When the horrific news of a child being killed hits the headlines, the heartbreaking work begins at school: informing staff, preparing to deliver the news to students and anticipating the emotional fallout, reaching out to the family, deciding when and how to memorialize the victim. We go into this work to serve our students in every possible way. But even the most capable school leaders and teachers cannot prepare for an event so harsh, so devastating, so raw. It takes a terrible toll, and the loss continues to reverberate at many levels--in the community, in the classroom, in our hearts and minds.

The same can be said of the damage at the other end: The shooters are often our students or former students, and they send their own ripples of woe from families to society at large. In many classrooms in our city, most if not all students know first-hand either someone who was injured or killed by gun violence, or someone who is doing time in prison for it.

As Catalyst noted, our response to this crisis is scattershot. Two years ago, as part of my own professional development  with the Chicago New Teacher Center, I created a "grief kit" as a support for our beginning teachers who experience the loss of a student or a student’s family member to an act of violence, accident, house fire or other sudden tragedy. These are events that challenge the ablest, most experienced educators. NTC serves first- and second-year teachers, who, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection, are nearly twice as likely as veterans to teach in schools serving the most African-American and Hispanic students, populations disproportionately affected by violence.

Here are some of the questions I faced as a mentor to these new teachers:

• “How do I tell the kids?”

• “What if I cry?”

•  “What do I say to the family?”

•  “How can I help my students feel safe at school?”

•  “What behaviors should I be alert for?”

•  “What could our class do to comfort the family? Each other? Memorialize their classmate?”

How teachers handle the fallout of violence responsibly and empathetically in their classrooms--from acknowledging the loss to creating a safe environment where kids can not only learn, but find comfort and begin to heal--is not something that is taught in pre-service programs. We learn from experience to anticipate that a student who survived a shooting or who saw a family member killed could be at school the next morning. Grief counselors and crisis teams do an amazing job in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. School communities deal with both the short- and long-term impact.

The challenges teachers face in managing classrooms in which many students have been traumatized, some repeatedly, are significant. As Sarah Karp reported, “traumatized children often l