“Connecticut is far from the only state diverting school decisions to the local level. With few mandates coming from the federal government, most states are taking a similarly flexible approach to COVID mandates, leaving decisions up to individual districts,” said Sarah Woulfin, associate professor at UConn’s Neag School of Education.

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.

“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.

“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.”

“We are building this course so that it is a starting point, not an ending point. We hope students coming out of this course will be interested in learning more and pursue opportunities available to them at UConn to learn from the phenomenal faculty teaching these modules as well as many other UConn faculty who focus on issues of racism, anti-Blackness, and other forms of oppression,” says Milagros Castillo-Montoya, an assistant professor of higher education and student affairs at the Neag School.

“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 of Education, 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.”

The good news is that significant research and data on how to effectively teach literacy already exist. In 2012, an initiative developed by the General Assembly’s Black and Puerto Rican Caucus studied best practices in early literacy and resulted in the “CT K-3 Literacy Initiative,” a pilot program with the UConn Neag School of Education that established school-wide improvement plans for reading and intensive interventions and provided ongoing literacy professional development.