UCONN UCEDD Awarded National Early Childhood Intervention Personnel Development Equity Center
March 13, 2023
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Mary Beth Bruder, PhD Director of UConn UCEDD & LEND and Tawara Goode Director of Georgetown UCEDD & LEND has been awarded a $10 million federal grant by the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Special Education, to provide technical assistance to increase equity in the delivery of early childhood intervention services to infants and young children from diverse backgrounds who have disabilities or developmental delays.
The new Early Childhood Intervention Personnel Development Equity Center is national in scope, and will be working with state systems of early childhood intervention, and institutions of higher education (IHE) who prepare the workforce to provide these services.
The Center will be creating equity-based plans of study for IHE and state in-service personnel preparation programs who prepare early childhood intervention teachers, therapists, and specialists. The plan of study will be aligned with practice standards to ensure the early childhood intervention workforce will be able to create and provide appropriate and effective service models that will be welcoming to families and their children from diverse backgrounds.
Another focus of the center is to work with IHEs to recruit students into early childhood intervention personnel preparation programs who are more representative of the population served. That is, students who have diverse racial, ethnic, and/or linguistic backgrounds, and will graduate and become teachers, therapists, and specialists and serve infants and young children with disabilities or developmental delays who are also diverse.
“This large, federal grant funding will grow, diversify, and expand the nation’s early childhood intervention workforce and provide more equitable and appropriate interventions for infants and young children with disabilities and their families,” says Bruder, UConn UCEDD director and leading early childhood intervention expert and professor at the UConn Neag School of Education.
