The Connecticut State Department of Education is using reserves from its ARP and ESSER funds to establish the Center for Connecticut Education Research Collaboration (CCERC) to evaluate investments on an ongoing basis to determine efficacy, provide high-quality data, and guide resource decisions for the students most in need. The Center for Connecticut Education Research Collaboration is a partnership with researchers from the state’s universities, including the University of Connecticut, local representatives, and educators. The collaborative is unique in that it will build strong connections between the research and Connecticut’s districts, schools, and students.

Donna Hayward of Haddam Killingworth High School has been names National Principal of the Year by the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

A rapid research brief from Neag School’s Center for Education Policy Analysis, Research, and Evaluation (CEPARE) is mentioned.

Emily Wicks with UConn’s Ballard Institute and Museum of Puppetry noticed the pandemic-era disruptions to kids’ social-emotional learning and development, and reached out to Sandy Chafouleas at the university’s Neag School of Education. Together they developed Feel Your Best Self, a puppet-centered program aimed at helping “strengthen the emotional well-being of elementary-aged children.”

Samuel Galloway has been named the town’s new school superintendent and, pending successful contract negotiations, will officially take over the post on April 1. Galloway will replace Paul C. Gagliarducci, who has served as interim superintendent since Brian P. Czapla retired in June after five years.

Brain Healthy, an initiative developed by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers and educators headed by Neag School of Education Assistant Professor Ido Davidesco with the support of a $1.3 million Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Brianna Chance ‘23, a music education major, received funding from the BOLD Women’s Leadership Network for her project documenting student homelessness and housing insecurity in Connecticut.

Adam McCready, an assistant professor in residence in the University of Connecticut’s Neag School of Education and the editor of Oracle, a research journal for fraternity and sorority advisers, said that student-conduct offices’ efforts to list organizations’ misconduct was born out of efforts by fraternity-and-sorority-life offices to be more transparent about Greek-letter organizations’ conduct after hazing-related deaths.

“These decisions can have major implications for them, because you’re going to see religious churches and other entities saying that they want to run charter schools, and they want to run religious charter schools,” Preston Green said.

When Dan Crispino took the job overseeing the curriculum for elementary schools in Meriden, Connecticut, it was 2019 and he had a big problem to solve. The low-income district, where nearly 75% of kids receive free or reduced lunch, was struggling with math.

“When I would go into classrooms all over the district, I could see that kids didn’t seem as excited about math,” Crispino said. “And it didn’t surprise me that our results were depressed in math.”

Crispino said math classes were 60 minutes then. They are now 90 minutes, beginning with a 30-minute lesson followed by an hour-long block where every minute counts. The class is made up of tightly timed segments, where students and the teacher rotate through small groups.