a talk FEATURES Lamplighter: 24
ALLEN-STEVENSON’S EMPHASIS ON S U P P O RT I N G T H E W H O L E B OY A Talk from the Wellness Series Panel on April 5, 2022 By Dr. Michael Schwartzman, Consulting School Psychologist and Co-Author, with Elena Lister MD, Giving Hope: Conversations with Children About Illness, Death, and Loss (Publication date August 2022. Penguin Random House)
It has always been apparent to me that Allen-Stevenson is an extremely caring community. Throughout my 29 years here, the heart of the School has always been the partnership that the faculty, staff, and administration, and now CL+D, too, have with our parents, in support of our boys and their families. The communal interest, which always focused on academic achievement, importantly, also has stressed the whole boy, the individual boy, the caring boy. Together, we always placed this focus within the context of what is happening in the larger environment around the boys. As Mr. Trower has always reminded us, during the hard times that inevitably befall, our tradition and practice of supporting and caring for the student and his family require great consideration of what he goes through, personally and communally. And in my tenure here at A-S, we have lived through many hard times. I remember many, many years ago, as I waited to begin a 4th-grade Parent Connection meeting, I wondered about how to counsel a group of parents, one of whom had lost her husband to a heart attack just the night before. My childhood
Dr. Michael Schwartzman
friend, who was a 4th-grade parent and, at the time, was the current head of the Parents Association, came over to me and said, “Michael, we don’t want to talk about how to talk with a child about death. We need to use this time to plan for what this family is going to need.” And they did. We sat together and talked through 9/11, personal catastrophes, natural disasters, and the pandemic as we do now. During such times in the past, we have talked as a community about our children’s needs and especially about the emotional well-being of the community. The guiding principle has always been that if our boys can’t feel well socially and emotionally, it is much harder for them to focus and learn academically. And so too with this pandemic. What is exciting to me is how, once again, parent and school actively partner to support each other’s efforts. Today, we have the privilege of having two parents, both mental health practitioners, who will talk with us about what to look out for in our children, children they know personally, that might indicate underlying stress and anxiety, and what you as parents might do in response. We have an
