CMI Director Cheri Lovre
Meet the Director  Cheri Lovre, MS, Director of CMI, has over 30 years of experience in the field of prevention, crisis response, grief, trauma and many related topics. Because of her range of experience, she has developed a philosophy and a specific approach toward the unique requirements of survivors of trauma. The focus of much of that time has been working with schools in the aftermath of student and staff deaths, suicides, homicides, natural disasters, traumatic events, shootings, arrests of staff for internet child pornography, teacher-student sexual misconduct and a wide range of other tragedies that overwhelm a district's usual abilities to cope.
During the 1980's, while employed by Marion Education Services District in Salem, OR, she worked extensively on creating training and materials for crisis response teams, which has become one of her specialties.
From 1985 - present, she has responded to many communities that have suffered the loss of children to death by suicide, homicide, students who have been abducted or gone missing, beating deaths and cyber suicide. In one community, four students died by suicide in three weeks, two of whom were brothers. She has consulted to districts in the aftermath of arrests of school staff for a range of inappropriate sexual behaviors with students, situations involving drugs and alcohol, and other incidents that created a breach of trust between parents and the school.
During the Shootings at Thurston and Columbine High Schools.
As the shooting at Thurston High School was first being covered by media, Ms. Lovre was on her way to begin to help coordinate the support for students, staff, parents and the community. She had been involved in training the county-wide Flight Team (crisis response team) for 13 years, so this was a team with over a decade of experience in responding to every death of a student or staff person for over a decade. This was a great lesson in what communities need to in order to recover from these events. This continues to be the only public school mass casualty shooting that resulted in no lawsuits to the school, to any staff in the school, nor to any of the emergency response agencies.
Ms. Lovre received initial contact from the superintendent's office of Jefferson County Public Schools from them as the tragedy at Columbine was unfolding. At the time of the initial phone call, there was no contact with anyone inside the building, so it was not known who the gunmen were or whether students were under threat or had been shot. At the time of the call, the SWAT team was still mobilizing to begin to set up a perimeter around the school. She went on to spend a week in Littleton, Colorado.
Following September 11, 2001She received a call from the office of the Chancellor of New York on 9/11 about 20 minutes after the second tower collapsed and spent much of the following two years serving the 29 "schools that fled" (those that ran for their lives in the roiling wave of debris that resulted as the towers collapsed) and had to be relocated all around the city for the year. She worked with administrators, counselors, teachers, parents and children, and integrated Systems Thinking into the activities used to help all regain stability. This event was the first time the United States had suffered circumstances with such powerful impact to schools in which the whole community support system (including emergency services) was unavailable to assist the schools. Her time on the east coast included serving many schools and communities in New Jersey, serving schools where many students and staff lost the head of household when the towers collapsed.
The TsunamiFollowing the tsunami in Asia, Ms. Lovre spent time working with an orphanage and school in Sri Lanka. This provided new and important lessons regarding the resiliency and needs of an already-traumatized population (orphans) who subsequently survive a catastrophic event together. This was also a terrific opportunity to work in another culture and see elements that appear to transcend culture and those that are highly culturally influenced. Some of these new insights are valuable as we face the possible re-traumatization of American students who have been through one catastrophic event and then must cope with yet another, and also to approach all responses with flexibility, recognizing that those within any given community may have come from vastly divergent cultural backgrounds.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita
Ms. Lovre was asked to compose a brochure for the US Department of Education regarding guidelines and suggestions for schools that would be absorbing students who had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. Following the hurricanes, Ms. Lovre provided both staff development and group work with students who had been relocated. Child after child had pictures of a foundation or less and told stories about where their houses had been and shared their dreams and fears about whether their families would be able to return. There were some interesting correlations across the cultures in the art work of survivors of the tsunami and those who had relocated because of hurricanes. Some of the similar responses that were unique to these two disasters held new insights about how children process this kind of event and what kinds of safeguards their minds are able to utilize.
The shooting at Nickle Mines ~ an Amish Community and Their Neighbors
Following the shooting of ten little Amish girls in Nickel Mines, PA, Ms. Lovre provided support to the community, schools and families. In the first week, she provided a range of workshops and for groups as diverse as school administrators, school counselors, emergency responders, and evening community meetings attended by both Amish and non-Amish families. She returned 30 times in the five years following "the happening."
And In General...Ms. Lovre has provided training and technical assistance to the National Association of Secondary School Principals, the U. S. Department of Education, the American School Counselors Association, and other national and state educational agencies. ( View partial list) She has given testimony at the federal and state level for issues involving school safety.
As school crises have grown and changed, her materials and training continue to reflect the cutting edge in her field. Another outgrowth of her work has been to help states create state-wide teams to help respond to schools in the aftermath of major catastrophic events, such as shootings, natural and human-caused disasters, multiple death accidents and other events. Ms. Lovre continues to integrate into her work the cutting-edge concepts of Professional Learning Communities, Systems Thinking and resiliency to enhance the efficacy of her plans and publications. Her goal is to remain at the cutting edge, taking the whole field of crisis response to the level needed when responding to events as overwhelming and complex as terrorism and overwhelming natural disasters.
Writings and Contributions by or about Cheri Lovre
"This was a wonderful collaborative project that I was honored to do with
Drs. Charles and Kathleen Figley. This encyclopedia covers a wide array of situations involving trauma and provides down-to-earth usable insights." ~ Cheri Lovre
 ASCA - American School Counselor Association - Publication
Contributing Chapter: Working with the Victims of Extreme Crisis ~ by Cheri Lovre
|
"This is a book of interviews with a range of people in leadership positions who
have had a time that was remarkably inspired or spiritually endowed. I am
privileged to be included in this anthology of interviews." ~ Cheri Lovre
