Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, school closures across the United States have forced teachers to implement various forms of contact-less instruction. The research on childhood trauma and learning indicates that social/emotional factors significantly impact the effectiveness of instructional approaches. Therefore, shifts to online learning should consider students' immersion within traumatic circumstances. This unprecedented conversion from face-to-face to distance learning, while unavoidable, reinforces the importance of relationship and community in lesson delivery and learning experiences. By moving too quickly into rigorous and demanding web-based instruction, teachers and administrators risk overwhelming learners who must navigate a world that unexpectedly and dramatically changed over the course of days and weeks. Failure to recognize the potential trauma that affects learners in difficult times can lead to harmful results, even with the best of intentions. As teachers move students online, they must keep in mind that not all students are living through this upheaval within similar circumstances, thus they are experiencing different types of trauma, depending both on zip code inequities and family structure variances. Moreover, this unexpected structure could provide a unique opportunity to improve our educational approaches.