Anna Zuidema, the clinical director at Good Life Therapy in West Des Moines, mobilized her staff to help the community of Perry after tragedy.
Writer: Jody Gifford
Photographer: Duane Tinkey
Life in Perry changed forever the day a 17-year-old student opened fire on classmates and staff at Perry High School. In the months after the January 2024 shooting that killed two people — principal Dan Marburger and sixth-grader Ahmir Jolliff — and wounded six others, students, parents and the entire tight-knit community have struggled to come to terms with the tragedy.
Anna Zuidema, the clinical director at Good Life Therapy in West Des Moines, remembers the day she received a call from the Heartland Area Education Agency as it was mobilizing a team of counselors to help students and staff try to make sense of such a senseless event. The AEA was enlisting clinicians to provide longer-term support, for the people who still needed counseling after the initial response teams had moved on.
“The response was almost immediate,” she said. “I think there was a collective awareness amongst my colleagues and other practices and organizations that just created this mass outpouring of support.”
At the time, Zuidema’s staff included a pair of interns who volunteered to help at the school. One of them had experience in mobile crisis response, and together, they visited Perry once a week to meet with students. Instead of formal therapy, Zuidema said they offered a more low-key format. “Here’s a place you can go and talk. They had the therapy dogs there and everything.”
One of the volunteers, Morgan Edgeton, was a graduate counseling intern at Good Life Therapy and had experience working with school-age children. She jumped at the chance to help in Perry and has been offering counseling services in the district since February. She sees six to eight students each week.
In the beginning, their discussions focused on the aftermath of the shooting, “but there are other kinds of problems that their parents wanted them to be seen for, too,” Edgeton said. “I have clients who come in for anxiety and depression, which are always going to be present in some way or another. I can see a need for more mental health services, especially in that area.”
The school district recently hired a full-time mental health coordinator, funded by a federal recovery grant, as well as two trained therapy dogs to assist students and staff along their healing journeys.
“It’s been incredibly meaningful to see the Perry community supporting these efforts and their children,” Edgeton said. “Perry is a small community, but you can see they’re working together to help the students and families as much as they can.
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