A Colwood school is grieving following a weekend collision that claimed the life of a nine-year-old student.
The girl was travelling in the front seat when her father lost control of their vehicle and slammed into a hydro pole on Sunday morning on Shawnigan Lake Road. The girl was an atom player for Juan de Fuca Minor Hockey and the pair were travelling to one of her games at the time of the collision.
The girl was reportedly a well-liked student at Wishart elementary and had attended the school for multiple years.
On Monday, two members of Sooke School District’s critical incident response team, counsellors and on-call teachers were brought in to the grieving school to help students and staff deal with the tragedy.
“We met with the staff before school and shared the information for those who didn’t know what had happened and gave them some advice on how to talk to their kids about it,” said district superintendent Jim Cambridge.
Safe rooms were set up for students and teachers who needed extra support throughout the day. On-call teachers were able to give regular teachers a break who may have needed to gather themselves emotionally.
Cambridge spoke with a counsellor at the end of the day to find out how the kids were handling themselves.
“He said they were amazingly resilient, but that processing information like this is sometimes difficult for kids and so they may not act in the first day or two in the way you would expect them to,” Cambridge said. “What follows in the next week is really important for us to pay attention to.
“When (kids) are presented with very tragic news, they can process it, give it an emotion, and change very quickly into something else a couple minutes later, and then come back to that sad emotion again.”
School staff have had conversations about planning a memorial of some sort, but Cambridge said they will hold off and wait to hear what the family’s wishes might be.
joel.tansey@goldstreamgazette.com
