Charles H. Bullock School Awarded Equity Grant by Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence

The Charles H. Bullock School in Montclair, NJ was recently awarded an equity grant by the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence (MFEE). The $10,000 award aims to provide significant funding to address issues of racial and socioeconomic inequity within each school.

Bullock has been using Montclair State University professor Bree Picower’s Six Elements of Social Justice, a framework for elementary students to learn about social justice, “to think about the way in which they’re supporting social action learning in the classrooms,” said Masiel Rodriquez-Vars, the Executive Director of MFEE.

“To address equity for all learners, we use culturally responsive practices that seek to consider what the students see, hear, feel, and experience as individuals in their learning environment to affirm who they are and can become as a result of their presence in a classroom space,” Bullock Principal Nami Kuwabara said in the release. “Students are also supported in learning how to recognize injustice in their community and take action.”

Dr. Bree Picower is a Professor in the Teaching and Learning Department and Co-Director of two innovative teacher education programs, the Urban Teacher Residency, Newark Teacher Project as well as the Critical Urban Education Speaker Series with Dr. Tanya Maloney. She is the author of Reading, Writing and Racism, Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets and the co-editor of What’s Race Got To Do With It? How current school reform maintains racial and economic inequality and Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Counternarratives of Critical Practice. Across her writing and teaching, Picower examines the role of racism in education and how to prepare teachers to disrupt Whiteness in order to advance social and racial justice. She has taught in public elementary schools in Oakland, California, and New York City.