Bus crashes, bushfires and deaths: How schools deal with life-changing trauma

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After a bus carrying 27 students and several teachers collided with a truck and rolled several times down an embankment, Loreto College Ballarat principal Michelle Brodrick rushed to the hospital.

Deputy principal Christine Shaw stepped up to run things back at the school. “One of our challenges was, where was everybody? We weren’t at the scene,” she said of the crash last September near Bacchus Marsh.

Loreto College Ballarat principal Michelle Brodrick (left) and deputy principal Christine Shaw.Credit: Liz Crothers

“We knew people were going to hospital, but we didn’t know where all our children were and all our families were, so we were just trying to get together and work out, where is everybody, what’s actually happened, and what do we do from there?”

Shaw said the 147-year-old school had never experienced trauma like it. “Obviously lots of schools have trauma through the years – it could be the loss of a staff member or the loss of a student for various reasons – but something on this scale, we had 31 people impacted in such a critical moment where it’s very life-changing.”

All schools have critical incident management plans and teams, but when disasters strike, there is a broader system to help schools stay open and students and staff to heal.

Shaw said the Department of Education, Catholic Education, the Loreto Ministries, local schools and police all pitched in, communicating with families, providing counselling and offering teachers.

The Victorian Education Department’s Incident Support and Operations Centre. Credit: Jason South

“We felt straight away, not only did we have our school incident team, but we had all these external supports who kicked into place,” Shaw said.

Victoria’s 24/7 school crisis team is probably the most sophisticated in the country, says Simon Milligan, the Education Department’s executive director of security and emergency management.

The department’s Incident Support and Operations Centre helps principals deal with issues such as break-ins, severely disruptive student behaviour, aggressive parents, nearby fires, road accidents and student deaths. It works with Catholic and independent schools when there’s a large-scale incident.

The five-year-old centre has huge screens monitoring live weather maps, news channels, school CCTV footage and security alarms. Social workers, psychologists and operators are on hand to support principals.

Simon Milligan in the Education Department’s incident management room.Credit: Jason South

“Everything that happens in society, in the community, impacts schools, and so schools are very much that focal point of the community,” Milligan said. “We have the backs of the schools, and we do our best to make sure that kids are looked after.”

Milligan, who has a background in psychology and the military, said most schools would have contact with the centre each year.

“We came out of the bushfires into COVID and then into floods, but the primary work is the day-to-day incidents,” he said.

“When an incident that’s more extreme or a high level comes through, that’s when we activate our incident management team and respond to that, and we’ve had three in the past three weeks.”

These three were the horrific bus crash on Melbourne’s western fringe involving students and staff of Exford Primary School, the fatal stabbing of 16-year-old Pasawm Lyhym in Sunshine and a car crash near Hamilton in the state’s south-west that killed three teenagers and an adult.

Incident management teams bring together different parts of the department – such as legal, communications and employee safety and wellbeing – to help schools with logistics, planning and recovery. They send in counsellors, communicate with families and staff, help ease students into their return to school and devise long-term recovery plans.

Cyberattacks on schools have also become more common in the past 18 months, Milligan said. “All different sorts of challenges ranging from kids doing the wrong thing and getting into school systems, through to genuine hostile threats from overseas actors who will through whatever means hack into a school, do ransomware attacks.”

Natural disasters are an increasing problem, too. “As the increasing threat particularly around natural disasters has been in place, the focus on making sure schools are safe in emergencies has become really important. It wasn’t as much of a focus 30 years ago, 20 years ago,” he said.

Sandbagging at St Joseph’s school in Rochester with principal Liz Trewick during the 2022 floods.Credit: Justin McManus

Liz Trewick is principal of St Joseph’s school in Rochester in northern Victoria, which was devastated by floods last year. Students are back at the school, though not all buildings are repaired and the trauma remains. “It’s just a constant for everyone,” she said.

Trewick said the school was focused on communicating with families and maintaining routines. Catholic education is providing wellbeing support for children and working on rebuilding the school.

“We’re not just working with the children to improve their outcomes in maths and literacy, but we’ve got a higher level of wellbeing that we need to care for,” she said.

“And when children are not coping with things, their behaviour changes. And that’s OK because we just keep changing to meet those needs.”

Year 12 student Sienna Gladstone, an executive on the Victorian Student Representative Council, said her school brought in a trauma counsellor to support its own wellbeing team after a student died by suicide.

“My school made the greatest decision to bring in the trauma counsellor. And for those who didn’t feel comfortable talking to a stranger, our wellbeing staff were there to offer support. They ensured that brochures and resources were sent out to families or placed on tables around the school,” she said.

“Through the trauma counsellor’s advice, we wrote letters to the friend that we lost. Having that person there, although a stranger, made us feel less alone.”

Suzanne Camm, Department of Education area executive director for the state’s south-west, said a long-term recovery plan was critical.

“Sometimes for really big things, that sometimes can be a one, two-year plan. Because we know that in really big events, unfortunately funerals come and that’s different from what we needed when the event just happened,” she said.

“We know that big anniversaries like 12-month anniversaries of really tragic accidents need additional support.”

Loreto Ballarat’s Shaw said: “I think the essence of it is that schools are communities, connected communities, they really do support each other. I’ve been at lots of different schools and been involved in different critical incidents and seen that in spades.”

Crisis support is available from Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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