A time of grieving for area high school students

After two local teenagers died in a car crash Monday afternoon, support and condolences poured in on Tuesday. Two 15-year-olds were killed at the intersection of 45th W. and 17th S. Both were students at Skyline High School.

This has been a rough few months with local students having to deal with death this year.

“A lot of times, it’s allowing them some opportunities to even be by themselves or if there’s a group of them together to allow them just to talk regarding what happened. The people they’ve known that may have passed on or been involved with the incident itself,” said Lloyd Becker, the mental health crisis team leader for the Bonneville School District.

“Sometimes it’s kind of hard, because sometimes we don’t know the students we just know it affects the community and so the smallest things we can do — because we don’t have a ton in our power — but what we can do is make a poster, we can show support, and reach out to those that we know. And I think that by doing the small things it’s a chain reaction, and it helps the other students do the little things they can and then make a big difference,” said Bonneville High School’s student body service project coordinator, Emily Russon.

In a tragic situation such as this, it affects students even outside the district. This is something guidance counselors from different school districts also have to be aware of.

“The first thing we look at is when the incident has occurred in another district what the overflow is to kids that have been associated with the individual in the other district. You can see what kind of effects that’s having in the schools within our district,” Becker said.

“I think the biggest thing that we’ve realized is even though me and Emily may not know who they are or anybody in our student council knows who they are, there’s definitely hundreds of people that do know who they are. As we’ve seen with several of these tragedies that have happened in our community, it’s affected the entire town one way or the other,” said Bonneville High School’s 2017-2018 student body president, Harper Clayton. “I think it’s important for us to show that we are one town. That we are all in this together and it’s a community deal. So we try and show our support for those that are grieving, for those that are lost because Bonneville’s gone through a loss and we’ve seen other schools go through a loss — we know how it feels.”

Grief counselors are on hand in different schools and districts to help students cope with the recent news.