Some hospices have increasingly recognized the value of collaborating with local educators when it comes to improving community grief support for bereaved children and their families.

Establishing collaborative relationships with educational institutions can help hospices ensure that they’re developing age-appropriate grief services, according to Cole Warner, director of support services at North Carolina-based Hospice of Davidson County. The nonprofit provides hospice services across 10 counties in its service area and also offers bereavement and veteran programs. 

The ability to identify and communicate grief-related emotions ranges across different age groups, and bereavement care teams need to be well-versed on youths’ cognitive capacity, Warner said. This involves having educators weigh in the common challenges that kids experience along their grief journeys.

“We do a lot of education, especially with younger kids, on emotions and feeling open to share with each other,” Warner told Hospice News. “We’ve communicated with local school counselors and social workers in the area to get the word out to the kids they work with and ask them what they see in their schools and what we can do with our grief programs specifically to better serve those kids.”

The hospice provider in 2019 launched a partnership with the Davidson County school system that has since expanded. 

Last summer marked the unveiling of a new grief program for children, teens and adolescents.

The program, Camp Comfort, was an effort several years in the making and developed in part as an extension of the hospice’s existing bereavement services fueled by stronger collaborations with local elementary, middle and high schools, Warner stated.

“We decided we would go into a different school each month and do a month-long, once-per week grief group for those in school that had lost someone,” he said. “The groups were a huge hit. What we found is that we created a really great relationship with quite a few different agencies in the process, including the school systems that work with youth. We actually started serving more and more children through our grief counseling programming. We really wanted to start this [grief camp] as an extension of that.”

Developing, sustaining school-based grief support

Children who do not receive grief care following a loved one’s loss can experience a range of complicated emotions that can pose challenges well into adulthood, research shows. Youths can experience prolonged grief disorder with symptoms including existential and identity issues, persisting distress reactions, behavioral regression and aggression, among others.

Having peer-based grief programs offers children, adolescents and teens a safe place to process a loss with others going through similar experiences and emotions, according to Jenny Sytkowski, bereavement coordinator at Hospice Alliance. The Wisconsin-based nonprofit provides hospice and supportive care as well as bereavement services.

“Children who have experienced the death of an important person sometimes want to be around others who have experienced something similar,” Sytkowski said in a press release. “We know that working through loss with the support of others can potentially teach resilience, empathy, creativity and perseverance. By honoring grief and integrating loss in healthy and meaningful ways, we can help support families.”

Hospice Alliance has operated a grief support group for nearly four years, which is offered to bereaved youths from age 2–18 years old and a trusted adult in their community. Dubbed as Connections – Planting Seeds of Hope, the services are available to anyone experiencing a loss, regardless of whether their loved one was a patient of the hospice.

The program has grown since its launch, in part as the hospice provider recognized barriers of access among children across its service region. Offering these services around local school system’s schedules has been an important part of bridging gaps of unmet bereavement needs, indicated Rita Hagen, executive director of Hospice Alliance.

The hospice’s support group is offered every third Thursday evening of each month, with the most recent iteration launching on October 17.

“After seeing a gap in service in our community, we launched Connections four years ago,” Hagen said in the announcement. “We follow the school calendar, offering the groups from October through May. We are excited to begin our third session in a few weeks after experiencing the program’s growth since its launch.”

Interdisciplinary grief teams need to be trained in various approaches to provide individualized support for children and youths, said ​​Cathy Stauffer Wozniak, executive director of Hospice & Palliative Care of Martha’s Vineyard (HPCMV).

Established in 1981, the Massachusetts-based nonprofit organization is located on an island seven miles off the state’s coast in the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to providing hospice and palliative care, HPCMV offers bereavement support such as individual and group counseling services.

The hospice has specialized training programs for social workers who provide grief counseling to children, an important part of bringing families together following a significant loss, Stauffer Wozniak said.

The hospice has developed a grief program in collaboration with local elementary and high schools. The one-day program, Camp By The Sea, is held at a local farm and offered at no cost to bereaved children, teens and their families and includes crafts, yoga, pottery, face painting, meditative sound baths and visits with farm animals, among other activities.

A key to school-based programs is understanding the range of unique bereavement needs that a local community may have, said Stauffer Wozniak. HPCMV’s remote location is a population vacation and retirement destination, with serious illnesses and tourism-related accidents leading causes of death in the community alongside addiction and suicide.

“We have a school-based grief program in high schools and elementary schools for children who have had a significant loss,” she said. “We do have accidents here on the island. We [also] have some drug and opioid use issues, and we have also seen pretty critical needs of some kids who have lost their parents or grandparents to suicides. That flows into crisis intervention, where we’re often called into the community or by the school or the hospital to help someone who’s had a sudden, terrible loss in their family.”