Educator looks at equity in education

For the past decade, Carla Brunelle has been working with students with multiple disabilities as a paraprofessional at Newton High School.

She also has been very active in the New Jersey Education Association (NJEA).

Last fall, she saw an advertisement for an equity and justice fellow with the NJEA.

She believed that her passion for working with students with disabilities made her a great candidate for the role.

In her application essay, she explained how important it is to have a 36-inch pathway for people in wheelchairs.

When Brunelle was in her 20s, she worked in merchandising and retail. One of her tasks was to use a yardstick to ensure that wheelchairs could get through the store without an issue.

Now, 20 years later, she works with a student who is in a wheelchair.

“When you think about justice and equality, you think about cultures or race, which are very important,” she said. “To me, students with multiple disabilities and the challenges they face and the equities they do or do not have access to are very important.”

Equity in STEM education

She was chosen as a fellow and joined 11 others throughout New Jersey. The group meets a couple times a month online and occasionally in person.

Brunelle is working with Karen Hopson, a NJEA fellow who is a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) teacher in South Jersey.

The pair are collaborating on a presentation about equity in STEM education, with a special focus on whether students with multiple disabilities to have access to it.

She brings her students, ages 18 to 21, to Thorlabs in Newton to assemble boxes and put envelopes together with screws in them a few hours a day.

Her passion for working wiith students began when her youngest son was unable to nap at preschool. She helped out at the school to make his life easier.

She found it fascinating that young children were able to learn so much from professionals coming into the school to do early intervention.

“I just thought wow! You can teach someone so small little things ... I don’t think I had a hyper-awareness of that.”

She then started working at Newton High School, where she graduated in 1995, working with a student in a classroom.

Brunelle shifted to the life skills program, working on functional learning, and she loved it.

The class was not like most traditional ones, where students sit at a desk and listen to a teacher deliver a lesson for 45 minutes. These students were learning math and other subjects as well as learning how to cook and other life skills.

In the 2022-23 school year, Brunelle was named the Sussex County Educational Support Professional (ESP) of the Year.

“It is very rewarding to say the least,” she said. “When I won the county level award, the NJEA world kind of opened up to me, so I like to take advantage of the things NJEA provides through being our county representative.”

As the county representative, she travels to Trenton for meetings and is very active at the state level.

In February, she attended the NJEA Winter Leadership Conference in Parsippany.