“There are no words” read the weekly newsletter that arrived home in my child’s backpack. The photocopied memo, which I’ve kept, was from Jodi Weisbart, my son’s kindergarten teacher at PS 3, our elementary school in downtown Manhattan. In the handwritten note, dated September 12, 2001, Jodi acknowledged in a brief few sentences the tragic events of the previous day with great sensitivity, modeling how we might begin to broach the questions of our children. While there were, in fact, no words left to say, I was struck by the effort to produce a newsletter at all. In the next days, she and the school worked toward restoring regular classes and offering support to families, as we made plans to accommodate displaced students and teachers from neighboring schools adjacent to Ground Zero.
Jodi, now Weisbart Mahoney, is again facing students’ questions in the wake of a senseless, violent act, this time as the principal of Greenbrook Elementary School in South Brunswick, NJ. Kids need to know “You are OK, your family is OK. That’s where we need to ground ourselves,” at the elementary level, she says. “Yet we honor what they’re feeling and don’t dismiss it. And we partner with parents. We’d love to know what books you could recommend about resilience.”
If you have any titles you’d like to share, please contribute in the comments to “Why Did It Happen? Books to Help Kids Cope with Tragedy.” We share, too: LGBTQ & You: How to Support Your Students and a poem by Cindy Clement Carlson, librarian at Sandy Hook (CT) School.
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