We honored Jessica Raugitinane in 2012 when she was an undergraduate at UConn’s Neag School of Education. She earned her master’s degree in 2014 and has been teaching dual-language English and social studies at Mount Vernon Community School in Alexandria, Va., for several years.

Todd Campbell, one of the Neag instructors, tweeted that in the first session, forty participants recorded 112 data points from across the state in less than twenty minutes.

“In Connecticut, college students have been asked to step in as substitutes,” said Michele Femc-Bagwell, director of the teacher education program at the University of Connecticut. “The school has been getting requests to use fifth-year graduate students as substitute teachers. Heavy class loads and internship responsibilities, though, limit their availability to one day a week.”

“The biggest barrier to remote learning is having a good setup, that is, access to materials and technology…as well as resources such as uninterrupted space and time for learning,” said Sandra Chafouleas, professor of educational psychology and Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at UConn.

Michigan native Jeremy Landa, formerly a high school social studies teacher and swimming coach, arrived at UConn in the fall of 2015 as one of the Neag School’s first-ever Dean’s Doctoral Scholars. Having recently defended his dissertation in education policy, he now reflects on his experience as a doctoral student, sharing some of his learnings about the Ph.D. process, and himself, along the way.

“Principal preparation means getting staff ‘school-ready.’ While training programs often focus on knowledge, the University of Connecticut (UConn), with aid from The Wallace Foundation’s University Principal Preparation Initiative (UPPI), has found that practical leadership activities over time are equally important,” says Richard Gonzales, an associate professor in residence and director of educational leadership preparation programs at the Neag School.

In the United States, suicide is the 10th leading cause of death — with more than 2,000 14- to 18-year-olds dying every year by suicide, and accounting for about one of every three injury-related deaths. That’s the equivalent of losing a large high school’s worth of teenagers to suicide, year after year. These numbers demand our attention.

In the months since Breonna Taylor and George Floyd were killed by police last spring, public outrage over anti-Black racism has inspired widespread protests, conversations and calls for reform. It is a movement with origins both recent and centuries old, and continues to spark in protest, as in the recent case of Jacob Blake, a black man shot by police in Kenosha, Wis. For students at the University of Connecticut, a new course will introduce them to the foundational history of systemic and anti-Black racism in the U.S. that underlies the current movement.

“Six months ago, we could not have imagined that our daily vocabulary would be filled with the p-word. And while perhaps we are getting tired of hearing the word pandemic, I can’t help but ask why we haven’t used it to bring urgency to confronting teen suicide,” says UConn Board of Trustees Professor Sandra Chafouleas. “The race to find a cure to the COVID-19 pandemic certainly is front and center, but that same sense of urgency does not seem to be evident for the unsettling rise in teen suicide.”

Historical monuments are intended to be timeless, but almost all have an expiration date. As society’s values shift, the legitimacy of monuments can and often does erode,” say Alan Marcus, a professor of curriculum and instruction at the Neag School, and Walter Woodward, an associate professor of history at UConn. “This is because monuments – whether statues, memorials or obelisks – reveal the values of the time in which they were created and advance the agendas of their creators.”