Tuesday, September 18, 2001

Small hearts, big fears
Education majors help young students cope with terrorist attacks
By Jordan Blum
Staff Reporter

A plane falls on a bystander as fire spews from the top floors of one of the twin towers in a crayon drawing by Kevin Barkin, 8, a third grader at Grapevine Elementary Schoo.

Lindsay Barnard, a senior elementary education major, said she has had to subdue her own fears about the terrorist attacks while explaining the events of the past week to her students.

“It’s the first time we’ve been in a situation like this,” Barnard said. “Now I’m the teacher, and I have to realize that I’m no longer the kid anymore who needs to be comforted.”

Senior education majors involved in student teaching programs at the Mary Louise Phillips Child Care Center said they’ve had to take the role of teacher and mentor to help their students cope with their fear of the unknown.

Jane Vonhoff, a senior special education major, said explaining the basic facts of the terrorist attacks and reassuring her first graders of their safety was enough to put her students at ease.

“The teachers and school counselor told the kids it was a real bad thing and they understood that the nation was scared,” Vonhoff said. “But we also made supreme efforts to make the kids feel safe and let them know Fort Worth isn’t the next target.”

Erin Savage, a senior early childhood education major, said she was surprised at how much her kindergarten class understood the attacks and how concerned they were for their own safety.

“(The children) knew a lot and they said a plane crashed into a building and there were bad people and that kind of thing,” Savage said. “But they were really concerned about whether the bad people were coming to get them. So we spent a lot of time telling them we were there to keep them safe and that the school was very safe.”

Kristen Wright, a senior elementary education major said, “At one point there was a plane that flew overhead because an air force base is close to the school and it scared us all to death,” Wright said. “I just froze and my heart was going crazy and the kids were just saying, ‘The plane, the plane that crashed into the building.’ And they’d just repeat that over and over.”

Ranae Stetson, an education professor specializing in early childhood, said the student teachers did a good job explaining the facts to the kids and preserving their psychological safety through consistency and routine.

Savage said she talked to her class about the attacks, but focused on keeping her class on a normal schedule complete with recess and all the daily classes.

Becky Taylor, director of the counseling program for the School of Education, said it is difficult for schools to be kept routine when the parents of the children are panicking.

“I heard at some schools the parents were coming in all panicked and talking about World War III (which made) their kids panic,” Taylor said.

Vonhoff observed similar reactions from parents, she said.

“One parent came in a panic mode, who is normally very proper and business-like, and she nearly ripped her kid’s arm off,” Vonhoff said. “She’d probably never seen her mother like that in her life and she got scared. The look in the little girl’s eyes was pure panic.”

Taylor said it is important for parents to realize that their young children need to be told the truth, but they only need basic information and can become traumatized when placed in front of the news coverage for hours at a time.

Stetson said children learn from repetition and that can be dangerous when children see too much of the news about the terrorist attacks.

“When young children repeatedly see the plane go into the building from different angles they can’t differentiate that it’s one event they’re showing multiple times,” Stetson said. “With (the children) it’s happening each time as a new event. The fear escalates for them with each time the plane hits.”

Jordan Blum
jdblum@student.tcu.edu