KEYSTONE HEIGHTS – Their young faces were desperate for answers. Their eyes were red and puffy from crying. They hugged, hoping, as a group, they could summon the strength to find peace from the unspeakable pain a child feels about the unfairness of death.

So they gather, holding hands in a parking lot, in school hallways, on neighborhood corners and at a funeral, each looking to regain some sense of normalcy.

In time, they will remember the horrible days around the first of September. They will go to prom, graduate and start lives of their own. But for now, they hurt, with many looking for an outlet to vent their frustration and confusion.

The Clay County District Schools has a team that supports schools dealing with tragedies. Five counselors were at Keystone Heights Junior/Senior Highs last week after freshman Ryder Trull sustained severe injuries in a car crash on Aug. 26 on State Road 100. His sister was treated and released, but he was airlifted to Shands Hospital in Gainesville with critical head injuries, where the junior varsity football quarterback remains in the Intensive Care Unit.

Then, on Sept. 1, Ayden Graff, 17, was killed in a head-on collision near the Gainesville Airport.

“No one solution fits all,” said District Coordinator of Mental Health Support Melissa Moree. “You have so many different resources and answers for complex areas of tragedy. We have training for dealing with grief and mental health needs. And a lot of times, regardless of the situation around grief, the treatment of grief tends to be the same. It’s a lot of listening.”

The Mental Health Support team has a flexible approach since the department deals with various economic, societal and detailed cases.

“So all of our mental health clinicians have education and training to understand that we really listen first,” said Melissa White, Supervisor of Mental Health Support. “We don’t run to fix things. We really listen first and figure out what the community’s response is. Then, we do our best to support those particular children and communities in the way they need. With all that being said, maybe the quick and dirty part would be that we listen, understand the needs, and have many different skills. We have tools, and we use whatever tools we think will be most appropriate for that student and that community in that environment and that situation.”

Keystone Heights was an unusual assignment because it involved separate issues. Trull was in the ICU on Monday, Sept. 9, during Graff’s funeral. A day later, the school decided to cancel the rest of its junior varsity football season.

“There’s no definition of what someone should do when they grieve,” White said. “Everyone is entitled to their own grief process and their own feelings. It’s our job as mental health clinicians to support whatever that looks like for that person, as long as they’re not a danger to themselves or someone else or doing anything that’s going to self-harm or be really destructive in the process. You assure them that it’s OK. It’s OK to be sad. It’s OK to grieve. You tell them it’s a normal part of the process.”

Moree said that if she’s working with younger children, she often brings activities to create safe spaces for them to express their feelings. She said younger students are often more relaxed and able to talk when coloring or using building blocks.

“We might color with them while we chat,” Moree said. “Listening is normalizing. They need to know nothing is wrong.”

Despite their training, White and Moree said it’s not easy to see young lives dealing with grief and not be affected by it.

“We’re all humans first,” White said.

Counselors often have counseling sessions themselves to decompress the anguish and pain they experience in their daily duties.

“There might be some people on our care team who are personally affected by things that happen in our county, and then we have the abilities to support those people,” White said. “We have a rotating team of different people who can come out and support our schools. So we have a very robust system in place, not only for our care teams to be deployed to help the schools who have experienced some tragedy, but also we have some who support our staff.”