Kelly (Heffley) Villar ’06 MA, a second-grade teacher for the past 16 years at Southeast Elementary School in Mansfield, Conn., was selected as the Iditarod Teacher on the Trail for 2020. The race officially began March 7, and Villar has been tracking her experience with blog posts and photos on the Iditarod’s Teacher on the Trail blog since arriving in Alaska in February.

Jason Gilmore, a Guilford resident and art teacher at McDonough Middle School in Hartford, was named the recipient of the 2020 Rogers Educational Innovation Fund, a $5,000 annual award for an innovative project for elementary- or middle-school level classrooms.

Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom. If you have an accolade to share, we want to hear from you.

Thanks to the Initiative on Campus Dialogues (ICD) Fellowship Program at UConn, members of the Neag School community are engaging in projects focused on expanding productive dialogue within and beyond the University community.

Congratulations to our Neag School alumni, faculty, staff, and students on their continued accomplishments inside and outside the classroom. If you have an accolade to share, we want to hear from you! Please send any news items and story ideas to neag-communications@uconn.edu.

Representatives from Connecticut school systems, state agencies, higher education institutions, and nonprofit organizations gathered at the University on Wednesday, Oct. 23, to develop collaborative plans to broaden school and community mental health services across the state and address issues surrounding childhood trauma.

More than 60 Neag School alums, students, faculty, and administrators, along with education professionals from across Connecticut, gathered last month for an evening of networking, followed by a panel discussion at the Darien Community Association in Darien, Conn. This year’s forum, held for the first time in Fairfield County, was hosted by Neag School Dean’s Board of Advocates members James Degnan ’87 (CLAS) and Elizabeth Degnan ’87 (CLAS).

Editor’s Note: Jeremy B. Landa, Neag School doctoral student in the Learning, Leadership, and Education Policy program, prepared the following issue brief — in affiliation with the Center for Education Policy Analysis (CEPA) — exploring the distribution of Black or Hispanic educators across Connecticut’s school districts. 

There’s an Olympian spending time at the University of Connecticut right now and, if you think it’s a Husky basketball player, you are wrong.

The athlete is Karen Chammas, who represented her native Lebanon in the sport of judo at the 2012 London games, and she is spending late October and early November in Storrs as part of the Global Sports Mentoring Program.

There’s an Olympian spending time at the University of Connecticut right now and, if you think it’s a Husky basketball player, you are wrong.

The athlete is Karen Chammas, who represented her native Lebanon in the sport of judo at the 2012 London games, and she is spending late October and early November in Storrs as part of the Global Sports Mentoring Program.