School of Social Work Associate Professor Priscilla Gibson has received a $100,000 award from the University Metropolitan Consortium for her research project, “Reducing Out-of-School Suspensions of African American and African Immigrant Students: Building a Well-Educated Minnesota Workforce for the 21st Century.”

Gibson is the principal investigator for the project, and Professor Wendy Haight, Gamble-Skogmo Land Grant Chair in Child Welfare and Youth Policy, and Post-Doctoral Associate Misa Kayama are co-principals.

Nationally, black children are three times more likely than white children to be suspended. The study will examine the perspectives of black children who have been suspended, as well as those of their parents and educators, with the ultimate goal of producing an intervention to reduce suspensions and improve opportunities for low-income black students to become educated, productive, contributing members of the Twin Cities metropolitan workforce.

Gibson, Haight, and Kayama will explore the culturally nuanced meanings of suspensions by conducting individual, face-to-face and telephone interviews. Findings will be presented to focus groups and to other community partners for consultation on the design of the intervention. The findings also will be used as pilot data in a National Institutes of Health proposal to implement and evaluate the intervention.

The University Metropolitan Consortium is a program of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota.