Compassion Fatigue Springfield Local Schools
Springfield Local Schools is fortunate to collaborate with Bowling Green State University and educational colleagues throughout the region with the innovative “Project Impact” partnership. We have featured information in previous updates and newsletters on all the resources, professional development opportunities and additional programming that the collaboration brings to our staff (and eventually our students). The title of Project Impact’s next program, “Compassion Fatigue” really got me thinking and motivated this week’s message.
I’m an English teacher by training, so I usually like to research and include definitions of words and phrases in my messages. Again this week as I began writing, I used Google to assist with the definition of “compassion.” The word literally means “to suffer together.” Among emotion researchers, it is defined as, “the feeling that arises when you are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to relieve that suffering. Compassion is not the same as empathy or altruism, though the concepts are related.”
We have all been suffering together. Few of us have been spared a text, phone call or email that announced that a loved one or friend was affected by the coronavirus - whether it was through illness, job loss or by the many ways it has changed our ways of life. The people in your lives–especially those in education whose life’s work is to nurture, feel helpless when we can’t make things better. We are indeed fatigued– school staff for sure, but also students, parents and our partners–not one of us is immune. Our mutual fatigue has emerged as frustration, anger and for some an increase in feelings of sadness and depression. I talk to so many staff, students and parents who are just tired of having to “understand/accept all the changes.” This week I received sev
This week I received several short messages of thanks from parents and staff. Many cited previous emails in which they had expressed their disagreement with a decision or direction I had made and my effort to reply–always with an invitation to meet to discuss their issues in person. Most writers wanted to recognize that we are going through unprecedented times and to thank us for putting the health and safety of our students and staff at such a high priority. Few believe that the decisions we’ve made have been easy ones–and I want everyone to know that we appreciate this compassion.
I wish I could say that navigating this next week, or the week after, will be any easier. I’m going to borrow these words from author Whitney Johnson, “Difficulties we don’t deserve happen to all of us. Yet, when we dream, we begin to make meaning of these challenges. We give ourselves hope, and we can hope that the sorrow and pain we’ve walked through will help lighten someone else’s load.”
