As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many school districts have closed for the remainder of the academic year. These closures are unfortunate because, for many students, schools are their only source of trauma-informed care and supports. When schools reopen, they must develop a comprehensive plan to address the potential mental health needs of their students.

Ensuring a psychologically and physically safe learning environment for students and staff is necessary for students to learn and grow and for teachers to teach. However, for Black students and other marginalized students, the school environment is often physically and emotionally unsafe and they are targeted by anti-Black policies and practices, ultimately producing inequitable outcomes. As such, school safety must be reexamined and reconceptualized to promote a safe, secure, and welcoming environment for Black students. In this article, we will discuss the school-based experiences of Black students in American schools with a particular focus on Black students’ physical and emotional safety. Furthermore, implications and recommendations for establishing safe, affirming, and culturally relevant educational spaces for Black students are provided.

Despite progress over the past decade in math and reading, proficiency scores of African American boys continue to trail behind those of White, Latino, and Asian male counterparts. African American boys’ reading and math disparities have been attributed to the negative portrayal and the pervasive deficit-oriented discourse about these young men. Using salient characteristics of organizational culture as a framework, this paper offers strategies for creating a culturally responsive environment that supports and promotes high academic performance among African American boys. Attention is given to policy, practice, personnel, programs, and process in schools and their role in culturally competent approaches for improving schools and individual academic achievement.

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We explored mothers’ beliefs, expectations, and behaviors as these relate to early academic success, their roles as parents to young children, and the influence of other ecological factors. Eleven African American mothers of children in kindergarten through third grades were interviewed twice with daily journaling for 2 weeks. Utilizing both Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and Spencer’s phenomenological variant of ecological systems theory as our primary theoretical underpinnings, results were interpreted emphasizing contextual, cultural, and personal characteristics that may serve as protective or risk contributors during children’s education. As mothers defined their contributions to the early academic success of their children, related themes emerged from the data including the significance of parent involvement, family routine and cohesiveness, the availability of resources, and racial issues. Findings provide a contextualized cultural understanding of African American mothers’ beliefs and their potential influence on their children’s early school experiences and how these beliefs are enacted in structured and intentional ways.