Collaborative assessment and healing in schools after large-scale terrorist attacks

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, as well as the strong possibility of future similar attacks have obliged school crisis responders in our country to rethink usual ways of helping. In planning CISM services in U.S. schools, it now may be practical and necessary to use large-group approaches to assessment and service planning similar to those provided in war-affected nations (Ressler, Tortorici, & Marcelino, 1993). This paper reports on an extension of the CISM approach in schools (Everly & Mitchell, 1999; Johnson, 2000a, 2002; Johnson, Casey, Ertl, Everly, & Mitchell, 1999) as a guide in developing large-scale assessments and action plans. Such actions may be led by school CISM teams in collaboration with school site teams. Examples of collaborative assessment and action planning are included from CISM team and training experiences in New York City, El Cajon and Long Beach, California.