E.B. Kennelly School in Hartford, Conn., hosted the second annual “UConn Day” at the school on May 2, an event that included a schoolwide parade and a basketball game with students playing against the teachers and staff.

The UConn AAUP honored Professor Sandra Chafouleas as the 2019 recipient of the Edward C. Marth Mentorship Award at a reception on Thursday, April, 25, 2019. Dean Kent Holsinger from The Graduate School at UConn presided over the ceremony and led the toast honoring her many contributions.

Over the past academic year, Neag School graduate student and high school English teacher Leszek Ward studied the effectiveness of regularly bringing small groups of students together with faculty advisors during homeroom at New Haven Academy, to determine whether implementing a structured protocol across certain groups would increase students’ sense of belonging.

Of the programs that do exist in California and elsewhere, there is no statewide quality control. A recent survey from the University of Connecticut found that most gifted classes in 2,000 schools in three Midwestern and Southern states didn’t actually provide much accelerated content.

The Neag School of Education, UConn’s Department of English, and the Connecticut Writing Project (CWP) at UConn are proud to announce Connecticut’s winners of the 26th annual Letters About Literature competition, a nationwide contest sponsored by the Library of Congress for students in grades 4 through 12.

Fellow faculty members, students, alumni, family, and friends last month joined Joseph N. Cooper, assistant professor of sport management in the Neag School, to celebrate his newly released book, From Exploitation Back to Empowerment: Black Male Holistic (Under)Development Through Sport and (Mis)Education (Peter Lang, 2019), inspired by his research on the intersection between sport, education, race, and culture and the impact of sport involvement on the holistic development of Black male athletes.

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.

This April, the American Educational Research Association (AERA)’s Annual Meeting will be collaborating with the Canadian Society for the Study of Education and the World Education Research Association to travel to Toronto, Canada. There, education research work by 60 faculty researchers, graduate students, and alumni from UConn’s Neag School of Education will be featured.

Through a $50,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation, University of Connecticut assistant professor of educational leadership Jennie Weiner will investigate how microaggressions and discrimination affect the experiences of 25 black, female principals. Neag professor Laura Burton is the co-investigator on this project.

Segregation in schools was abolished in 1954 in the Supreme Court’s historical decision in Brown v. Board of Education. But this decree from the court did not magically wipe segregation or racial prejudices and tensions away. There are a variety of models schools around the country used to deal with student behavior problems, and while they have been successful in many cases, these models fail to account for specific issues caused by race-related behavioral problems.

In a collaborative grant from the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities for the University of Connecticut and the University of Alabama, assistant professor of the school psychology program in the UConn Neag School of Education Tamika La Salle and Sara McDaniel, associate professor of psychology at the University of Alabama will work to look at ways to address this gap.