Tragedies can teach lessons
EDUCATION Choctaw sees more than its share of deaths

BY JESSE OLIVAREZ

Published: October 6, 2008

Donny Black’s notepad appears nonthreatening. It’s a book of white pages with notes scribbled throughout. But each time Black has to pick it up, dread fills his heart.

It means something terrible has happened at Choctaw High School.

Black is the principal at Choctaw, a school of about 1,000 students that has struggled through 10 deaths in the past eight years.

This calendar year, the district has lost three members. A popular teacher and coach was killed in a motorcycle wreck. A 16-year-old girl died in a car accident. A junior wrestler was found dead in August, the cause yet to be explained by authorities.

The events left the school community rattled and Superintendent Jim McCharen putting the district’s all-too-familiar grieving plan into action.

"Unfortunately we’ve had far too much practice,” McCharen said in August after the most recent death. "We’ve had the procedures down pretty good because we’ve had to implement them so often.”

Since 2001, the school district has had 16 students and teachers die — 10 at the high school and six at elementary schools. There have been drownings and car wrecks and murders.

McCharen, superintendent since 2002, balks at any notion that bad luck or some unexplained, unknown forces might be behind the deaths. He figures tragedies happen anywhere and everywhere.

Tragedies just seem to happen a lot in the Choctaw school system, and it takes its toll on all involved, McCharen said.

Not only on current students and teachers, but former teachers who remember their old students quite well.

The challenge for administrators is to strike a balance between letting the community grieve properly and maintaining order so the school year can continue.

Enter Black’s notepad. With each death, Black, the principal since 2001, scribbles down notes.

Once he jotted down the words "PHONE SYSTEM” after the grieving parents of a deceased student got a call from the school’s automated phone system informing them their child hadn’t been in school for several days.

Writing down notes helps ensure mistakes like that don’t happen again, Black said.

It also helps him stay focused on keeping the school moving forward.

"You can’t do it by yourself,” Black said. "It takes a lot of people to deal with the situation.”

McCharen said those people include school counselors and pastors from local churches, who combine their efforts to comfort families and friends of those who died.

Still, the superintendent remains hopeful the tragedies will end and Black’s notepad never sees light again.

Comments