By Amere Dorsey with SGJC Student News Network
Hearts are heaving right now after the small town of Uvalde,Texas is mourning after a gunman shot and killed 19 students and two teachers yesterday. Also, while injuring 16 others.
Innocent lives have been taken away after a gunman entered the Robb Elementary School and opened fire.
This has been the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012.
After speaking to child trauma expert Shannon McCullough,from Center of Hope, she feels just like others when she heard about what happened in Texas.
“I was devastated to hear that so many children lost their lives, so many families are waking up today just grieving such a big and heavy loss and just thinking about how the community is going to be affected by that in Texas and you know across the world.” McCullough said.
We cannot make situations like this normal but we do have to be prepared for it because this is not the first time and quite frankly it might not be the last.
While this is something that seems to be so unbelievable McCullough went on to say, “It reminded me that violence is so prevalent in our community in our society and just thinking as a parent or a therapist it's really important to me to figure out how to work with kids so that they can try and process that so it doesn't become traumatic for them.”
School shootings can be devastating, and we might not be able to wrap our heads around it. With these tragedies being in the classroom, the elementary classroom we must find ways to be able to talk to young children about it.
“It's important to prepare yourself for that conversation. Make sure that you as the parent of the caregiver or the adult or the adult in the child's life… make sure that you as the adult are regulated, that you have checked your own emotions, that you know how you feel about what's going on. And that when you sit down and have these conversations with your children that you are in a place where you can have them kind of without breaking down and activating them more and then you want to gather information and provide children with age appropriately honest information.”