9/11 Funds Keep Counselors in Schools By Carl Glassman Normalcy long ago returned to the Lower Manhattan schools that children fled on Sept. 11, 2001. But demons from that day can still lurk in the young minds of some who were there. That is the view of the American Red Cross, which recently announced that, as part of its September 11 Recovery Program, it is providing $1.1 million to continue psychological services next school year at Downtown schools, among them P.S. 89, I.S. 89, P.S. 150 and Millennium High School. With a separate Red Cross grant of $240,000, Lower Manhattan's youth services provider, Manhattan Youth, will hold parent workshops and teen "life skills" seminars. The funding for Downtown schools is meant to maintain services that had been supported by Project Liberty, a federal program that ended last year. "We feel that the need for our services is not going away," said Spencer Eth, director of behavioral health services at St. Vincent's Hospital, whose psychologists have been counseling P.S. 89 students since soon after Sept. 11. Eth was among the mental health professionals who advised the Red Cross on continuing psychological services in the schools. "I don't want to give the impression that the majority need treatment," Eth said. "But that's not to say that there aren't substantial numbers of kids who do." "The effort is to find the people who are still suffering," said Randall Marshall, director of Trauma Studies and Services at Columbia University, who also advised the Red Cross. A study by Christine Hoven of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health found that six months after the terrorist attack, a smaller percentage of children closest to Ground Zero than of public school children in the rest of the city suffered anxiety and depressive disorders. Hoven speculated that a combination of factors, including immediate mental health intervention, may have made the difference. At P.S. 89 there are two full-time, Red Cross-funded counselors for 450 students. One, a social worker from St. Vincent's, treats children who have experienced any trauma. The other is a Department of Education guidance counselor whose duties include meeting with children and parents in small groups. Their schedules are full, said Principal Ronnie Najjar. "I dread thinking what's going to happen when the funding dries up," said Najjar, who had no counselors on staff before Sept. 11. The Red Cross-funded psychologist at P.S. 150, Artemis Kohas, said that anxiety or anger from any cause can be exacerbated by the kinds of traumas experienced on Sept. 11 and in its aftermath, even for children who were very young at the time. "I think we're quick to assume they don't remember, but on a primal, instinctual level, they do," said Kohas, adding that she made more referrals to psychologists this year than in the past. P.S. 234's psychologist, Bruce Arnold, who is funded by the PTA rather than the Red Cross, was on the school's staff when the terrorist attack occurred. He works mostly with parent groups and teaches the health curriculum for 4th- and 5th-graders. He said that this is the first school year since the attack that parents have not expressed an interest in talking about Sept. 11. "It's just not a relevant issue this year," Arnold said. While most kids are doing "just fine," he said, some of the younger ones seem to need a bit more support, and he calls the parents "a little more anxious." Residual effects of Sept. 11? "It's one of the things we wonder about," he said.