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Children and trauma: a post-Katrina and Rita response.

Article Excerpt
Many children have struggled to cope with the traumatic experiences brought about by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. This article recounts how the authors intervened in the lives of children and families after the storms.

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Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were powerful forces of nature that devastated the lives of many children and their families. Feelings of insecurity, powerlessness, confusion, and depression were common, as homes, workplaces, and schools were destroyed or left uninhabitable. Communities and their schools welcomed displaced families, including nearly 240,000 schoolchildren (Pascopella, 2005), while struggling to meet the demand for additional resources. Among those first in line to aid families and their attempts to recover were professional school counselors (PSCs).

Recognizing the needs of those impacted by the storm was the impetus for this article. In the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita, PSCs worked feverishly to assist established and newly relocated students, parents, and colleagues. As counselors and consultants, we conducted brief workshops during the storm's aftermath to assist PSCs with intervention strategies. We also were involved in counseling K-12 students and their families, as well as supervising school counseling internship students. This article weaves reports of these actual experiences with informational data. A case study also is provided to exemplify the difficulties one child faced in the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

INTERVENTION STRATEGIES

A goal of any intervention following a traumatic event is to help students and their families begin to recover from the trauma, which typically requires a safe and trusting environment. Because routine fosters a sense of safety and security in children (New York University Child Study Center, 2005), PSCs must collaborate with faculty and administrators to facilitate a return to some type of school-based routine. After the hurricanes, many displaced parents enrolled their children in new schools. This was a good decision for many, because it allowed their children to return to a routine and regain a sense of normalcy, which led to increased feelings of safety and security. PSCs were instrumental in helping these students transition to new schools following both storms.

In the aftermath of the hurricanes, the PSCs we...