Scott County Schools and the Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families have teamed up to help students process grief in a healthy way.

It's something the center's executive director knows about firsthand.

We try to make sure we're addressing all the needs of our students, and we would be doing things for students that are dealing with grief from the loss of a loved one anyhow.

However, this is a very pinpoint, accurate, specific grant that's providing for the very targeted needs of these of these students that are dealing with these issues.

We are focused on peer support and group work, so we have school based work where children during the school day and their school settings, if they've had a significant loss and they're struggling with feelings of grief, they can attend these peer facilitated peer support groups at their school.

The Kentucky Association of Health Plans and New York Life Foundation are funding us to do a full two year expansion of this work in the Scott County schools.

We have we have almost 20 schools in our district, and we're going to be able to address the needs of students in eight of our schools.

The reason it's those eight schools is because of the targeted need.

We have students that meet the qualifications for this.

If we end up having needs in other schools that they can be flexible and we can make sure that students that that have some need to be a part of these groups get a chance to be a part of it.

Children who are grieving are also usually trying to protect their parent or caregiver because they know when they bring up dad's mom get sad.

The virtue of the school based approach is that the kids really can say and talk about what they need to talk about and not worry about, you know, how how a caregiver is going to react.

We've had students who would say at the end of group, I didn't really have any friends at school, but now I know there are people who have my back and can support me.

And I think especially for for any of us, but for kids, that is that is huge and something really important for them.

We're seeing an increased need for this and we see the connection to what that and what that need for students ends up resulting in how they might have different things that might come about from that.

You know, sometimes they end up in the juvenile justice system or or they have they have other needs that that come up.

And so this is an opportunity to try and approach them at that at the most, I guess, fragile point of need to try and address those concerns so that we don't we don't see them doing anything that manifests in a negative way in their life moving forward.

Learning to navigate grief is also, to me, a fantastic way of understanding how to live in the world, how to navigate tough circumstances when they come up, whether it's any kind of loss or something we wish hadn't happened.

If we can learn the skills of how to bounce back from that.

The Kentucky Center for Grieving Children and Families also has a community group in Lexington and an online teen group for people who have experienced loss.