School and Community Leaders’ Experiences Implementing Critical Well-Being During the Dual Pandemics

Emerging research has revealed the disproportionate impact COVID-19 has had on communities of color (Wilder et al., 2021), and the subsequent rising rates of racialized trauma that has occurred due to increasing racial injustice in the United States (Horsford et al., 2021). Although calls have been made for trauma-informed and social and emotional learning efforts in schools to become more race conscious (Alvarez, 2020), healing centered (Ginwright, 2018), equity focused (Venet, 2021), and promote justice (Jagers et al., 2019); such articulations have not been documented in K-12 settings during this particular context. In this study--School and Community Leaders’ Experiences Implementing Critical Well-Being During the Dual Pandemic -- I document how a model called Critical Well-Being, which draws from, and remixes these aforementioned discourses, was implemented in a school community during the 20210/2022 school. This study particularly focuses on school and community leaders' experiences implementing this effort to mitigate racial trauma and promote thriving with students of color, in a State that embraced a legislative ban against CRT midyear. Drawing on a corpus of data including 18 interviews, a focus group, field notes, school records, and observations I illustrate the experiences of six school and community leaders implementing this effort. This research provides a timely account on the challenges and insights that can significantly inform state and district policy, practice, and research in trauma informed care, healing centered engagement, social and emotional learning, and school-leadership that places student and community voice at the center.