Arkansas Schools to Help Pupils Cope With Tragedy of 16 Slayings

A rural school district that lost four pupils to the worst family mass murder in U.S. history has formed a task force to help other students deal with the tragedy, officials said Friday.

About 20 Dover school district officials, mental health and school counselors and ministers attended the first meeting of the task force and agreed on a series of steps to help students and faculty members cope.

“We’ve all got this for the rest of our lives,” Supt. Danny Taylor said of the killing spree that began before Christmas and ended Monday, leaving 16 people dead, including 14 members of a family that lived near Dover.

R. Gene Simmons Sr., 47, is to be charged soon in the slayings of his wife, seven children, four grandchildren and two in-laws. He has already been charged with murder in the slayings of two people in nearby Russellville, Ark., and is currently undergoing 30 days of psychiatric examination at the State Hospital at Little Rock.

Four of the slain children--Loretta, 17; Eddy, 14; Marianne, 11, and Becky, 8--attended Dover schools.

About 1,150 of their schoolmates will return to school Monday from the Christmas holidays, and Taylor said the faculty will encourage students to talk about the killing of their classmates.

Taylor said students would “be faced by it wherever they go, and we don’t want our students thinking they are less because they are from this area. We’ve done nothing wrong at Dover.”

Taylor said the school district will have representatives of two mental health agencies meet Monday with 70 faculty members and the driver of the bus that took the Simmons children to school.