And then, alongside their own tumult of emotion, they began grappling with how to explain Castile’s death to the children who loved him.

Anna Garnaas, a teacher at the St. Paul, Minnesota, elementary school where Castile worked, is already anticipating what she will hear from her first-, second- and third-grade students when they return to class in the fall.

“I think that’s when we’ll see them crying and wondering and asking questions, the first day of school in September,” she said. “Where’s our buddy? Where’s the guy who takes care of us and makes sure we have our most fundamental needs met?”

Amid spasms of violence between police officers and the communities they are sworn to serve, this is the job of parents and teachers across the country: Help children make sense of the senseless. Teach them how to process questions that the entire nation is struggling to answer, questions that are bound up with America’s complex history of race and racism: Why is this happening? What can we do about it?

And, particularly in communities of color where tension with police is not just something children see on the news but is an experience they live: How can we keep people safe?

They were difficult questions in 2014, when police officers killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri., and Eric Garner in New York. They were still pressing questions in 2015, when an officer shot Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and when Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore.

And they became even more tangled and urgent this week, when – in the span of three days – police killed Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana, and a young black man, saying he was angry about such violence, responded by shooting 12 officers in Dallas, killing five, one of the worst attacks on police in the nation’s history.

These same events that leave adults grasping for answers also affect children, who need somewhere to take their confusion and their sadness, experts say. Schools need to be one place they can turn to.

“Schools can make such a big difference, even without having the answers,” said Deborah Menkart, executive director of the Washington-based nonprofit Teaching for Change. “Just being a space where every person’s humanity is acknowledged and there’s a chance to discuss it, and it’s not something that’s left outside the school doors.”

The anger that young people feel, particularly young people whose families or friends have been touched by violence, is real and visceral. “They’re slaying us like animals,” Allysza Castile, Philando’s sister, told The Washington Post this week.

Melissa Reeves, president of the National Association for School Psychologists, said children will learn from the reactions of the adults around them, including their parents and their teachers. “It’s okay to be angry,” Reeves said. “But what’s important is how you use that anger in a way that’s going to be peaceful and part of a positive solution.”

Laura Fuchs, a U.S. history and government teacher at H.D. Woodson High in Washington, said she teaches about how government institutions work and about the long struggles and the successes of past nonviolent social movements. It’s a way to show young people how they can channel their anger about the violence into positive change, she said.

“We look at a lot of civil rights activists from the past and the present and how it is always young people who propel these issues forward,” Fuchs said. “Hopefully they can be inspired by others, and be able to think about what can my role be, how can I be part of the solution?”

Fuchs said she also feels a responsibility to help her students, many of whom are African American, stay safe in the world as it is today.

She grapples with that particularly when she teaches about the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures: She wants students to know and protect their constitutional rights. But she also wants them to be careful not to provoke a police officer’s anger or fear.

She tells them that if they believe they’ve been stopped illegally, or are being searched illegally, they should assert that they don’t consent to the search. But if police persist, they should submit, she tells them. And never, ever run.

“It’s not fair that they have to be so careful when interacting with authority figures, but they do,” she said.

Steven Berkowitz, an associate professor of clinical psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania, said schools should deliver one very simple message to children younger than eight: “This is all very complicated, but our job is to keep you safe. And that’s what we are going to do as adults.”

But schools can teach older children how incidents of police violence are part of broader societal patterns and problems, he said. And schools can give students a way to approach police departments with constructive criticisms, and in that way play a critical role in changing their communities’ relationships with police.

But like Fuchs, Berkowitz said that teachers and parents should help students think through not just how they want to change the world, but also how to avoid violence.

Schools should teach young people that incidents of violence almost always arise out of fear, when the rational part of the brain shuts down, he said. So what does that mean for a young person caught in a tense situation with a police officer?

“You do exactly what the cop says. You don’t give them any reason to feel afraid,” Berkowitz said. “To have to say that to a kid is a terrible thing. But that’s the reality.”

He said he hadn’t yet wrapped his mind around how schools should help children understand and respond to the shooting of police officers in Dallas on Thursday night.

But he said it’s important for schools to be unequivocal that violence is wrong.

“There is never a justification for shooting or killing somebody when you are not in danger,” he said. “There’s no justification.”