Warner School of Education – Center for Education Success (CUES): This gift creates a newly endowed position to lead CUES, ensuring permanent support for the position and the ability to attract and retain top leaders for the center and its work. Shaun Nelms ’04W (MS), ’13W (EdD) has been named the first William and Sheila Konar Director for the Center for Urban Education Success. Nelms will continue his role as the superintendent of East Upper and Lower Schools and as an associate professor at Warner. Designed to support K-12 urban schools’ success in Rochester and beyond, CUES shares findings among researchers and practitioners in urban education and creates models that can be adapted in other school districts across the country. The intent and design of CUES are to create a bridge between research and practice.

St. John Fisher College – Coaching a Whole-School Trauma Sensitive Community: Without intervention, the achievement gap in the Rochester City School District will continue to grow. This program will roll out coaching to build a teacher leader while also increasing the number of teachers and administrators in School #33 who participate in professional development to engage in building a trauma-sensitive school community over the next three years. The majority of school staff will speak a common language regarding trauma and know how to engage in self-care, contributing to establishing a healthy community school in School #33.

The Children’s Institute – Teachers’ Perceptions of Students’ Cognitive and Social-Emotional Growth in Pre-School Classroom: The purpose of this project is to interview Universal Pre-kindergarten teachers (UPK) within the Rochester City School District to better understand the relationship between teaching and learning in early childhood education classrooms.  The targeted demographic area will be the Rochester City School District.  A small sample of no more than 20 UPK teachers will be interviewed for this project. Employees of The Children’s Institute will contact teachers, and interviews will be scheduled at the Children’s Institute. This grant will include three objectives: Identifying a sample of UPK teachers to be interviewed; Conduct 12-16 UPK teacher interviews and; complete a final report with recommendations. The final report will detail UPK teacher perceptions of student learning and social-emotional development with potential recommendations that may be implemented into UPK practices. Themes will be discussed, as well as the incorporation of teacher quotes pertinent to our findings.