Monday After Sandy Hook: Hugs and Thank-Yous

It was a tougher-than-usual goodbye Monday morning for parents dropping off their kids at schools throughout Collingswood, said Superintendent Scott Oswald.

"Kids were low-key, especially this morning," he said. "Parents were giving an extra-hard hug."

In the wake of , families and educators alike are still searching for ways to put the event in perspective. Their responses varied from the emotional to the detached, he said.

Mostly, everyone was just trying to get through the day.

Oswald described the mood districtwide Monday as "solemn." Kids were not talking about the event, he said, and several parents asked that teachers not make it a focus of discussion.

They almost needn't have worried. Oswald said, "I know the teachers were certainly affected" by the news.

"Many kids spend more waking hours with their teachers than they do with their own parents," he said. "The classroom [especially] at an elementary level grows into a strong family."

The safest places in America for children 

From an administrative perspective, Oswald said he visited every school in the district Monday; pulled on every door to make sure they were all locked, "which you knew they would be," and confidently asserted, "I did not come across any doors in the district that were insecure.

"We were working to assure our kids that, despite this event, schools are the safest places in America [for kids to be]," he said.

At the Monday night meeting of the Collingswood Board of Education, Oswald reassured those in attendance that staff practices both one fire and one security exercise per month.

"We do drill those; we have been drilling those," he said. "We have been doing those things for years everywhere in New Jersey, practicing things that we hope we’ll never have to use."

'I saw one parent cry as she left'

A group of parents from William P. Tatem Elementary School thought that the first day back might be rougher than usual on everyone, too. So they put together an impromptu breakfast as a way of easing the transition for faculty and staff.

It started as bagels and yogurt, and then exploded into quiches, stratas and other homemade goodies, said Sarah Mello, whose son, Charlie attends Tatem.

Not wanting to interfere with potentially increased security measures, she said, parents dropped off breakfast items at a small table outside the school, then took them inside, set up, and left.

"It seemed to be a pretty calm day," Mello said. "There seemed to be more parents at the school kissing their kids goodbye. I saw one cry as she left."

Mello said that since the shooting, she's seen a variety of reactions from kids, including Charlie, who is in the fourth grade. As is appropriate, she said, parents have offered a variety of responses to their questions. 

"I was very straightforward with [Charlie] about it," Mello said. "I had him tell me everything the school does to keep them safe; he rattled through it.

"He’s always felt really safe there at the school," she said. "The teachers didn’t directly address [the incident today] and he seemed to be fine."

'People were problem-solving with each other'

Mello also said that as a community, Collingswood has been working through its relationship to the tragedy in different ways.

She was at a party Friday night where two children announced to a roomful of adults, "Something happened today and nobody told us." Parents looked at one another, and then one of them took the kids in the other room and sat them down for a talk, she said.

Another child asked if she could rewrite her letter to Santa Claus: Instead of toys, she wanted to ask him to bring back to life the children killed in the attack.

Processing both kinds of reactions requires the kind of group support that a community needs to provide in the wake of such events, Mello said.

"There was an ongoing chat over the weekend on the [Tatem] PTA [Facebook] page about what people were going to say to their parents," she said. "People were problem-solving with each other."

'Teachers in that school did exactly what our teachers would do'

On the other hand, she said, Facebook can also be an echo chamber for grief and tragedy, which can make it harder for people to overcome, in her opinion.

"There are people who are watching every vigil, every single thing, posting and posting and posting; it keeps the drama high around that," Mello said. "We don’t see the coming-together celebrated much."

It's worth mentioning that not even two months ago, teachers were political targets in a presidential election that criticized their salaries, tenure, job effectiveness and the impact of their unions on the fiscal health of the nation.

Nobody talked then about the likelihood that their profession also might someday demand stopping a bullet for the children in their care.

Yet educators are called upon to carry such burdens every day, even in communities not directly hit by such violence, said Oswald.

"I think teachers are so proud of what they do, they probably don’t even notice such things," he said. "The teachers in that school did exactly what the teachers in our district would do."