Lindsay Malloy and Amanda Zelechoski were selected as this year’s awardees of the American Psychological Association Div. 37 Citizen Psychologist Award for their joint project “Pandemic Parenting.” Thanks to Amy Damashek and Rick Short for serving on the Selection Committee. The awardees requested that the $250.00 honorarium go to their project “Pandemic Parenting.” Both awardees will receive a plaque memorializing their winning project. The plan is to make the announcement of the awardee on listservs, newsletter, and website at the same time of the announcement of their webinar presentation in May or June 2021. I will be seeking out support from other Div. 37 board members to help organize and market the webinar presentation.
I am extremely grateful to Liz Gershoff for taking a lead role in promoting the February 9, 2021, webinar presentation on No Hit Zones. The overall goal of the webinar presentation was to prevent and end the use of physical punishment against children in all settings. A No Hit Zone is a policy adopted by an organization that prohibits hitting by anyone including parents hitting children, children hitting children, adults hitting adults and children hitting adults. Thanks to Stacie LeBlanc, the chair of the No Hit Zone committee of the National Initiative to End Corporal Punishment (NIECP), a toolkit was developed on how to implement a No Hit Zone in schools and other organizational settings. The goal of the February 9 webinar was to educate psychologists and other professionals about the science behind No Hit Zones and on how to implement No Hit Zones in community schools and work organizations. Liz Gershoff presented on what No Hit Zones are and the science behind No Hit Zones. Stacie LeBlanc presented on how to implement No Hit Zones. The February 9 presentation was co-sponsored by Div. 37, New York Foundling’s Vincent J. Fontana Center for Child Protection, and the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC). APSAC generously offered continuing education credits to participants in the webinar. You can access the full 2-hour webinar here
Again thanks to the tireless work of Liz Gershoff, Div. 37 and eight other co-sponsoring APA divisions were successful in obtaining a $5,000 CODAPAR interdivisional grant to support a congressional briefing in April 2021 to inform legislation that would ban corporal punishment in all public schools across the nation. The bill entitled “The Protecting Our Children in the Schools Act” is being sponsored in the Senate by Senator Murphy (Connecticut) and in the House of Representatives by Congressman McEachin (Virginia). Both Liz and I have been in contact with the Senator Murphy and Congressman McEachin’s aides and have met with APA Advocacy staff to plan the congressional briefing. We plan to reach out to NIECP, APSAC, Prevent Child Abuse America, and other organizations to support the bill. If anyone knows of organizations in one of the 19 states that currently allow corporal punishment in the schools that may be willing to support the “The Protecting Our Children in the Schools Act”, please contact me or Liz so we can follow up and hopefully get them to officially support the legislation.