The stories kept coming. Siblings with terminal illnesses. Close family members dying suddenly.
For the first time, the children were in mourning—more than the counselors, teachers and administrators of the Baldwin Union Free School District had ever realized.
“I don’t think we’ve ever seen — or maybe we weren’t prepared for — the number of students who have lost a parent for one reason or another,” said Shari Camhi, the New York district’s superintendent of schools, looking back at the 2023-24 school year. “We’re seeing a lot of cancer. We’ve just seen a lot of deaths.”
Baldwin is far from the only district tasked with supporting grieving students. In the spring of 2022, nearly 250,000 children nationwide lost a parent or caregiver to COVID alone.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for the 74 newsletter
Perhaps, as Camhi admitted, it has always been this way. Perhaps children have been grieving in silence. And only now, after concerted efforts to strengthen family ties and prioritize students’ emotional well-being, have they begun to open up.
Baldwin was now ready to support them: By the time counselors noticed the children’s stories, a new, free wellness center had just been built: a home base from which they could organize grief support groups.
Their creation highlights the common thread that ties Baldwin’s wellness initiatives together: family relationships. Camhi says the approach is old-fashioned, a throwback to a time decades ago, before cell phones turned kids into introverts and became a hotbed of bullying, when neighbors actually knew each other and what was going on in their lives.
After all, most schools don’t monitor deaths in families, information that can only be obtained through “relationship and trust building,” said Gina Curcio, director of health, wellness and community services for the Long Island district.
Open late every weeknight, the wellness center employs pediatric therapists and psychologists, is located in the high school with a separate entrance for privacy, and is intended for children of all ages. Created through a partnership with PM Pediatrics and a four-year grant from former Rep. Kathleen Rice, it opened in the fall of 2023 without the usual challenges that districts often face, such as hiring hard-to-staff behavioral health positions.
In the quiet, colorful space, decorated with student artwork, bean bags, and infographics about the workings of the mind, two grief groups welcomed 11 children for six weekly sessions throughout the school year. Another session was held this summer, with children meeting weekly for 90 minutes, grouped by age.
In addition to the stages of grief, they’ve learned coping skills through mindfulness, art and music therapy, and made friends with peers they had no idea were dealing with similar feelings—all things that were previously out of reach due to a combination of stigma, financial pressures, and the lack of a comparable resource in their community.
The grief room and the “transition groups” they inspired, for children making the transition to kindergarten, sixth and ninth grades, and college, are just a few of the many initiatives Baldwin has implemented in recent years to address children’s emotional and physical well-being, which impacts their ability to show up at school feeling ready to learn and safe.
“We still suspend kids who do things that make it unsafe for other kids… [but] “We will reduce the suspension in exchange for weekly counseling for students because we believe there is something wrong if you behave in that way,” Camhi added.
Baldwin looks for ways to build strong bonds between children and their communities on both a small and large scale.
During play days this summer, parents were forced to join their children—no electronics allowed. In third grade, all students were taught wellness tools like grounding and breathing techniques to help manage and express difficult emotions. Each year, AP Photography seniors interview second graders about their dreams, hopes, and faces that are printed and displayed on campus, at a local hospital, and in family court.
National reports show that only 29% and 37% of Black and poor families report that their child’s school offers counseling and other support services, compared to 52% and 59% of their white, more affluent peers. Baldwin’s wellness center and its connection to families are a stark contrast.
From January through March of this year, the wellness center hosted more than 600 sessions for the predominantly Black and Latino district — ranging from peer conflicts, which psychologists say have made it harder for children to deal with after the isolation caused by the pandemic, to divorce, cyberbullying and symptoms of anxiety and depression.
Large racial and class disparities in K-12 mental health care linked to absenteeism
In group and individual therapy, often based on art, children learned how to set goals, make compromises, and practice role-playing in interactions with mean people or conflicts with friends.
“I think you can make me happy again,” a six-year-old child told a clinician, who had begun the sessions by saying she was sad and “depressed.”
The fact that families can access health services on campus, without the hassle of wait lists or insurance issues, has made all the difference for families, even during times of extreme uncertainty.
Last school year, a mother at Lenox Elementary School received a phone call that her 10-year-old son had said in class that he wanted to commit suicide.
“I was at a standstill,” she told The 74, recalling that she immediately left work to hug her son and talk to the school social worker. She discovered that he felt socially marginalized and left out, and she knew he was more prone to exploding than her other children, but she didn’t know that he was hiding suicidal thoughts because he didn’t want to make her sad.
The Jamaican family, whose names have not been used for privacy reasons, were among the first to be served at the spa. Initially fearful to begin with, with an image in mind of being forced to sit on a couch and talk to a stranger, her son changed his tune after the first of about 20 therapy sessions, during which he used drawing as a way to express harder emotions.
“I love it. It’s not like the movies. It’s fun.”
Today he sleeps better, has less intrusive thoughts, knows how to notice bad feelings and talk about them when they come up. He has taken some of the resources home with him, like Lego, stuffed animals, drawings and stickers. In his friendships he doesn’t take things so personally or overreact anymore.
In 2019, the graduation rate in the district, where more than a quarter are considered low-income, was 95 percent. By 2023, that had risen to 99 percent, 12 percent above the national average. The number likely has something to do with Baldwin’s emphasis on how students feel about school, which reflects whether kids feel connected to each other, their work, and their place.
Research confirms that belonging is also essential in curbing risky behaviors in adolescents, such as drug use and violence.
In a first-grade classroom, near the end of the school year, a group of Baldwin Elementary students sat cross-legged, listening intently to each other repeat a wellness skill they had “loved” or “learned” during the year. Together, they held a “breathing ball”—taking deep breaths as they imagined the ball filling with air in their hands, slowly expanding and contracting.
One of them said softly that when he was upset at home he remembered the “singing bowl” – metal, sometimes filled with water, that released a calming frequency when struck with wood – and that it made him feel better.
The wellness teacher encouraged him to create or visualize his own version at home, urging, “remember, you can go anywhere in your imagination.”
