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CAEP Annual Plan: 2019-20 71 Adult Education Pathways

Status: Consortium Approved

California Adult Education Program : Annual Plan : 2019-20 Produced: Aug 15, 2019, 9:58 PM UTC Shannon Eller

71 Adult Education Pathways

Plans & Goals - Consortium Approved

Executive Summary
The consortium's guiding principles are to: focus on the needs of adult learners within Siskiyou County; work with transparency and inclusion with all stakeholders; embrace collaboration and partnership to leverage resources, achieve better outcomes and have a positive collective impact on our region; explore expansion and innovation in adult education services in the region; and commit to ideas, decisions, and practices that anticipate the future needs for adult learners in our region. The consortium's vision for the 2019-2020 year is to revitalize adult education in all areas of Siskiyou County. Consortium members have been developing and growing programs for adult learner success while remaining sensitive to the diversity of our communities. The county is vast and very rural, so it is important to design innovative solutions to services that serve our adult learners and overcome their geographic and access challenges. Adult Education Pathways, and all its partners, will need to provide ample opportunity for learning, skill development, and overall collaborative efforts within local communities and county wide. Our area of focus this year is to building connections with our region's businesses. We have had great success with two local business partners and want to continue the training models provided by vendors with an increased number of partners. There is an overwhelming number of occupations potentially available to our adult learner populations in our region as evident through the STEP, Inc. weekly job list and ongoing labor market research. We believe it is our job to prepare our students for these careers. It will be critically important to collaborate with local employers to find out what their needs are within their organizations. We are not experts in their field, so we need to communicate with them. This goal comes directly from our three year plan and we have determined that it is one of our most important goals as we enter the new year.
Regional Planning Overview
As discussed in the executive summary, our consortium is all about assisting in getting adult learners into the regional job market. We will be developing relationships with local industry leaders, implementing a marketing and outreach campaign in order to recruit more adult learners and shifting the assumed definition of adult education ("getting a GED") to a definition that benefits all adult learners within our county ("helping people get jobs, better jobs, or higher wages"). Our county is traditional and can sometimes seem outdated. However, our county has a lot to offer in the areas of forestry, construction and hospitality. It is our responsibility to reach further into the remote areas of our region to help all adult learners. Our three year plan has a general theme: our geography can be a struggle. Our region is spread out over many miles and is very rural. Some of our cities/towns don't have suitable internet access - or none at all. Physically getting to remote areas in the county can be a challenge during the snowy winter season. Or, roads can be blocked off during our (seemingly never-ending) fire season. It can be difficult to develop common consortium goals when our communities have such different needs. What is needed in one part of our county, may not be needed in the opposite part of our county. It will be important to share individual ideas/models and communicate concerns with all our consortium members at our monthly consortium meetings. Furthermore, it will be hugely important for each member representative to continue discovering what labor market is within their service area and how we can connect with those organizations to develop programs for our students.

Meeting Regional Needs

Regional Need #1

Gaps in Service / Regional Needs
Geographical and Access barriers
How do you know? What resources did you use to identify these gaps?
Maps, distance between sites and reports from students that geography and transportation were their biggest barrier to participation. Winter snow and icy conditions, as well as landslides and seasonal wildfires, can cause both smaller roads and major highways to become impassable. Severe winter weather can occur from November to April, while wildfire season generally occurs from April to November. Since a large percentage of county residents reside in remote areas of the region, this makes access to services even more challenging than the ongoing geographic barriers within the county. Another barrier includes lack of sufficient broadband internet access for many students. There are no dedicated adult education counselors, neither academic nor transition on site at any of our adult schools or college.
How will you measure effectiveness / progress towards meeting this need?
Effectiveness will be measured primarily on student milestones and outcomes, but also with reports from students on how they learned about our programs and services.

Regional Need #2

Gaps in Service / Regional Needs
Collaborations with regional organizations and agencies around career opportunities
How do you know? What resources did you use to identify these gaps?
Outside our consortium, there are a number of agencies and non-profits contributing services to the exact populations that we are targeting for adult learners looking to enter post-secondary education, enter the workforce, or increase their current wages. There is a great deal of disconnect and lack of information sharing between these agencies in government, non-profit and education. We are working to better coordinate these organizations to align services and student information into more effective pathways to employment. Many organizations hear the name "Adult Education Pathways" and believe all we offer is GED preparation. We know this when we are invited to advisory and collaboration meetings and organization leaders tell us that they didn't know that we assist students in discovering their pathway to employment. This is truly unfortunate as there may have been missed opportunities to leverage funds in order to impact our adult learners in the most effective way.
How will you measure effectiveness / progress towards meeting this need?
Primarily, we will use referrals from outside partners as a measure of partnership success. Student numbers should increase proportionally to these referrals and we should start to also see an increased number of students move more quickly into career &/or post-secondary opportunities. On a systems level, we can measure partnership collaboration by inviting community organizations to our monthly public consortium meetings and aligning board regional strategies around adult learner occupational and educational success. Long-term, our hope would be that partners begin to see a decline in the number of adults returning to social services and a decline in the number of adults returning to correctional facilities. The overall hope is that Siskiyou County's unemployment rate decreases as a direct impact of Adult Education Pathway's program and services.

Regional Need #3

Gaps in Service / Regional Needs
Pre-apprenticeships
How do you know? What resources did you use to identify these gaps?
Currently, Siskiyou County has no registered apprenticeships. In the past, there was effort from our community college partner to establish these apprenticeships and they are working with local industry groups to design apprenticeships in the areas of: advanced manufacturing, small business and entrepreneurship and media/digital arts. We have approved non-credit pre-apprenticeship curriculum, but have not been able to move students through because there is no established apprenticeship program for them to transition into.
How will you measure effectiveness / progress towards meeting this need?
We will continue to work with our community college in developing a pre-apprenticeship program. As new funding comes into the community with the intent to get county residents jobs, there may be potential for the college to connect with an established apprenticeship.

Regional Need #4

Gaps in Service / Regional Needs
Programs for adults with disabilities
How do you know? What resources did you use to identify these gaps?
Our TOPSpro data for the last 5 years has shown that we are not serving more than 5 disabled students per year at any of our sites. The US Census Bureau data indicates that for the years 2013 - 2017, 14.1% of Siskiyou County residents possessed a disability.
How will you measure effectiveness / progress towards meeting this need?
Reports from TOPSpro showing increased number of enrollments for students who possess a disability.

Gaps In Service

New Strategies

Strategy #1
Continue to develop online, distance learning, transportation assistance, testing vouchers, expanding to nights and summers to accommodate non-traditional work schedules. Enhance linkage to STEP, Inc., including transition coordination services, pathways to post-secondary education, and employment and training assistance. Continue coordinating consortium-wide activities and timely relay of information.
Strategy #2
Collaboration with regional community organizations to coordinate communications, build a better referral system, identify challenges and strategize for program expansion that supports existing and new students. Work around data sharing barriers and lack of awareness or understanding about Adult Education Pathway's services. Develop a marketing and outreach strategy that targets specific populations in our region. In the marketing and outreach strategy, we will to analyze and research what media platforms will work best for who we are targeting.
Strategy #3
Continue to expand course options and curriculum, particularly around CTE and exploring pre-apprenticeship opportunities, with the possibility of working with already established apprenticeship programs to see if bringing them to Siskiyou County would be mutually beneficial. Transition students from short-term CTE programs into technical programs at the college. Convene industry groups around soft skills needs and offer workforce skills training and certificates to students.
Strategy #4
We will make connections with local agencies who work with individuals with disabilities, such as, The Siskiyou Opportunity Center, Sourthern Oregon Goodwill, Compass, and Northern Valley Catholic Social Service. Our strategy would be to provide these individuals with occupational skills and certificates to get hired within our local community.

Seamless Transitions

New Strategies

Strategy #1
We have centralized the transition coordination services to our WIOA Title I (Siskiyou Training & Employment Program, Inc. - STEP) member. They are the only consortium member with existing transition coordination services for workforce. They serve as the intake coordinator, transition coordination and data manager. They support all 6 K-12 adult school sites with their data. Students receive an initial pre-screening interview with STEP that includes completing intake and registration, gathering transcripts, goal setting, career advising and generating referrals to their local adult school or consortium site's training program.
Strategy #2
Setting new non-credit and certificate programs in place that address specific pathways into employment for our region.
Strategy #3
We are working to achieve 100% pre and post test assessment each year for new student enrollment.
Strategy #4
We are looking to document and share success stories. Word of mouth about our programs has proven to increase new participants.
Strategy #5
Ensure our common diploma aligns with course pathways.

Student Acceleration

New Strategies

Strategy #1
Our Dunsmuir & STEP, Inc. site has been extremely successful in developing a vendor-type model of partnership for training programs. These sites have leveraged resources and funds in order to develop job trainings that gives adult participants the opportunity to obtain employment at the end of the training program through direct hiring. Finding other opportunities to utilize this model has started and will continue throughout other sites.
Strategy #2
Our community college has developed certificate pathways that move students from non-credit to either short-term CTE or to credit classes. We are also hoping to align our short term CTE offered at the K-12 level into creating a pathways to the community college
Strategy #3
We also have students complete a "job preparation capstone project" as a diploma requirement, which helps them plan for career or continued education while completing HSE.

Professional Development

New Strategies

Strategy #1
Better connect with TAP and the CAEP office and have more members participate in webinars offered by CAEP and CASAS. The director and other CAEP personnel throughout the region will be participating in multiple CAEP and personal development conferences and state events.
Strategy #2
Coordinate with WIOA and local workforce partners to share best practices and joint training opportunities regarding the alignment of CAEP and WIOA performance-based measurements.
Strategy #3
Offer internal training to member schools and partners on subscriptions we currently utilize like: ACT WorkKeys, GED Academy, Newslea, TOPSpro Enterprise, AERIES, LACES, CASAS assessments and Google Toolkit.
Strategy #4
Develop metrics on member effectiveness so all members can be pursuing the same goals and standards in regards to milestones and outcomes.

Leveraging Resources

New Strategies

Strategy #1
We have been extremely successful with partnering with two local organizations - the ski park and a forestry company. Our Dunsmuir and STEP, Inc. site collaborated and partnered with these agencies and were able to give adult learners the opportunity to enter employment upon completion of training programs. These sites used the partners as a vendor and it was fiscally effective, as well as, students reached almost 100% outcomes. This model will be shared with other consortium members at our annual retreat. We will have other sites adopt this model to continue such successes in their own service area. We will also be working on connecting with other industries (bus driver training for instance) to develop this model.
Strategy #2
Through partnerships with local agencies, such as, First 5 Siskiyou, the Family Resource Center network, and Health and Human Services, we are integrating Adult Education Pathways materials and outreach into the hands of adult learners who may not have known about our services.We will also be utilizing the local radio stations and newspapers for advertisement.
Strategy #3
Through a partnership with the local Sheriff's office, Probation and Day Reporting Center, we will be offering adult education classes to adult learners involved in the criminal justice system. GED preparation services as well as non-credit classes will be offered.

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.
Our consortium went through a "hiccup" in the 2017/18 & 2018/19 year. The NOVA system wasn't reflective of actual budgets and expenses that we had on our books. Between changing fiscal agents at the end of the 2017/18 year, three different changes in the director position over a three year period, and inaccurate reporting into the NOVA system in 2017/18 & 2018/19, the consortium had an unrealistic understanding of how much carryover was available in the shared expense budget. Now that the director has worked with all sites' business offices and the fiscal agent's business office (Siskiyou County Office of Education), we are confident in our numbers and figures going forward.Our budgetary structure aligns well with our annual and 3-year plan that gives each voting member an internal budget to provide core adult educational services, as well as, a customized set of specialized services depending on their individual capabilities and the needs of their community. It also allows some flexibility to pursue systemic program improvements each year and pursue closer partnerships where funding can make possible new collaborative programs within the local community. We have also allocated the COLA into the fiscal agent's budget to be designated for shared expenses.
An approach to incorporating remaining carry-over funds from prior year(s) into strategies planned for 2019-20.
With the unfortunate fiscal reporting of previous years, it has left a large carryover for the shared expense budget. We will not need to utilize all of the funding in shared expenses. We will be voting to reallocate a portion of the shared expense budget carryover out to the programs that are in need of more funding. We are starting off the 2019/2020 year developing strong metrics for member effectiveness. In general, members who are proving to have high enrollment, high persistence, and a high number of outcomes will be given the opportunity to be reallocated more funds. Those members who have carryover within their own internal budget will be required to use up their carryover without the option of receiving a portion of the reallocated funds. These sites will coordinate with the director and receive guidance from other consortium members to develop programs or services that will directly impact adult learners within their community.

Certification

Butte Valley Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Jason Allen

2019-08-14

Dunsmuir Joint Union High - Member Representative

Approved by Ray Kellar

2019-08-14

Scott Valley Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Marie Caldwell

2019-08-15

Siskiyou Co. Office of Education - Member Representative

Approved by Kermith Walters

2019-08-12

Siskiyou Joint CCD - Member Representative

  • Kim Freeze
  • Director Noncredit, Continuing Education, Contract and Community Education
  • kfreeze@siskiyous.edu
  • (530) 340-3371
Approved by Kim Freeze

2019-08-14

Siskiyou Training & Employment Program, Inc. - Member Representative

Approved by Joanie Zarzynski

2019-08-13

Siskiyou Union High - Member Representative

Approved by Yolanda Sanchez Mrs.

2019-08-14

Tulelake Basin Joint Unified - Member Representative

Approved by Shannon Eller

2019-08-15

Yreka Union High - Member Representative

Approved by Rhonda Daws 8426151

2019-08-14