Friday, March 13, 2020, is etched in our memories. It was the day the federal government declared a national emergency, and for me, everything stopped. Schools closed. Businesses shuttered. The world seemed to freeze—much like it did on 9/11—except this time, the crisis did not arrive and recede. It lingered. Six years later, one lesson should be beyond debate: Healing matters as much as learning.
You cannot learn if you have not begun to heal. And yet, nearly six years later, we are acting in many places as if the trauma of the pandemic was a temporary disruption rather than a generational experience.
Across the country, academic recovery is increasingly framed as a technical problem—raise scores, accelerate content, close gaps. That framing is dangerously incomplete. The increased unfinished learning, chronic absenteeism, disengagement, and teacher shortages we see today are not isolated academic failures. They are the aftershocks of collective trauma.
The pandemic did not simply interrupt schooling. It reshaped childhood, widened inequality, strained families, and destabilized the educator workforce. Many students today carry anxiety, grief, and social disconnection. Educators feel exhausted—and in many cases, they suffer profound emotional distress because the adult world has not adequately responded to the needs of their students. The emotional aftershocks are still with us—in our classrooms, our faculty rooms, and our beloved communities.
If we are honest: The pandemic did not create most of education’s problems. It exposed and intensified ones we had been living with for decades.
Research has long confirmed what many educators know intuitively: Emotional well-being is inseparable from academic learning. Trauma, anxiety, and chronic stress impair memory, attention, and executive functioning. During and after the pandemic, student anxiety and depression surged. So did educator burnout.
Social-emotional learning and trauma-informed practice are not political slogans. They are practical responses to a biological reality: Many students—and adults—have trouble learning when they do not feel safe, regulated, and connected.
Schools that invested in mental health supports and relationship-centered cultures did not lower standards. They stabilized their systems.
Schools that invested in mental health supports and relationship-centered cultures did not lower standards. They stabilized their systems. If budgets prioritize academic programs while neglecting adult capacity and student well-being, rigor becomes unsustainable.
Healing is not something you do before learning resumes. It is something that must be woven into how learning happens. To truly move forward, we must look back at key lessons we learned from the pandemic.
1. Inequality is not a side issue. It is the system
The pandemic did not create educational inequity. It exposed it—brutally.
Some students had tutors, learning pods, and quiet workspaces. Others were just trying to survive. Learning loss, trauma, and helpful resources were not evenly distributed—and years later, we are still experiencing these inequities. Just one example among many: Between April 2020 and June 2021, more than twice as many Black children as white children lost a parent or primary caregiver.
If we are serious about recovery, equity cannot remain a special initiative. It must become core infrastructure: mental health services, tutoring, community partnerships, and sustained academic support.
2. Fragmented leadership has real consequences
One of the most painful lessons of COVID was how quickly public trust eroded when local, state, and national leadership did not coordinate when working together to bring our nation out of the pandemic and reopen schools.
Many communities remain divided over whether schools stayed closed too long or reopened too quickly. The deeper lesson is this: Student needs and educator safety cannot be framed as competing interests. Both are moral imperatives.
Future crises will demand transparent frameworks that explain how health data, staffing capacity, and student well-being are weighed together. Districts with strong community relationships, clear communication, and collaborative decisionmaking fared far better—not just operationally but emotionally.
Crisis leadership is not about having perfect answers. It is about coherence, credibility, and care.
3. Crises do not slow the world down. They speed it up
Early in the pandemic, many hoped this might be a cultural reset. It seemed to slow our fast-paced world down and provided more time at home for families. As the pandemic accelerated, however, much of the nation moved with great speed from the information age to the digital age. What would have likely developed over five years happened in a matter of three months because of the pandemic emergency.
In education, we certainly saw years of technological change compressed into months. Some of it was necessary. Some of it was deeply flawed. Remote learning kept schooling alive, but it also revealed how much learning depends on presence, structures for interaction, and human connection. Yes, online digital platforms kept schooling operational, but they also intensified concerns about attention, mental health, and social development.
The lesson is not “technology is bad.” The lesson is that speed without safeguards is dangerous—especially for children.
4. The digital age is not neutral
We are no longer entering the digital age. We are fully immersed in it.
Education leaders now oversee systems in which digital tools shape cognition, behavior, and social interaction. Just as cars required seat belts and traffic laws, the digital world requires boundaries, protections, and intentional design.
Social-emotional learning, media literacy, and healthy technology norms should no longer be optional. They now serve as the guardrails for childhood in a high-speed world.
The most effective leaders I observed during and after the pandemic did three things consistently: They told the truth, they prioritized relationships before compliance, and they protected the adults—knowing the adults protect the children.
Across these lessons runs a common thread: Healing and learning are not sequential; they are intertwined.
Empathy is not weakness. Psychological safety is not indulgence. And healing is not a detour from academic improvement. It is the road back to it.
We can pretend the pandemic was a temporary disruption. Or we can accept that it was a generational rupture that requires generational-level change.
The schools that thrive in the next decade will not be the ones that simply try to “catch students up.” They will be the ones that rebuild belonging, trust, emotional strength, and purpose—and then build rigorous learning on top of that foundation.
That is not lowering expectations. That is fully understanding what makes learning possible.
