About the BSU BOLD Grant
- Principal Investigator: Jennifer West, Ph.D.
- Co-Principal Investigator: Kimberly Daniel, Ph.D.
- Co-Principal Investigator: Darla Scott, Ph.D.
One barrier to academic accessibility during this global pandemic is the ongoing anxiety and stress occurring in families due to social distancing and racial tensions across the nation. In an effort to provide support to Maryland families, the Bowie State University (BSU) School Psychology program within the College of Education has partnered with several public and private schools to implement the BSU Building Online Learning Disciplines (BOLD) Parent Training Initiative. BSU BOLD is funded through the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) Fund, and is one of 30 programs chosen by the Maryland State Department of Education to help provide education stabilization as a result of COVID-19.
The goal of BSU BOLD is to facilitate family psychological wellness, online learning skills, and student engagement through culturally responsive family mental health support, interactive parent academic coaching training and student mediated learning support for 80 Maryland families placed at risk. The objective is to help parents/caretakers unpack some of the stressors and anxieties surrounding the navigation of home-based distance learning and prepare them to be academic coaches equipped with tools and strategies to help their children become more effective online learners. A key feature of BSU BOLD is the completely virtual formatting of the program, which will be delivered to participating parents and students online via Zoom.
The BSU BOLD parent training initiative is customized, sustainable, culturally responsive, virtual and resourceful. Another innovation in this project is rooted in the focus on a baseline needs assessment to be responsive to the current social unrest and pandemic related anxieties experienced by children and parents. Parents responses to the needs assessment will help drive the nature of the topics discussed in the “healing circles” designed to help them gain clarity, focus and coping skills necessary for positioning their children to become effective online learners. Furthermore, this initiative is incorporating local community stakeholders in the training process to create mutually beneficial sustainable family –school-community partnerships that will lead to additional capacity building supports for the families, and mentorship/community-based service opportunities for the students.
Finally, a value-added component of this initiative is that it will meet an impromptu need within our academic program to provide our pre-service field based candidates with additional opportunities to work with students and parents online. With the sudden shift to online and hybrid learning, the structure and format for field based experiential learning opportunities, like practicum and internship, required major adjustments for school-based training programs.
Therefore, the BSU school psychology faculty will be leveraging this current opportunity, with BSU BOLD, to engage parents and students as an additional resource for field-based learning for our school psychology candidates.