Black Students Are Still Experiencing Pandemic Trauma

By Maya Pottiger, Word in Black

Black parents were the most likely to report their K-12-aged children’s mental well-being has not improved from the negative toll the pandemic took. Dr. Terence Fitzgerald discusses why this is and potential solutions.

People aren’t rubber bands.

Even as kids attend school in-person full-time again and life slowly returns to normal, they aren’t going to snap back to who they were and how they felt before the COVID-19 pandemic. It had a deep and lasting impact on everyone, especially Black families and Black children, that we are still learning about, says Dr. Terence Fitzgerald, an internal consultant with the National Council for Mental Wellbeing.

And one of the keys to understanding these impacts and finding solutions is acknowledging the important variables that we like to ignore, Fitzgerald says, like race, gender, and class, which all play a role in a person’s identity.

“We have to be able to take race into consideration more often as we think about solutions versus these universal solutions that we think apply to every child,” Fitzgerald says. “That does a disservice to children, and it also ignores their pain.”

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Unfortunately, many students are behind because of COVID-19.

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