RADFORD – Grants to assist in academic support and research at Radford University were recently awarded to the Waldron College of Health and Human Services and the College of Education and Human Development.

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is the funding agency for the Children’s Advocacy Center (CAC) of the New River Valley which received a grant of $27,814 to be used for program development and expansion of a grant from the National Child Advocacy Center. RU project director and BSW Coordinator is Alice King Ingham, assistant professor in the Waldron College of Health and Human Services School of Social Work. The grant allows the advocacy center to hire a master’s of social work student as a part-time coordinator to help coordinate CAC projects on campus in the local community. Among the coordinator’s duties will be to develop a new case review and peer review system for the New River Valley forensic interviewers in order to strive toward accreditations standards with National Children’s Alliance. It is the only service of its type offered in the New River Valley region.

The College of Education and Human Development was awarded $89,000 from the Virginia Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Education for the Virginia Consortium for Teacher Preparation in Early Childhood Special Education (ECSC) project, under the direction of Kathryn Hoover. The consortium is now in its third grant cycle of providing tuition support and needed coursework to teachers of ECSE, an area of critical need, with provisional teaching licenses in Regions 5-8 of the Commonwealth. The consortium, in which RU partners with Lynchburg College, has delivered live video conference and online courses to students at the Higher Education Centers in Abingdon, South Boston and Roanoke, the New College Institute in Martinsburg, and the two partnering schools. Over the past three years, more than 40 provisionally licensed teachers and pre-service teachers have completed licensure requirements through the course offerings by the consortium.