By Jonathan M. Saxon
Families have had to make serious fundamental adjustments to how they live and operate in recent years. During the pandemic’s peak, families were coping with dramatic shifts in how they worked coupled with sudden changes in how their children learned and engaged with school. Additionally, the country experienced some of its highest levels of social unrest in years stemming from high-profile instances of racist violence.
Dr. Jennifer West, an associate counseling professor, saw a need for addressing families’ psychological wellness through these difficult conditions and used funding from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief Fund to create the BSU Building Online Learning Disciplines (BOLD) Parent Training Initiative.
“We were answering a call to try to help families deal with the dual pandemic we were having,” said Dr. West. “Initially, it was just COVID. But right when COVID hit, George Floyd was murdered on TV. Everybody was trying to find some things to do. We answered with this grant.”
Dr. West, in collaboration with Dr. Kimberly Daniel and Dr. Darla Scott, who served as the co-principal investigators, designed the BOLD Initiative to provide families with mental health support on two fronts. First, Dr. West and other professionally licensed counselors connected with parents to teach them how to identify their stressors, how to shift their lives when it came to working from home with children who are also learning virtually and how to have some of the difficult conversations concerning race to answer questions their children had about what they were seeing on the news.
“It was a relief for some of the parents to have a space to talk about some the issues that were going on,” said Dr. Daniel. “It was an opportunity for them to share and get their thoughts and ideas out.”
Simultaneously, a group of eight school psychology graduate students were working with the families’ children to help them adjust to virtual learning, develop executive functions such as planning, organizing and problem solving, as well preparing them to return to the traditional classroom after an extended time away from their teachers and peers. The graduate students also conducted counseling work to help the children process all of their thoughts and feelings about what was going on around them.
“It was a good pick-me-up as I prepared to conquer the next week,” said Andrea Webb, a school counselor at Reid Temple Christian Academy who participated in the initiative workshops along with two of her sons. Valuing her self-care was Webb’s biggest takeaway that she still applies in her life. “I just wasn’t equipped to manage the needs of my children properly without forgetting myself. The thing that stood out for me was the importance of self-care as we are doing all that we can to create a level of normalcy for our children.”
While the grant for the initiative expired last September, Dr. West and her team were encouraged by the work they were able to accomplish as they worked with 15 families twice a month over a two-year period. The team is currently looking to leverage what they learned from the initiative and take the next step in a couple of different ways.
First, they want to grow Bowie State’s school psychology master’s program, which is the only National Association of School Psychologists accredited program offered by an HBCU, into a doctoral program. They also want to build an outpatient mental health facility that would not only serve the community, but also offer students a space to fulfill their requirements for clinical hours as they matriculate through the program.
“We would love to be able to create a space on campus to invite families in to do similar work, whether it’s parenting classes, anger management or any sort of counseling for kids,” said Dr. Scott. “Those things will provide an opportunity for us to connect with the community, have a place for our students to learn and practice, as well as a way to bring in extra money to support students.”
