Congratulations to Dr. Sophia Rodriguez, assistant professor for the Department of Educational Leadership and Cultural Foundations in the School of Education at UNC Greensboro, for receiving new funding from the Spencer Foundation for the project “Promoting education equity for immigrant students: Examining the influence of school social workers.”
From the abstract:
“This mixed-methods study focuses on the role of school social workers in promoting access and education equity for vulnerable immigrant students in public K – 12 schools. School social workers may play an important role in shaping school climate and directing immigrant students to key resources, but we know relatively little about how they are doing so—or why, under some conditions, they are not. Beginning from the assumption that school social workers are structurally positioned within schools to shape the (re)distribution of goods and services available to students, we use the framework of street-level bureaucracy to identify the ways school social workers broker resources for immigrant students, and how their own views of immigration influence the choices they make along the way. Our proposed project includes a national survey of school social workers and in-depth interviews with a subset of this national sample. Our contribution promises to advance how we understand access, opportunity, and education equity for immigrant students by highlighting the influence of school social workers within schools.”
