Healing at Annunciation

When a playground ball hit the window of Annunciation Catholic School’s staff lounge, the teachers froze.

“Annoying in any other year. But then this year,” said Dean of School Culture Deana Clapp.

Following the Aug. 27, 2025 shooting that killed two students and injured 29 others, normal moments have become reminders.

“We carpeted almost the entire building, just to keep the sound and echo down,” said Clapp. The sound of a dropped water bottle, popped balloon, or ball hitting a window is still triggering for students and staff.

Only 20 days after the shooting, kids returned to campus for school. Last school year was about attempting something unprecedented: returning to a school building where two murdered children’s desks sit empty. To do this, Annunciation partnered with Washburn Center for Children. Together, they started with intensive intervention. But over the school year, they progressed towards a new normal, despite a midyear setback.

350 different paths
Washburn Center for Children Chief Clinical Officer Jenny Britton set out on a difficult task. “The community itself is in recovery and healing, but you have 350 different people who are on their own individual paths,” she said.

One of the first things teachers and counselors did was reexamine the curriculum. Britton said that curriculum changes are “not canceling something, but adapting.”

For example, the class hermit crab. “Those creatures don’t have a long lifespan. We had to step back and say, ‘Can we do this? Are we going to cause discomfort when the hermit crab dies? Do we want that?’” Clapp questioned.

Even the free-throw contest at the end of gym class for a bottle of Gatorade – a long-standing school tradition – has been reconsidered.

“It’s always happened: somebody doesn’t make it, they get upset and start to cry. Now there’s just a little bit more talking about that.” She said teachers have had to reframe the lesson to “if you don’t make it today, you might make it tomorrow.”

Books, too, prompted a moment of pause. Every year at Annunciation, the eighth graders read a book that features gun violence. This year, they had the kids vote on whether they were ready for that project, and how it would be graded.

“At some point they’re going to read something and hear something that involves gun violence. How do we do that safely within our school?” Britton said.

Heavy work
Another aspect of acute response was making therapy part of school. Deana Clapp took a group of fifth-grade boys out of class every day for something she dubbed “heavy work.”

“I picked them up at one o’clock for three months straight. We’d clean up, we’d move some stuff, and then they could play a little bit. They built all sorts of forts and things for the preschool. We shoveled all the block after a heavy snowstorm,” she said.

Britton said there is a clinical reason for heavy work. “When we activate the left and the right hemisphere of our brains – like when we walk or when we run, or when we play tag – it helps us reintegrate the body and the mind.”

Dean of Academic Excellence Sheila Loschy’s role has been to step in for teachers who need to attend therapy sessions.

“One day I stepped into a classroom, and some students said, ‘Our teacher had to leave for therapy.’ Then a kid said, ‘I went to therapy this morning,’ and somebody else was like, ‘I’m going after school today.’ Then, they asked, ‘Do you go to therapy? I told them, ‘I do go to therapy,’” she recalled.

Setback during metro surge
With any recovery, there will be setbacks – except Annunciation’s was larger than expected. Mid-school-year, Homeland Security’s Operation Metro Surge enveloped the city, leading to the murder of two protesters.

“Again, it’s gun violence,” said Clapp. “We did change our dismissal procedures. Shortly thereafter, we followed the protocol with Minneapolis schools and were closed for a day.”

Britton called this a “moral injury” for the kids.

“All of a sudden, you have increased police presence, guns, people being harmed, sirens going off,” all activators, according to Britton. When she spoke with kids, she said, “Your body might be remembering what it’s like to feel scared. Your body might be remembering what it’s like to see police officers. That is normal.”

Reclaiming campus
As the school year ended, Britton said Annunciation reached a midway point between acute response and stabilization.

“I loved it when a cheese stick was thrown across the eighth-grade table,” said Clapp. “I thought that was the best thing ever because that’s exactly what eighth graders do in the beginning of lunch before they know the expectations are going to be enforced.”

“Some days are just going to be really weird. Some days you’re going to think about it all day, some days you’re going to think about it 0% of the day,” said Britton.

Cheesesticks have become milestones. And this summer – even after the last school bell rang – kids and staff continued to reclaim campus as a safe space. For four weeks – two in June and two in August – over 100 kids returned for an academic summer camp. In total, 71% of kids returned to the campus over the summer.

Loschy faced funding problems early in the process, due to the autumn government shutdown.

“We were sitting in limbo until January when we decided that this is something our kids needed, and we were going to make it happen one way or another.” So, they dipped into their Hope and Healing Fund – a fund specifically for recovery from the shooting.

Once she settled funding, Loschy worried. “Will our own teachers want to do this and have capacity to do this?” Swiftly, Annunciation teachers raised their hands in meetings and via email to teach over the summer.

The first morning of the program in June was joyful. Math teacher Molly Means felt it was like back-to-school night, with “a lot of like happy reunions, friends who hadn’t seen each other for a little bit, teachers who were really excited to see the kids.”

On that morning of sleepy faces and grumbling, kids in Means’s sixth-grade math classroom snapped into gear once they started a puzzle race. “They were obsessed with the puzzles.” Later, for snack time, they made DNA strands out of gummy bears.

During the STEM block, kids K-8 gather all together for science. Loschy loves this time because she gets to “see the younger and older kids interacting together and kids who don’t see themselves as leaders stepping up to be leaders.”

Following STEM time, Braylen Nuah taught third-grade boys how to dribble and shoot a basketball during snack time. He started with this group of boys in the school year. Now, their whole class runs out of class to hug him and has dubbed him “Big Boy.”

Loschy has received feedback on the summer program from both parents and kids. She said, “The kids have established the school building as a place of safety and the staff as people of safety. For some kids, they’re like, ‘I will go to a summer camp at Annunciation, but no place else. I want people who know and understand me.”

So yes, there are carpeted floors and weird days – but there are also cheesesticks, giggles, and puzzle races.

Ben Aviles will be a senior at Blake School in fall 2026. He is editor-in-chief of The Spectrum, Blake’s school newspaper.