The Heinz Endowments has awarded a $500,000 grant to James Huguley, interim director of the Center on Race and Social Problems, and Ming-Te Wang, a professor in the School of Education and research scientist at the Learning Research and Development Center, to support continued work on the Just Discipline Project that Wang and Huguley have implemented in the Woodland Hills School District
The project, which was created in 2016, aims to tackle the school-to-prison pipeline in predominantly Black, low-income schools. The project supports teachers, students, and staff in efforts to enhance relational approaches that ultimately reduce the need for exclusionary discipline, such as suspensions, in schools.
It’s part of an ongoing collaboration between CRSP, the Heinz Endowments, Pitt’s Motivation Center, and the Woodland Hills School District in the eastern suburbs of Pittsburgh.
The grant will go toward expanding the program into the Just Discipline Regional Impact Model, adding more staff to schools and helping move the project into an advocacy role for policy changes related to equity and racial justice.
Huguley and Wang will be co-principal investigators for the project.
“We hear from teachers and administrators all the time that they actually don’t want to use suspensions as much as they’re used,” Huguley said in the news release. “But at the same time, they don’t have the tools to effectively implement more relational and restorative practices effectively. (Our) program partners with schools to provide necessary resources, document progress, and communicate those results to the rest of the field.”
— Donovan Harrell
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