A crisis management team helped students at Creekside Elementary School deal with their grief after a classmate drowned on Wednesday in a small retention pond across the street from his home.

A neighbor in Kempton Park said the 6-year-old’s father pulled him unresponsive from the unfenced pond. She said she had spotted his tennis shoes by the water’s edge and the ball he’d been playing with floating on the water and then alerted his parents.

“I know he was playing in front of his house, and they told him to stay in front of the house,” said the woman, who asked for her name to be withheld.

“We speculate he was bouncing the ball, and the ball rolled down into the lake, and he tried to get it and either slipped and fell in, or walked in and lost his balance.”

The woman she was headed outside through her garage door at about 5:50 p.m. when the mother asked her if she had seen her son.

“I said, ‘No,’” the woman said. “She said, ‘I’ve been looking for him, and I’ve been up and down the street.’ She was a little frantic.”

The woman said she asked the mother if she had called the police. The mother said she had not.

“She said she’d been looking for 20 minutes,” the woman said. “I said, ‘You go call the police, I’ll go look in the pond.’”

Her discovery was chilling.

“I saw his tennis shoes and his ball, but I didn’t know it was his tennis shoes and his ball,” the woman said. “The dad jumped in after the mom realized they were his (her son’s) shoes.”

After the father pulled his son out, the woman said, another neighbor who is a doctor began resuscitation procedures.

The doctor performed CPR for “a long time” before emergency services arrived and took over, the woman said.

The boy was pronounced dead at a local hospital, according to a city news release.

Children in the neighborhood routinely play in the street together outside one of their homes, the woman said. “When they are outside playing, we check on them every 10 or 20 minutes,” she said.

On Wednesday afternoon, she added, the other children were inside doing their homework, including her son.

“When they were getting off the bus, (the boy) asked my son if he wanted to play, and he said, ‘Sure, but I have to do my homework first,’” the woman said.

According to a letter sent home to parents by Creekside Elementary Principal Katrina Rountree, Suffolk Public Schools central office staff “acted quickly to support our school family.”

The team of grief counselors remained at the school Thursday to provide “grief counseling and extra emotional support,” Rountree wrote.

Three students approached the counselors, who were to return to the school Friday, according to district spokeswoman Bethanne Bradshaw.

The woman who described the heartrending unfolding of Wednesday’s tragedy said her son, 7, was with her when she found his playmate’s shoes and ball.

He also saw the boy’s frantic father pull his still body from the water.

“Last night was rough,” the woman said. “We said some prayers.”

On Thursday morning, the woman hugged the boy’s mother just inside her front door. “They are very protective parents,” she later said. “Relentlessly so. It was a total accident.”