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CAEP Annual Plan: 2021-22 11 Tri City Adult Education Consortium

Status: Consortium Approved

California Adult Education Program : Annual Plan : 2021-22 Produced: Aug 16, 2021, 01:21 AM UTC Yvonne Rodriguez

11 Tri City Adult Education Consortium

Plans & Goals - Consortium Approved

Executive Summary
The Tri City Adult Education Consortium's mission statement is: "We connect education and workforce training to create family-sustaining careers." However, it is more than a mission statement; it is a goal in itself. It guides the priorities and strategies implemented within the region. In considering the implementation of this year's annual plan, it comes with the reality that we weren't fully able to integrate the majority of the previous year's annual plan. Therefore, we will be recasting the majority of the last year's strategies with renewed guidelines for offering courses to our students. Moving forward, the overall goal of the 21-22 Annual Plan will continue to be recovery through short-term career preparation that jump-starts people back to work. The students served by the Tri City Adult Education Consortium will continue to transition from one program to the next, onward and upwards through a transition to high-demand career pathways. This focus includes the Consortium establishing a more robust outreach and marketing plan to boost enrollment to respond to the Pandemic and high unemployment numbers. In addition, our collective strategies to offer college noncredit/credit coursework through Compton College will continue to introduce our adult school students to future opportunities that they can pursue in higher education. The latest program that will help lift our participants out of poverty is the Compton College offering of the Apple Swift Coding program and the Apple Consultant Network. Compton College has arranged for each participating adult school to receive 20 Mac computers housed in a laboratory setting at each site for the introductory through employment level scaffolding of coding and computer technology repair of Apple computers. Every Tri City Adult Education Consortium member has had to adjust its teaching methodology to an online structure in response to the COVID-19 Pandemic. Many of our CTE programs in Truck Driving, Construction, Cosmetology, Phlebotomy, Medical Assistant, and Licensed Vocational Nursing have had to be temporarily halted or shifted to a distance education medium. This year, a core strategy for our adult schools involves laying the groundwork for dual enrollment noncredit programs, short-term CTE training in essential jobs for the economy, and digital literacy to help our constituents thrive in this forced technology landscape. The goal is to continue to build upon these successful strategies in the 2021-22 Annual Plan.
Regional Planning Overview
We are encouraged by partners' continued engagement and persistence in creating a welcoming environment for learners within the Compton, Lynwood, and Paramount service areas. Most recently, this collaboration has involved developing a new website that more seamlessly funnels students towards the most appropriate institution to meet their needs. We are also contracting with an agency to provide better print-based marketing to help display our newly aligned curriculum and programs highlighted within Tri City. Additionally, we plan to build on the Tri City Adult Education Consortium Executive Board's two-tiered strategic planning process followed in crafting the former 3-Year Regional Comprehensive Plan. The Executive Board and faculty and staff from each Member site will follow a similar model as in previous years by completing another self-evaluation to examine effectiveness as a Member and as a Consortium. The Executive Board will also participate in an inventory exercise that examines the actionable areas of the plan submitted in 2019 and evaluate how well those strategies were executed. Current regional data will be analyzed and compared to the actionable areas to determine where gaps still exist. We expect a comprehensive list of regional priorities to emerge that can be narrowed down to the regional priority areas that will help fill the gaps. The regional priorities for the 2019-2022 Regional Comprehensive Plan are Transitions, Career Pathways, Curriculum, and Instruction Alignment, Entrepreneurship, Outreach & Recruitment, Professional Development, and Hallmarks of Success. Yet, we now must continue to address these priorities through the lens of a changed COVID-19 work and learning environment. To this end, our collective action on these priorities involves a continued focus on whether our learning and training opportunities allow our participants to be effective in their chosen path at its conclusion. Each area of regional need is addressed through the lens of this new health crisis, and our resulting collaboration must address the dynamic changes imposed on our learning environments, students, and instructors.

Meeting Regional Needs

Regional Need #1

Gaps in Service / Regional Needs
The impact of COVID-19 on our English language learner population and community has had a devastating effect on learners' ability to maintain enrollment in our institutions. Despite the increase of unknown variables plaguing the lives of our students, we still subscribe to the fact that improved literacy and high school diploma completion can dramatically enhance the living wage attainment of individuals in our region. It also doesn't diminish the need for a more straightforward system that provides job leads and a way to track student enrollment, completion, and progression across our adult school, community college, and workforce systems. At our 2018-2019 Board Retreat, we engaged in a deeper dive into our surrounding populations. We also used the American HD Index resources, which measures how people are doing, offering a more accurate perspective on opportunity and well-being. A significant focus is ensuring access to our programs through a shared application process that all appropriate parties vet. We are also engaged in using a new unified pathways system called College Central Network, which will assist in career exploration and build a career persona for students in our ESL and career pathways. Although we took a renewed look at the Tri City AEC website, we realize improvements need to be made in the warm hand-off of individuals interested in our programs. Students can now access regional resources to overcome barriers to employment and education via the Tri City AEC website. It is incumbent on us to help students transition towards online preparation for completing high school diploma classes, entry, and completion of certificates/credentials, increases in employment placement rate, and an increase in overall enrollments through heightening technological competency. In like manner, we hope to show a decrease in our regional unemployment rate, present an increase in enrollments within our HSD programs, show increases in enrollments in ESL programs, continue increasing enrollments in CTE programs, as well as, focusing on the ever-important component of improved transitions to Compton College or the workforce (all through the use of a more integrated technology infrastructure using College Central Services and LinkedIn Learning). Today's conversations around our focus on transitions to employment and ABE/ABS to HSD, must be seen through the lens of building online orientation systems that communicate the information we previously sought to share in person. By providing special attention and robust planning in each of these areas, we expect to see increases in transitions from HSD, despite the current health climate. Ultimately, we will continue to emphasize program improvement across all seven CAEP areas. By focusing on these core initiatives, we will dramatically impact gaps in service and meet our regional needs.
How do you know? What resources did you use to identify these gaps?
Tri City used the American FactFinder American Community Survey, the CTE Launchboard, Centers of Excellence Supply and Demand data, and self-reported data from adult schools and community colleges to identify gaps.
How will you measure effectiveness / progress towards meeting this need?
An under-utilized resource of many consortia is the management information systems hosted at each college. One of our primary strategies is to help adult school students complete a college application to access shared resources provided by the college. Students can then be placed in a cohort-based adult school and monitored for when they transition to Compton College. Additional services such as tutoring, student advising, and counseling can also be extended to each of the adult school campuses when a dual application is completed in this way. This will help us increase outcomes and capture progress toward our primary metrics. It will also help to measure the percentage change in the following areas from year to year: HSD Completion, Placement into Jobs, Improved Literacy, Improved Wages, Transition from Noncredit to Credit, and Adult School to Post-Secondary and increase Post- Secondary Certifications-Degrees-Training. Ultimately, we will be able to measure overall effectiveness and progress toward meeting our overall regional need by having students complete any of our short-term career pathways that lead to employment or transition to Compton College in Computer Information Systems, Apple Consulting Network (Fall 2021), CIS-Mobile Application Development using Apple Swift Coding (underway), Health Careers (Spring 2022), Child Development (2021-2022), Cosmetology (on-going), Certified Nursing Assistant (Fall 2021), and Emergency Medical Technician (Spring 2022). By implementing these strategies, it will help to ensure we meet our goal by 2022, where at least 25% of students will transition to Compton College from the adult schools; including 25% of students transition to employment in a high demand industry through a short-term career pathway by 2022; continue our efforts towards 100% faculty attendance in Professional Development focused on differentiated instruction for English Language Learners and learner persistence by 2022; as well as engage in the alignment of ESL course outlines to ELPS standards to improve rigor for students to successfully access and transition into short-term career pathways by 2022.

Gaps In Service

New Strategies

Strategy #1
Since the region's geographic location is near the border of two counties, the economy and labor market are influenced by Los Angeles County and Orange County. This unique situation provides adults in the region with a variety of career opportunities across both counties. Despite the career opportunities, the data reveals a continued need for adult education in the region. The number of adults being served by the Tri City Adult Education Consortium represents a small percentage of the overall adult population of the region. This is an opportunity to reach more adults and provide them with the education, training, experience, and skills to help them transition into the wide variety of career opportunities afforded by the region's unique geographic location. According to the CAEP Fact Sheets, 77,929 adults in the region have limited English skills, 78,714 adults without a high school diploma, and 13,948 unemployed adults. In 2018-19, the Tri City Adult Education Consortium served 4,656 students according to the LaunchBoard Adult Education Pipeline, a decrease of 594 students from two years prior. Unfortunately, there was a drop in the number of students earning a high school diploma (or HSE or GED) from 251 to 113, while 16% (512) were enrolled in Career and Technical Education (CTE). 70% of students had 12+ contact hours (3,259), with 552 students earning a postsecondary CTE certificate and 42 students earning a postsecondary credential. Additionally, a $4,111 increase in median annual earnings was $29,976 for 197 earners in 2018-19 while also posting a 45% change in wages for 13 participants. This demonstrates an unmet need in the region as the population continues to grow.

Seamless Transitions

New Strategies

Strategy #1
To ensure seamless transitions, the Tri City Adult Education Consortium will continue to establish baseline data for transitions in 21-22, using a three-year average of the data for our previous plan. In 2018-19, 16% or 415 students transitioned to Adult Secondary Education based on LaunchBoard Adult Education Pipeline data, while 21% or 640 ESL, ABE, and ASE students transitioned to postsecondary education. Successful student transitions will be achieved in the 21-22 plan by meeting the following goals from the 3-Year Regional Comprehensive Plan:•SMART Goal 1: By 2022, students will complete one of three short-term career pathways that lead to employment or transition to Compton College: HVAC, Cosmetology, or Welding.•SMART Goal 5: By 2022, align ESL course outlines to ELPS standards to improve rigor for students to successfully access and transition into short-term career pathways.

Student Acceleration

New Strategies

Strategy #1
The students of the Tri City Adult Education Consortium face multiple barriers to education and employment. To ensure that students can successfully make transitions, they will be referred to additional resources that will provide them with additional support to overcome identified barriers. The Asset Inventory Mapping completed in the 3-Year Regional Comprehensive Plan planning process will be developed into an interactive Google Map that students and staff can access to find available regional resources. Compton College has hired an Adult Education Counselor who assists all three Adult Schools by providing support and connecting students to a Career Pathway connected to each school listed in SMART Goal 1.

Professional Development

New Strategies

Strategy #1
Because most students served by the Tri City Adult Education Consortium are ESL students and the goal is to help these students persist, complete, and transition, the need emerged for high quality, evidence-based Professional Development focused on this population. The focus for Professional Development will achieve the following goal from the 3-Year Regional Comprehensive Plan: SMART Goal 4: By 2022, 100% of faculty will attend Professional Development focused on differentiated instruction for English Language Learners and learner persistence. Some potential Professional Development activities in 21-22 may include but are not limited to TAP Webinars, the CalPRO Conference, OTAN Conference, the CATESOL, and the CAEP Summit.

Leveraging Resources

New Strategies

Strategy #1
The Consortium allocates funds to each member according to the activities and projects approved by the executive board that each member will be conducted during the year. Members report to the executive board regarding progress on the implementation of the three-year plan. Additionally, members provide quarterly expenditure information to the fiscal agent so reports can be completed and submitted to the State. The allocations and any carry-over funds from prior years will be used to pay for Professional Development and align curriculum and instruction as outlined in the 3-Year Plan.

Fiscal Management

A narrative justifying how the planned allocations are consistent with the annual adult education plan which is based on your CAEP 3-year plan.
The Consortium allocates funds to each member according to the activities and projects approved by the executive board that each member will be conducted during the year. Members report to the executive board regarding progress on the implementation of the three-year plan. Additionally, members provide quarterly expenditure information to the fiscal agent so reports can be completed and submitted to the State. The allocations and any carry-over funds from prior years will be used to pay for Professional Development and align curriculum and instruction as outlined in the 3-Year plan.
An approach to incorporating remaining carry-over funds from prior year(s) into strategies planned for 2021-22.
The Consortium allocates funds to each member according to the activities and projects approved by the executive board that each member will be conducting each year. Members report to the executive board regarding progress on the implementation of the three-year plan. Additionally, members provide quarterly expenditure information to the fiscal agent so reports can be completed and submitted to the State. The allocations and any carry-over funds from prior years will be used to pay for Professional Development and align the curriculum and instruction outlined in the 3-Year plan. The effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic have made it difficult for our Consortium to be innovative in connecting with students. During this time, recommendations for the use of carry-over funds have been shifted towards building communication and marketing buys directed at producing increases in enrollment and program completion. Further investments for these funds will include student supports for increasing transition to ASE and postsecondary and critical equipment, supply, and material purchases across the Consortium to support building an integrated noncredit to credit or workforce pathway.

Certification

Compton CCD - Member Representative

  • Lynell Wiggins
  • Director of Adult Education and Workforce Development
  • lwiggins@compton.edu
  • (310) 900-1600 ext: 2753
Approved by Lynell Wiggins

08/15/2021 05:59 PM PDT

Compton Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Doi Johnson

08/15/2021 06:08 PM PDT

Lynwood Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Shamell Wilson

08/15/2021 04:31 PM PDT

Paramount Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Dr. Yvonne Rodriguez

08/15/2021 06:21 PM PDT