Peabody Public Schools Caring & Healing Committee

Overarching goal of the caring and healing plan: To help staff, students, and community members with grief recovery; especially, those who have been affected by the recent and sudden deaths of the superintendent of schools, assistant principal of the high school, and eighth grade student at the Higgins Middle School.

Volunteers needed! First meeting date: January 15, 2020,

4:00 p.m. Higgins Middle School Cafeteria

Action steps
1. Create a district caring and healing committee (DCH committee) that:

• includes volunteers from the comunity;
• includes volunteers from PTO and at least one staff member from each school;
• provides logistical and actual support which may include outreach to community and businesses, plan and coordinate help for schools, and outreach for financial support;
• meets regularly for three-five months and works with the superintendent to help implement the caring and healping plan.

2. Create and implement activities to provide grief recovery to staff at each of the schools. The plan will:

• provide light refreshments for breakfast and/or lunch for staff one day per week for the months of January and February;
• provide small room within each school for staff to have quiet time or reflective conversations with another staff member.(The rooms have snacks, paper, envelopes, stamps, journals, etc.)
• provide healing opportunities (individual or group) for the months of January – June.  These healing conversations will run before, during, or after school for staff members.
• provide self-care activities such as yoga and mindulness exercises weekly depending upon need and location.  The point is to help staff with their own social emotional self-awareness regarding stress, sadness, and well-being.

3. Create a caring and healing event in April open to the community and
school staff.

4. Create a caring and healing garden and grounds maintained by the
community, with benches and flowers located at a designated spot in the
city, by the end of May.

5. Provide support to school personnel who are providing grief recovery to
students.

Seven care and healing subcommittees

• Food and snacks: this committee coordinates staff breakfast and
  lunches at each school. Coordinate with community vendors who
  offer breakfast or lunch for 10 schools.
• Small private area: works with food and snack committee to ensure
  that private areas have snacks, journals, paper, stamps, envelopes,
  etc.
• Communication: this committee ensures that all activities of the
  caring and healing project are documented and communicated to the
  all stakeholders: writing thanks you notes, keeping blogs, tracking
  minutes and sharing them with all committees, making connections
  with newspapers, etc.
• Self-care activities: this committee coordinates where and when
  yoga, mindfulness, and/or meditation activities take place.
• Caring and healing event: this committee handles all logistics for the
  spring event.
• Caring and healing garden and grounds: this committee plans and
  helps coordinate the May event.
•  Project finance: this committee helps make connections with
  community businesses who will help underwrite portions of the
  caring and healing project.

Captains: each subcommittee will have a captain. Captains will coordinate
subcommittee work and will collaborate with other captains to handle all
logistics.

Captains work with the superintendent of schools to implement portions of the
caring and healing plan.

Categorized in: District