June Moss Handler ’43, of Hackensack, N.J.

June Moss Handler ’43, of Hackensack, N.J.; Nov. 6, of pancreatic cancer. She was professor emeritus of early childhood education at Kean Univ. in New Jersey. After receiving a master of arts in early childhood education from Bank Street College and a doctorate in education from Columbia, she taught at Newark State College, now Kean University. Committed to the civil rights movement, she worked with a coalition of low-income parents facing limited access to child care to develop an innovative infant/toddler program in Newark called Babyland. Along with her graduate students, she founded the Coalition of Infant/Toddler Educators and helped develop and implement New Jersey’s regulations for infant care centers, which became national models. She led the state’s Head Start efforts; her dissertation was used by Head Start to develop its first national training program. She also worked with the State Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) and was the author of Infants and Toddlers as Members, Makers and Interpreters and numerous related articles, including “An Attempt to Change Kindergarten Children’s Attitude of Prejudice Towards the Negro.” During the 1970s she was a member of the New Jersey consultation on Ethnicity and worked toward obtaining New Jersey Department of Higher Education recognition of the importance of ethnicity. She was honored in 2006 with the Thea Bry Award given by the YCS Institute for Infant and Preschool Mental Health. After retiring from Kean, she founded a group of Bergen County Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women who met, talked, and studied together for almost a decade. She enjoyed writing poetry and traveling. She is survived by a daughter, a son, a daughter-in-law, a son-in-law, five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren, and her sister, Beverly Moss Spatt ’45.