Acknowledgements: Parents and Teachers in Title I Schools

I wish to express my thanks to those individuals without whom this project -- my major research and analysis paper for my MPP -- would not have been possible.

First, my deepest thanks to Dr. Catherine Gavin Loss, for patience and counsel, for encouragement for my unorthodox framing to an important question, and for helping me think about the issues at hand from multiple perspectives. This project is not the sum total of everything I have wanted to write about over the course of this project (and thank goodness!) but it certainly represents the best of what I have learned at Peabody. And that is thanks to the unwavering advocacy and support of Dr. Loss.

My gratitude also to Dr. Sandra Barnes, for the introduction to the wide world of sociological inquiry, and for demonstrating the power of rigor and precision in the service of justice. She was (metaphorically!) looking over my shoulder as this paper came together, and I can only hope that I have done these texts justice.

I must also thank Dr. Joe Murphy, whose wisdom, scholarship, and humor were steadying even my most skeptical moments. (This is "seed-bed work'' indeed, Murph.)

My gratitude also to fellow Peabody students Chelsea Henkel, for taming my chaotic early drafts, and Joanna Geller, for sharing the riches of her research and welcoming me into her own inquiry.

I also wish to acknowledge Dr. H. Richard Milner IV, for welcoming this stray policy student into his course on culturally responsive pedagogy, and for demonstrating the power of these CRT frames in the teacher education classroom.

In the Nashville community, I am deeply grateful to Robin Veenstra-VanderWeele and Laura Bilbrey, for the richness of my practicum experiences with TIP in the Promise Neighborhood. I also wish to thank the TIP groups at Kirkpatrick Enhanced Option Elementary School and the Early Learning Center at Martha O'Bryan Center.

On a personal note, I thank Bridget O'Brien, for counsel and expertise, Andrew Remick, for cheering me along toward the finish line, and Jennifer Muñoz, for patience and for keeping me human these last many years. I would also like to thank my own "first teachers'', Elizabeth Abeyta-Price and Craig Price, for raising all three of their children to love justice and to fight oppression. Surely this paper is part of that mission.

Above all, I must express gratitude for my partner Matthew Smedberg. At every step of this project he has encouraged, cajoled, coaxed, nudged, catalyzed, soothed, supported, chivvied, cheered, consoled, proofread, clarified, debugged, championed, advised, edited, prodded, challenged, and now, finally, celebrated. I may be the sole author of this paper, but he is the reason it is out of my brain and onto the page.


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Acknowledgements in frontmatter of "Parents and Teachers In Title I Schools: A Critical Race Theory Analysis of Parent Engagement". I am happy to provide a copy of the manuscript (PDF) to interested parties.
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