Three free videos. Real stories. Tools every educator can use — starting now.
Before the crisis comes, your staff can be ready.For a limited time, you can access samples of Cheri Lovre's proven crisis response trainings online.
No school expects to lose a student. Most eventually do. What happens in those first hours — what a teacher does with an empty desk, how a counselor understands what a grieving child actually needs, who reads the announcement and how — depends entirely on whether everyone is prepared.
Three Videos. Three Critical Moments.
One Place to Start.
These aren’t generic grief resources. Each of the three videos in this bundle is built around a real story from Cheri Lovre’s decades of school crisis work. Together they address three of the hardest, most critical moments a school faces after a student dies.
Each video stands alone. All three together create a foundation your staff can return to again and again.
Who This Bundle Is For
School counselors and social workers
who want practical, immediately usable tools to help their staff and students through tragedy, and who will champion this resource once they see it.
Superintendents and district leaders
who need a effective, efficient use of Professional Development time, and a no-risk entry point to a larger conversation about crisis readiness.
Principals and building administrators
who want to prepare their staff before the school year starts, not scramble after something has already happened.
Classroom teachers and all building-level staff
who will be on the front lines when a student death occurs — and who deserve to know what to do before they’re asked to do it.
Crisis team and flight team members
who know the value of shared language and structure to ensure smooth collaboration across districts or regions.
Any school or district
approaching summer or fall PD planning that wants to use that window to build real capacity.
What's in the Video Bundle
VIDEO 1
What to Do with the Empty Desk
When a student dies, one of the first and most visible questions a teacher faces is also one of the least talked about: what do you do with that desk?
The instinct is to make the absence disappear. Rearrange the room. Remove the desk before the children arrive. Move on.
This video shows a different way. Through the story of a special education classroom after a sudden student death, viewers see what it looks like to leave the desk in place — to make it a gathering point for cards and letters and flowers — and to involve students in deciding together when and how it should be moved. The custodian who comes to take the desk while the children are present creates a moment of storytelling and ritual that would be lost entirely if the desk had been gone before they arrived.
For teachers: A concrete, compassionate practice they didn’t know they needed.
For administrators: A building-wide protocol that can be taught, communicated, and shared.
VIDEO 2
Tasks of Grief
Have you heard of the Stages of Grief? This video provides a framework that introduces a task-based model of grief that is actionable, non-linear, and child-centered. The tasks — hearing the truth, putting words to the loss, gathering with other people, engaging in some form of life tribute — don’t happen in order. Different students need different support at different times.
Understanding this framework changes what adults look for and offer. It opens up a question most counselors have never thought to ask: What does this death mean to you?
For counselors: A framework they are unlikely to already have, and a new way of understanding what children (and adults) actually need.
For administrators: A clear explanation of why structural supports — a safe room, space to process the announcement, guidance on how students source information — aren’t optional extras. They are the response.
VIDEO 3
The Student Announcement
When a student dies, someone has to tell the other students. Standing in front of a classroom with a prepared statement is one of the most anxiety-inducing moments in all of school crisis response.
Teachers are handed a script and asked to deliver it. Some are deeply reluctant. Some freeze. Almost none have been prepared.
This video follows one teacher who said, flatly, “This is not in my job description” — and who, one year later, said “Those are my kids. Nobody gets in my room right now.” That transformation didn’t happen by accident. It happened because she was better prepared and not left to do it alone.
The video makes clear: teachers don’t have to read the announcement themselves. A trained team member can be in the room with them. What matters is that they’ve thought about it before the day arrives.
For teachers: It’s not unusual to feel anxiety or reluctance, but they can feel confident in moving forward with supporting their students.
For administrators: A clear model for what it looks like to prepare your staff in August for something that might happen in October — and why that investment of time pays off entirely.
Take the Next Step
A Foundation, Not a Ceiling
This bundle is the beginning of the CMI online program, not the whole of it.
When you download these three videos, you’ll see that there are more than a dozen additional videos in the full program — covering the breadth of what schools need to do well in crisis: preparing all staff, equipping administrators, building and sustaining a Flight Team. What you experience here is, in Cheri’s words, only the tipping point.
For schools ready to go further, the full CMI program offers a complete, coherent, multi-year system for crisis readiness at every level. And for schools waiting on grant funding to get there: this bundle doesn’t require a grant. You can start right now.
How to Use This Bundle
The free bundle is designed to fit into your existing Professional Development time — before the school year begins. It’s flexible by design.
You can use it to:
> Show one video with a 15-minute guided discussion, and call that enough for now.
> Work through all three videos with structured group activities in a focused two-hour PD block.
> Let administrators and counselors preview it independently over the summer, then bring it to staff in the fall.
Each video comes with facilitator guidance and activity options, so you decide how much time to spend and which conversations to open. There’s no required sequence, no minimum commitment, and no wrong way to start.
The bundle is designed to be used before a crisis — when staff can absorb what they’re learning without the weight of something already happening. People learn best when they’re not under duress. That’s the whole point of doing this now.
Take the First Step — Before You Need To
Every school will face tragedy.
The question is only whether your people will be ready when it arrives.
Download the free bundle today. Use it this summer. Walk into the new school year knowing your staff has a shared foundation for one of the hardest things you’ll ever face together.
