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At one high school, grief comes too often

And for "Dr. Chuck," as kids at Tampa's Robinson High know social worker and grief counselor Chuck Jaksec, it's hard to stay detached, knowing that each death exacts its toll on students, families and himself.

By SHANNON COLAVECCHIO-VAN SICKLER
Published March 6, 2005

	[Times photo: John Pendygraft]
	Dr. Chuck Jaksec, a social worker at Robinson High and member of the school district’s crisis intervention team, poses near a portrait of former principal Kevin McCarthy, who died in November 2003 of a heart attack.
	[Times photo: Stefanie Boyar 2003]
	Lance Cpl. Andrew Aviles, April 7, 2003: A memorial at Robinson High honored the 2002 graduate, who was killed by enemy fire while crossing a bridge in Iraq.
	Kwane Doster, Dec. 26, 2004: A junior at Vanderbilt who was a football star at Robinson. He was shot to death Dec. 26 in Ybor City while on Christmas break. Johnathon Simmons, Dec. 28, 2004: The Robinson freshman, 15, was shot and killed in Bradenton while visiting his father.
	[Times photo 2003]
	Principal Kevin McCarthy, November 2003: From left, Robinson High School students Gabrielle Grenier, Annie Gbikpi and Magalia Dorce comfort each other after the funeral for Robinson High School principal Kevin McCarthy. “Every morning he put a smile on my face,” Gbikpi said tearfully at the funeral. “He would be the first person to wish me a good day and now he’s not there.”

TAMPA - Chuck Jaksec was driving his wife and two children home from Sunday Mass at Christ the King Catholic Church when the cell phone rang.

Pull over, Jaksec's friend said.

Jaksec stopped the car on the side of the road.

He listened to his friend, but the words seemed impossible. Unreal.

Kevin McCarthy, Robinson High School's popular principal, was dead.

McCarthy had had a heart attack that morning on his way to Christ the King's early service with his wife and children. He was just 39, an avid runner, a health nut.

Jaksec had received many of these death calls during his two decades doing social work and grief counseling in Hillsborough County schools. But this call was different.

A few weeks before McCarthy died, the two fathers had sat in the bleachers one Friday night and watched a Robinson High football game. Jaksec's son Rocky, 4, had snuggled up in McCarthy's lap. The two fathers had talked about how important it is to spend that kind of time with their children.

"And then," Jaksec said, "he was just gone."

This time, Jaksec wasn't a detached grief expert with all the answers. This time, he was the stunned recipient of awful news.

He got off the phone, told his wife, Samantha, what had happened, and drove to their South Tampa home. He thought of McCarthy's wife and three children. He thought of how devastating this would be for Robinson High, a close-knit school of about 1,200 students.

Then Jaksec prayed.

"When I feel weak," he said, "I turn to God."

In the past two years, Robinson High has suffered a series of staggering losses.

First came the news that Andrew J. Aviles, a popular recent graduate, died in Iraq - two weeks before his 19th birthday. Seven months later, the principal died. By the time Robinson students and faculty named the school's media center for principal Kevin McCarthy 14 months later, two more students were dead.

At the center of all this has been Jaksec, the school's social worker and school district grief counselor. His job is to see kids, teachers and staffers through the impossible pain of losing a friend, relative or beloved leader.

He sits with them in small groups or meets with them one on one. He opens by saying that for the next few days, or however long they need him, he will be around. He asks them to talk about what happened, wants to know whether they have lost a loved one before.

How did you deal with it? he asks them. They talk about the most positive ways to handle their grief. Always, his goal is to get a school past the raw pain of loss so that students and teachers can function again.

A death or other loss is like an open wound, he tells them. It takes time for it to heal. Until it does, the pain can seem unbearable.

When Jaksec's father died several years ago, Jaksec took his own advice to heart.

He didn't go in to work for a couple of weeks. In his lowest moments, he relied on his wife, on the joy of seeing his firstborn daughter play, on the phone calls from friends who wanted to offer their support. When he needed to cry, he cried.

"I found out, wow, this stuff I'm preaching really works," Jaksec said. "I mean, what would you do if you lost someone? We counselors are no different from anybody else.

"Death is just as hard for us."

It started at Robinson in April 2003.

Aviles, 18, was a former student body president, cheerleader and honor student. He had joined the Marines as a reservist after graduation, but he planned to start classes toward a business degree at Florida State University when he returned home.

He died April 7 when enemy fire hit his vehicle as it crossed a bridge in Iraq.

He was a year past his graduation from Robinson, yet students and teachers mourned him as if he'd never left.

They gathered in the courtyard at the center of campus and, under a gray sky, cried and held each other as Mayor Pam Iorio lauded Aviles' sacrifice.

"There were so many kids upset," Jaksec said. "Saying "I can't believe it. I knew him, how could he be dead? Why him?' "

National media came knocking, wanting the story of the promising young man who was one of the first to die in the Iraqi conflict. The devastation was so great, and the story of this hometown war casualty so high profile, Jaksec stepped in and took over with the clinical approach of an event planner.

He and school administrators worked with other members of the district's crisis intervention team to come up with a plan. How many extra counselors would the school need? Where should they meet with students? How big should the group discussions be? Who will talk to the press?

When Jaksec talks about this process, it's easy to mistake his matter-of-fact tone, the way he rocks back and forth in his chair, for apathy or detachment. He sees it as professionalism.

"I've been doing this for so many years," he said. "Do you know how many crises I've dealt with? You have to be confident dealing with it.

"You never lose sight of the fact that this is a human being, with a family that will miss him," Jaksec said. "But for the sake of the school, to get them back on their feet, you have to approach it this way. Just to get them going again.

"Especially in a situation like what we had with Andy. He was Mr. Everything. He had his whole life ahead of him."

Aviles' mother celebrated Veterans Day that year by attending a tree dedication for Aviles at Chiaramonte Elementary School.

Five days later, on Nov. 16, Jaksec got the call about McCarthy.

Jaksec drove his wife and children home from church that day. He could have stayed home with them, could have focused on his own grief.

Instead, he went to Robinson High. He knew people there would need him. And because McCarthy was his friend, Jaksec needed them, too.

"I'm helping the people who needed the help most," he said. "Including me."

By early afternoon, a dozen or so teachers and students flocked to campus. Again, Jaksec was called upon to come up with a plan for the days ahead.

"Chuck is so well-grounded," said his longtime friend, Pete Peterson, a marketing teacher who has been at Robinson for 24 years. "In a situation like that, you need somebody who can take over and guide us. And if you know Chuck, you know he's not shy about taking charge. So he did."

But this time was different.

"I had never been in a position with someone I knew like that," Jaksec said, "where he was gone, but I was supposed to be counseling. It was difficult. I was in it as much as they were."

That week at school, Jaksec was surrounded by students, teachers and other staffers mourning their principal. They looked to him and other counselors working as part of the school district's crisis team for strength.

So Jaksec waited until he got home to decompress.

He talked to Samantha, his best listener. He talked about his own mortality, about how crazy it was that a fit man seven years his junior could just collapse and die as his children and wife watched.

Some days, Jaksec told Samantha, "I'm just not ready to talk today." His emotions were too much. Then, a day or two later, he let them out, told her everything he was thinking.

"There were times during all this when she would say, "Are you ready to go there and be effective?' Because she knows when I need to pull back. She can see it when I walk through the door. Sometimes I would say, "I just can't do this.' And she was the one to remind me that I needed to pull back and get another counselor to step in."

He also played football with Rocky and rode bikes with his daughter, Jordan. He tried to explain to Rocky that the man who held him in his arms a few weeks earlier was in heaven now.

A few days after McCarthy's funeral, Jaksec walked into McCarthy's empty office.

"That's when it sunk in for me, finally," Jaksec said.

McCarthy was never coming back.

"That was the hardest thing."

He says he can't remember whether he cried, and brushes aside the notion that if he did cry, it would have been anything special.

"You know, so many people were crying."

Jaksec, 46, has the large, solid frame of a former student athlete.

Walking around campus in dark slacks and a brown sport coat that sets off his salt-and-pepper hair, he could be George Clooney's cousin. He speaks with a touch of his old, hard-edged Northeast accent.

He does not look like a guy whose job is talking about feelings.

And he doesn't dwell on his own. He addresses questions about how he copes with death and tragedy with generalities like, "Oh, but it's hard for everybody" or "What I was going through wasn't unique."

Kathy Toler, Robinson High's guidance secretary, said that when Jaksec is upset, it is evident only in the subtle change of his facial expression.

"He has a different look," she said. "It is so serious."

Jaksec said he's not immune to grief. He simply follows his own advice. He talks about his feelings to those closest to him. He prays. He does things he enjoys: gardening, writing children's stories, putting down brick pavers in his back yard.

But he admits the past two years at Robinson have been trying. Rocking back and forth in a chair in his living room, his arms crossed, he says, "Sure, it's been hard. Very hard."

"It's really hard for him when the people dying are kids," his wife said. "Because that just makes no sense."

When their phone rings early in the morning or late at night, even their children know by now that the news probably isn't good.

"The kids are getting to the age when they ask," Samantha Jaksec said. "It's not easy when you're explaining death all the time."

Jaksec was the eldest of four boys raised in Johnstown, Pa., a tiny steel town outside Pittsburgh where a series of deadly dam breaks in 1889 spawned an unfortunate nickname: Flood City.

After his freshman year at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, he went home for the summer, "not knowing what I wanted to do with my life except play football."

The answer to his future came on July 20, 1977 - the morning he woke up to find his hometown underwater.

It had rained all night, dumping 12 inches on the mountainous area around Johnstown. The water swept through town, killing 78 people and causing more than $200-million in property damage, according to the National Weather Service.

Jaksec's mother awakened him and his brothers in the morning and told them something terrible had happened outside. They went to the steepest spot in their neighborhood and looked down at the mess below.

Jaksec's mother looked at him and and his brothers and said, "You're going to help."

Jaksec, the oldest of the neighborhood kids, led a small parade of children to Johnstown's elementary school.

He walked up to a woman in the gymnasium who looked like she was in charge. He asked her if he could help. She burst into tears.

"So I said, "Okay, let's go,' " Jaksec recalled. "And I just took over."

For the next month, he helped his neighbors as they tried to salvage their lives. He cleared mud from basements. He saw schools turned into morgues.

It was a terrible time. Yet Jaksec felt at ease. He realized he belonged in the middle of this disaster.

"I just felt I was totally comfortable in a really rough situation," he said. "That's when it clicked, and I said, "I think I want to do this for the rest of my life - helping people when they're at their worst point.' "

Jaksec got his bachelor's and master's degrees in social work and counseling and, in 1983, moved to Tampa. After a stint as the director of social services at a nursing home, he went to work for the school district.

Jaksec's first school crisis came on May 7, 1987.

A sophomore at Leto High School stood up in class, shot himself and later died.

Reporters showed up, news helicopters hovered. Students and teachers were horrified, shaken.

"I walked down to the classroom where it happened and saw blood on the floor," Jaksec said. "Talk about getting your teeth cut on a crisis."

The day was so emotionally exhausting, he went home and crawled into bed before 5 p.m. He stayed there until the next morning.

He says when the alarm rang that morning, he never hesitated to return to Leto's campus.

"Nope, never did," he says. "They needed me, and that's what I was meant to do."

Robinson had started to heal by the time school began last August. The school made plans to honor McCarthy by naming the media center after him.

Before they could, death came again. And again.

Kwane Doster, a football standout who went on to play for Vanderbilt University, was shot dead Dec. 26 in Ybor City.

Junior varsity basketball player Johnathon Simmons was fatally shot two days later at a block party in Bradenton. He was 15.

With each death, teachers and students thought, Oh, no. Not again.

Then they turned to the man they call Dr. Chuck, because that's what they have been doing for more than 10 years.

He knew these teachers and students well enough to just look at them and know when they needed to talk.

"He's one of us," said Toler, the guidance secretary. She has been at Robinson for 28 years.

When her son-in-law died in October in a car fire, Jaksec was there to talk and listen, whatever she needed most. When Toler's daughter had brain surgery in April, Jaksec called her in Kissimmee "just to make sure I was okay and she was okay," Toler said.

"Without Chuck, the past two years would be a little weightier on everybody else here," Toler said.

"Without him, I don't know what we'd have done."

But Jaksec still walks around the campus courtyard and remembers how it was filled with students and teachers during the memorial service for Aviles.

He sits in the conference room for meetings, looks up at McCarthy's picture on the wall and feels his throat tighten.

He calls McCarthy's widow, just to make sure she's holding up.

Jaksec knows most people don't understand why he chose this career steeped in sadness and pain. He tries to explain.

"To me, the most special thing in the world is to pick someone up off the floor and make them feel better," he said. "No one wants to see tragedy, but when you can help someone at their lowest point, that's incredibly rewarding.

"You just wish there weren't so many tragedies."

- Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler can be reached at 813 226-3373 or svansickler@sptimes.com

[Last modified March 3, 2005, 10:57:04]