Good morning everyone and thank you for the opportunity to provide comments to the State Board of Education at your January 19th Board Meeting.

My name is Stephen Hegedus, and I am the current President of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE-CT). I am also the Dean of Education at Southern Connecticut State University. AACTE-CT is an association of thirteen public and private colleges and universities that provide Educator Preparation Programs to students interested in the education profession. We promote and strongly support high quality teaching and education in the state’s schools and are advocates for robust educational leadership.

On behalf of the AACTE-CT, we want to say thank you to the Board of Education, Commissioner Charlene Russell-Tucker, the Department of Education, and especially to those individuals with whom many of us from AACTE-CT work with regularly.

We are in a new year and we face new and ongoing challenges in education. We wish to reassure the Board that our faculty and staff are committed to offering our teacher and administrator preparation programs through flexible modalities and we continue to work closely with our school district partners respecting the protocols in place and guidelines related to public health and safety.

AACTE-CT has been meeting with state legislators sharing our perspectives on the recruitment and retention of a diverse educator workforce and supporting the continuing professional needs of our teachers. We are planning a statewide conference/workshop with faculty, students, school teachers and district leaders to create a CT learning community to share resources and best practices addressing the teaching and learning needs of our children in schools today.

We are also working with colleagues in other states to develop proposals to our elected officials on how they offset some of the costs that our student teachers face in preparing to be a teacher. Such financial burdens can prevent students from entering into the teaching profession and can easily approach a couple of thousand dollars in testing and certification fees. We would like our state to offset some of these costs.

Finally, on behalf of my institution, Southern Connecticut State University, I am pleased that you will be reviewing and endorsing the continuing approval of our educator preparation programs today following the recent accreditation results of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) which resulted in zero conditions and zero areas of improvement. I am very proud of this result and the hard work of my colleagues at SCSU.

We look forward to our ongoing collaboration with the Department, the Board and other organizations as we all continually strive to make Connecticut’s education system be the best.

Thank you and please continue to feel free to reach out to our association on issues of mutual interest.

Stephen J. Hegedus, Ph.D.
President, AACTE-CT Chapter
Dean, College of Education
Southern Connecticut State University
501 Crescent Street,
New Haven, CT 06515
+1 (203) 392-5900
Hegeduss1@southernct.edu