A collective coloring page welcomes students to the entrance to Baldwin Union Free School District’s wellness center. (Marianna McMurdock)
The stories kept coming. Siblings with terminal illnesses. Close family members dying suddenly.
Kids were grieving for the first time – more than Baldwin Union Free School District counselors, teachers and administrators had ever realized.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen — or maybe we weren’t attuned to before — the number of students who have lost a parent for one reason or another,” said Shari Camhi, the New York district’s superintendent, reflecting on the 2023-24 school year. ”We see a lot of cancer. We’ve seen just a lot of death.”
Baldwin is far from the only district tasked with supporting grieving students. As of spring 2022, nearly 250,000 children across the country lost a parent or caregiver to COVID alone.
Perhaps, as Camhi conceded, it’s always been like this. Perhaps kids have been grieving quietly. And now, only after concerted efforts to boost family connections and prioritize students’ emotional well-being, were they opening up.
Now, Baldwin was ready to support them: By the time counselors flagged the stories they’d been hearing from kids, a new, free wellness center had just been built – the home base from where they could launch bereavement groups.
Their creation illuminates the thread that unites Baldwin’s wellness initiatives: family relationships. Camhi says the approach is old-school, a throwback to a time decades ago, before cell phones pushed kids into introversion and became a hotbed for bullying, when neighbors really knew each other and what was going on in their lives.
After all, most schools do not monitor family deaths, information only discerned through building “rapport and trust,” said Gina Curcio, health, wellness, and community director for the district on Long Island.
Serving kids across all grades, homed at the middle school with a separate entrance for privacy, the wellness center is open late each weeknight, staffed by child therapists and psychologists. Established through a partnership with PM Pediatrics and a 4-year grant from former House Representative Kathleen Rice, it opened in the fall of 2023 without common hiccups districts often face, like having to take on hiring hard-to-staff behavioral health positions.
In the calm-colored space adorned with student artwork, bean bags and infographics about how the mind works, two peer bereavement groups hosted 11 children for six, weekly sessions during the school year; another ran this summer, with children meeting for 90 minutes weekly grouped by age.
