Mental health support offered to Cobb students, parents during school safety town hall at McEachern

POWDER SPRINGS, Ga. — The trauma that comes with and from school violence is very real, not just for students but their parents too.

At a Cobb County school safety town hall, a mental health support team is prepared to provide resources.

Channel 2 Cobb County Bureau Chief Michele Newell was at McEachern High School, the site of a shooting from early February, where the town hall was set to take place.

The mental health support team at McEachern High School offered self-help guides and other resources to students and parents coming to the town hall.

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The event is a direct result of what students and parents say they want, as multiple shootings have put parents, students and school staff on edge.

An emergency alert for a school shooting is a call no parent wants to get.

Lola Adesany, a parent of a student at McEachern High, spoke to Channel 2 Action News about her fears regarding school safety, even weeks after the incident.

“I texted him and told him I’m coming to get him because he was anxious and scared,” Adesany said.

Her son has attention deficit disorder and struggles with anxiety, she told Newell. He was inside the school when a fight and shooting broke out in the parking lot.

Weeks later, he’s adjusting to virtual learning.

“He doesn’t feel safe going back to school,” Adesany said.

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For others in Cobb, acknowledging the fear and trauma is part of the process to feeling safer and healing.

“I think it’s really important that we acknowledge the trauma,” Irene Barton, the executive director of the Cobb Collaborative, said. “Healing is going to look different for everybody and we must honor that.”

Barton’s team was providing students and parents with mental health support at the safety town hall at McEachern High School Thursday night.

“We need to acknowledge their experiences, learn the language. I know this is hard. I now this is difficult, let’s talk about it,” Barton said.

Barton said her team was prepared to give students and parents what they need to start processing the trauma they’re experiencing.

“We will definitely be able to direct them to some community-based resources,” including, Barton said “mental healthcare providers that operate on a sliding scale if insurance is an issue.”

For Adesany, the healing process looks different because of what she told Channel 2 Action News she and her son experienced the day of the shooting.

Adesany told Newell she pulled her son out of school due to their safety concerns. She said it has a lot to do with the hurdles she went through reuniting with him after the shooting at McEachern High School.

She said she wasn’t able to reunite with her son until almost 1 a.m. the next day because the Cobb County School District didn’t know where he was. She even filed a missing persons report with police.

“He wasn’t found until almost the next day,” Adesany said. “They checked the campus and they said they couldn’t find him with everything that was going on. There was nothing they could do.”

Adesany said she first knew something was wrong when her son didn’t get off the school bus. When the district told her to pick her son up from the bus stop, not the reunification center, she says she drove to the school.

After filing a missing persons report with police, Adesany said it wasn’t much help so she put her son’s picture on social media. Hours later, someone on the Next Door app found her son.

“It’s been extremely traumatic,” Adesany said. “He doesn’t feel safe going back to school but at the same time he missed being around people so it’s unfair that he is not able to be in his own school. I don’t feel like they have enough measures in place. Since this has happened they have closed some of the gates but it’s just a very open campus.”

Newell asked Cobb County School District officials what they’ve changed since the shooting. They sent a statement reading “To keep children safe, we cannot discuss specific safety measures at any school. We can say, simply: police officers across the county, and the investments we have made into our schools, keep students as safe as possible.”

In the meantime, the school safety townhall is underway and the main topic tonight is mental health, helping students and parents get through this.

We’ll have more on the topic after the town hall on WSB Tonight at 11.

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