specialists began walking the hallways in matching t-shirts and set up a walkie-talkie system to allow kids and adults in the school to radio for help whenever they needed it.
According to Loschy, that level of support has been critical.
“Teaching in an atmosphere where kids have experienced trauma…that's always the challenge. Like, you can be given a beautiful curriculum, but the challenge is always how do I serve the kids who are sitting in front of me?” Loschy said. “Now more than ever, it's that social emotional piece on top of it,” she added.
The school set aside a private space for teachers to retreat to if they need to cry or decompress, with the expectation that they can always radio for help if they need it.
“We all have our own independent journey of healing, and I feel like sometimes it gets set to the side for the greater good, but then there are times where it's like, ‘I need to take time for me, I need to leave early today, or I'm feeling really overwhelmed this month. I need to plan a day off proactively,’” Loschy said.
When Loschy looks back on the past year, she’s proud of how much she and her staff have accomplished. She’s also grateful for the ways they’ve been able to receive support and reflect love in the face of unimaginable circumstances.
“We were called to do impossible jobs, and, like, I stopped cooking meals. I stopped going to the grocery store,” she said. “Are there things we could have, should have done differently? Absolutely, but also none of us have done this before, and we were like just figuring it out as we went. It's not like we had training in how to navigate what we were navigating, and so I'm proud of that.”
When Britton looks at the work Washburn and Annunciation staff have done over the past year, she sees a community that’s been unusually intentional, tireless and able to strive together.
But she warns that more communities need to pay attention to how well their teachers are doing.
“The risk that we have right now in our country and in the Twin Cities specifically because of the things that have happened here in the last several years is that the helpers are tired and they also need help. We have to pay attention to the burnout of our teachers.” Britton said.
As the Annunciation community returns to school this month, Loschy said they are focused on supporting each other and on making school a safe place for students to return to.
“This is unfortunately part of who we are now, and it will be a piece of our history,” Loschy said. “Our world is full of division, but what if we at Annunciation could model how a community that has diverse people can still come together on things and show the world that in the face of tragedy doesn't need to turn into division. It can make a stronger community.”
