And people are allowed to come in. Here's hoping the vFairs is working. Come on people.

Michele, you're going to put the Mentimeter slide up or no? What are we going to do?

I think that if we're going to do the Mentimeter poll, we should just put it in the chat box, yeah.

OK. Let's just put it up.

Because Keith is going to present like--

Yeah. I don't want to distract from him. So it's menti.com, right?

Menti.com.

OK. I'm muting myself now.

It's OK.

Hey, Keith.

Nobody's here. I'm trying to figure out why.

Yeah, but you're recording. Melinda, are you going to chop the video so they don't have this part on there?

No.

[laughs]

We have attendees. Awesome.

We have attendees. We have four people. All right. Come on in, everybody. My name is Melinda Holt and I am with Outreach and Technical Assistance Network, and I'm providing support for this webinar. We are here to listen to Michele Stiehl, Justin Gorence, and Keith-- oh, I'm going to screw up his last name-- Thode. He'll tell you, OK? So come on in and have a seat. There's lots of room up front. Everybody, crowd towards the front, lots of open seats here.

I am going to go ahead and share my screen. We're going to do the housekeeping right from the get-go so you all know what to do and don't do. All right. Here we go. So before we begin-- let me move that over a little bit-- we are recording this webinar. This webinar will be recorded and it will appear on the vFairs platforms, so you will all be able to see the video after the fact. But it's going to take a couple of days, so please be patient with us.

The webinar has to render, and then we have to download, and then we have to upload, and then we got to make sure everything is working, and blah, blah, blah. So give us two to three business days, please. Your audio, you control it. That's one of the few things you control here, your audio. So turn up your sound, or turn it down if things sound too soft or too loud. Just turn up your own volume controls on your computer or tablet, or whatever you're watching this with.

You also have some options-- down at the bottom of your screen, you'll see an Audio Settings with a little carrot, which if you click on that, it will give you the options to choose your output-- which would be a headset, internal speakers, something to that effect, OK? So you control your own audio. There's a couple more buttons down there. If you see a Raise Hand button, don't click it. We're not going to use that, but we will use the chat. The chat will be used.

You'll listen to the presenters. And if they ask you to chat something or to say yes or no or something really simple like that, use the chat to do that. Please make sure that you have All Panelists and Everyone selected, otherwise only the panelists will see what you're chatting. So make sure your questions or answers go to All Panelists and Everyone. The Q&A will be used. So if you have questions related to the presentation, please put them in the Q&A.

General chit-chat should go in the chat, and then questions related to the presentation go in the Q&A. View Options. This is something else you can control. Up at the top of your screen, you should see something to the effect of View Options. It's right next to the green bar. You can Fit to Window or make it bigger. So if you can't see something, change the aspect ratio, make it 150%. Or you can also exit full screen so you kind of work off to the side while you're listening to the presentation.

There will be an evaluation. Hopefully it opens up to the evaluation today, to where you can't edit it. So please hit the Continue button for the evaluation. It should open to where you're filling it out, not edit mode. If you are in edit mode, apologies. Please just hit the eyeball up at the top of the screen-- that's the Preview button-- and then you'll be able to fill in the evaluation. We hope you're all having a great summit and that you continue to. And I'm going to hand it off to-- I believe-- Michele Stiehl. I'm going to stop sharing, and you all have a great session.

Good morning, everyone. I'm just going to take a moment. Keith is being gracious enough just to give us a quick moment to put a plug-in for our menti.com poll that we're going to be doing on funding formulas. So if you'll take a quick moment and look at the chat, you will see the website menti.com code number to join our poll, just to give your opinion about funding formula priorities. We'd really, really appreciate it. We're looking forward to seeing everybody in just a few minutes. But Keith has some really important information to share and we're really excited to hear it.

So I'm going to mute myself, Keith, so you can get started.

And Keith, you are muted.

Yes. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me OK?

Yes.

And can you see my screen?

Absolutely.

Two for two. I'm Keith Thode. I'm the CEO and Chief Scientist at AdvancedNet Labs. We're going to talk about one of the programs that we have, specifically for adult ed. And with the financial folks here, we have a tech grant opportunity that I want to share with the finance folks here. So I will do this for a few minutes, then we'll get into your main show for the day. Let's see. [audio out]. So about AdvancedNet, very quickly. We are a Tech For Good organization. All the work we do is in the Tech For Good space, most of that is in the education space, and most of that is in the adult learning space.

We are very passionate about adult learning-- as you are-- and we just love getting the chance to work with adult ed professionals-- just always such passionate people with such deep skills caring for folks and really making a difference in people's lives. Most of our work is in education-type technologies. We actually do our own virtual conferencing, some in the adult ed space. Louisiana's kicking off at the end of the week. And so if you want to hear-- if you just can't get enough virtual adult ed conferences, you could join the Louisiana conference going into the end of the week and into November.

We really love doing our virtual conference type work. But today, we're here to talk about WorkReady Mobile. WorkReady Mobile is an application we've built-- a mobile app-- and some background software that we've built specifically for the adult basic ed space, or the adult education and literacy space. Its goals are to help you retain your students, help them stick with the program, and then help you capture their gains. So we kind of keep that virtuous cycle going of helping more people.

We built it, originally, with Dallas County Community College District, or Dallas College, and then now we have programs using it from-- as of last week-- from Alaska to Florida, so all over the country using this program. The WorkReady Mobile becomes your own mobile app. So when the students download the app, it's got your branding, your messaging, all of that-- and gives you a secure place for you to communicate with your students.

So your teacher-- both from the teachers and from the administration standpoint, you can communicate with your students in a secure platform where you're not off sharing phone numbers and things like that, and it's all monitorable. Share documents. This communication engine really keeps you in contact with your students. And then there are some other functions that relate to that, like calendaring-- like all your class calendar, class meetings, things like that, meetings with your-- whether it's your registration folks, or with your navigators or counselors, anybody. That's all tracked.

Personalized goal setting. So those of you that do the goal setting exercise, used to doing that on paper and things like that, now it's all in the app and available to you on your computer. And with the power of technology then, we can know all this stuff about individual students or about students' class meeting times, about their individual appointments with the counselor, even about their personal goals and their steps. Well then through automation, we do a lot of automated reminders, back to communicating with these students about their individual goals and plans and tests they plan to sit for.

All that work that normally doesn't-- a lot of your team's positions are so overwhelmed keeping up with each student and trying to communicate with each one and their individual plans too. It's just too much to ask. Well now, this happens, and we help retain those students, capture their gains and help them both be more successful in life and for you to have the data you need to then have more money for your programs. We're very passionate about that. Not to get too deep into the features, but there's a student view, and then there's teacher views and administration views.

We talked about it as the mobile app, but there's also a test desktop version for each person using it. So if you're thinking about a student who only has a flip phone or no phone, they can use that. While some of the teacher work, you'll prefer to do on the computer-- because you can do your individual scheduling, it's got attendance, you can then do appointment scheduling with your teachers right from the app, and it only picks the times that teachers want to have available or their folks doing registration. And it's available in multiple languages.

Teachers, again, have the web and app versions of the technology. They can manage all of their class communications-- shared documents-- again, a lot of the work of reminding students, getting them to show up to class, all gets taken care of for you. Attendance you can do or the students can do, or you can do it in combo. Again, it integrates with your personal calendar, so you just set up the office hours that you want to receive, potentially receive times to meet with students, and the students will be able to just pick from those.

If right now was a normal time that you'd be willing to have meetings with students, but today you're at the conference, as long as you blocked off your personal calendar, that time won't show up for the student. Again, it's sort of a set it and forget it, until you get your reminder to show up for the meeting with the students too. So everybody gets reminded. It's got a little bit of a case management function as well. Most of our students we're dealing with are vulnerable and have a lot of challenges.

So you can have individualized personal notes, or notes that you would want to share with the other faculty on each student. And then all of the reporting you use. Teachers start to get reporting. The administration-- there's several levels of administration, depending on how large your program is. If you're one of these-- there's a consortia, and then want to have-- individual programs can have their own version of the app. And then you, overall, can have a different administration view.

So there's some different levels there with more reporting, messaging out to your students. Again, during the time of COVID, a lot of these programs are using it for the other social services that are coming up that are popping up that students need-- feeding programs, job opportunities. There is a standard job board, but then there's this other messaging you can do. Some of our programs are in the southeast and with these hurricanes that come through-- hey, campus is closed today, or the different changes that are happening.

All of that happens within the app. And again, a secure place for you to communicate with your students. There's more of that reporting to go into your state compliance and your other grant compliance systems. It's nice dashboarding, so you can see how things are going. And in each level, you can communicate individually with students, leverage the job board. It provides this one home base for your students. So right now, in this time of-- especially when so many students have had to go remote and programs are going remote, and now you have all these different online resources for your students.

And let's face it, a lot of times our students weren't great with all of these things, to keep track of in the first place. Well now you just send them to the app. They can find everything through the app. Just go to the app. So you don't have to keep trying to have them keep track of all these different tools and websites and things like that. And then even for some programs, like essential education, we have what's called Single Sign-On. So they just click on the button in the app, and all of a sudden they're just logged into essential ed, if you use that one.

We bring along some other partners who have some free resources that have been optimized for personality-based employment and hiring, some other things through the app. Just to give you-- I know it's a bit of information all at once, but we're just trying to take you on a quick tour. I won't give you the whole demo, but you can see some of it here. It becomes your own mobile app, and students kind of get-- they see where their messages are from each of their classes. They can exchange information back and forth with their teacher. Their teacher can communicate to the students.

It can be more than one class. Or recruiting, you can have that as a class. We don't charge for alumnis, so your alumni could be in a group. Here, you could see a student messaging-- or a teacher messaging with students, the students replying back. They can have one-on-one private conversations with the teachers. They can share files and homework and things like that. And keep track-- so again, if the student misses class, here's a list of all the classes right now for a given student. And then you saw there, in the back there, there was-- if it was an online class, it also lets you have the Zoom link right there, right?

Again, students not forgetting to show up to virtual class when the kids are driving them crazy and everything else that's going on in their lives. Here you can see a student, and all of a sudden they got a reminder on their phone to show up to class, right? And there's the link, and they just jump right in. Anything we can do to help students just do the right next thing and keep showing up to class. You can see a bit about the attendance and things like that. And again, if they're going to miss class, find that out early. Get them the resources they need to keep them moving forward.

There's a lot of other features. There's the Spanish. A bit about the infrastructure, it's not tied to a student's phone number, like most apps. Most of the students we deal with and our work at advancement overall are folks that are in poverty and struggle with poverty. So we know to make apps that aren't tied to a given phone number. So if they're on a prepaid cell phone plan and it changes, or maybe they don't have a data plan at all and they're just using their smartphone while they're on the free Wi-Fi at the McDonald's, this can handle all of those situations. It's built for that.

And of course, they can use-- if they have just a flip phone, well they'll get just text messages. And then they can go on the computer and do the rest. So it's very flexible around all of that that-- those type of situations. And it's built for-- you don't have to have the greatest cell phone or the most robust data plan and things like that because we know of the challenges our students are working with. It will translate-- it has a Spanish translation version of the app, as well as, there's some translation within the messaging where they can just hit the button and it'll translate the message to the home language of their phone.

We're very flexible in that, meeting students where they're at and really making it easy for teachers, really taking a lot of the administration and communication burden off of them, and really helping them be as effective as possible with their students and everybody in a secure, protected communication environment. I don't want to overstay my welcome, so I'll just point out that if you reach out to us, right now we have some technology grants available.

So a lot of you do-- are responsible for some of the financial pieces here. And really, this application-- among the other things-- the passion that drives us is student success, but it will help you have more gains, more attendance, and more things that you can have more funding for your programs as well. So it's kind of a virtual goodness piece and we can start off with some technology grants to really adopt the program, help it go well, changing lives.

And then by the time you're chipping in towards it, it'll already be also a net positive for you from a financial standpoint. So we'd love to talk more. Our information is here. And while we still have those tech grants, definitely have your folks reach out to us to take advantage of that. And with that, I want to thank you for your time and the attention today. Have a wonderful conference.

Thank you so much, Keith. Appreciate it. Well good morning, everybody. I am excited to see you this morning. Thank you for coming. There is Michele Stiehl, my partner. So a couple of things real quick. One is, if you happen to check the chat-- if you will-- there is a link to menti.com. We're doing a poll. So if you will go ahead and check in on that and weigh in on your opinion on priority areas for funding formulas. I know at 8:30 in the morning, that's what everybody is thinking about-- funding formulas.

So we'd be excited to get your input on that. Thank you so much. The other thing is, I wanted to just welcome you. Thank you for coming. Again, my name is Justin Gorence. This is Michele Stiehl. In case you wandered in here and we're wondering what this is all about-- like, hey what is this? I see a race car. What the heck are you guys talking about? Well what we're talking about this morning is funding formulas. And just to give you a little background, just to make sure you're in the right place.

We began the process a few years ago of how funding was allocated with our consortium, and took a look around and decided what was out there, what people were doing with funding, how we could look at the structure of funding, and get some input on what people were doing outside of the consortium, and get an idea of what things we need to consider when we were putting a funding formula together. So we did a lot of research. We did some simulations. We talked to a lot of people. We put a bunch of different components together. We ran the numbers.

And we really took a look at how the funding formulas impacted each of our member districts. It was a long process, took a long time to put everything together. If you are here looking for answers, looking for that magic formula, the answer to all your questions-- Michele, will they find their answer here in this presentation today?

There are no definitive answers today. What we have, though, is we will share with you everything we went through to create our funding formula, the considerations, the conversation that we had within our consortia. And then we'll share with you what we finally decided on too-- what we're going to be using in Los Angeles.

Cool. And Michele, are there any handouts associated with this presentation today?

There indeed are handouts. So if you went through the CAEP portal, there was a place where you can get to our handout. We didn't have our handouts ready right at that time. So there's a sheet there, and if you click the link, it'll take you to our handouts. And we have two things for you. We have a research document that has everything that we're going to talk about and then some in it, all in writing. And then we also have a copy of our spreadsheets that we used for working out our funding formula.

So they're the live spreadsheets that you can manipulate and plug in numbers to.

Awesome. Hey, Michele. Also, I wanted to ask everybody-- it's kind of a limitation for us. I know, Michele, when we present, we love to see the people that we're working with, that we're presenting to, so we can talk to you. It's a little bit limited here, but if you don't mind, can you go ahead and throw in the chat your name and where you're from and maybe how you work in the consortium-- whether you're an instructor, or an administrator, or a consortium level personnel. We'd love to get an idea of who's in the presentation today. That really helps us out. Thanks guys.

So I got my first one. Melinda Holt is here. Thanks guys, appreciate it.

And while you're doing that, we are going to give a shameless plug for something [audio out] consortia. And one of the things that we loved this year with LARAEC is that we have an annual conference. And typically, we have it reserved for people within LARAEC. But because it's online now, and because we're in this environment, we're able to open it up to everybody across the state of California. And we were super excited to have about 200 people from outside of LARAEC join us for our conference that we had in September.

And then as an outgrowth from our conference, we decided to keep the magic going with doing [audio out] And so we're doing Lunch with LARAEC every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:30, and we have all sorts of general interest sessions. Anybody is welcome to join. If you go to LARAEC.org, you can register and you can see the list of topics that we have coming up. Our past sessions, we've done three now. We had a fabulous one on social media. If you're interested in that, you can check out our recording.

We also just released our new ESL revised curriculum. The links to all the curriculum are on our website. And then we had a great presentation by our community colleges on SB68 and how it impacts some of our students, so you can check that out. And then coming up, we have skills for teaching online. We have some sessions coming up on collaboration between teachers and counselors in a remote school environment. And then January is going to be our ESL engagement and persistence months.

We'll have a whole host of speakers throughout January that deal specifically with dealing with low-level English language learners and how do we keep them engaged in coming to class. That was our shameless plug.

Awesome. Shameless, but important plug. Engagement and persistence, important. Quick shout out. I see our friends, Thatcher and Ryan, are on this presentation call. We appreciate it. They were very, very helpful and supportive of us as we were going out and doing governance research and having those conversations to put this presentation together. So thanks guys for coming. We really, really appreciate it. Thanks for everybody who put their name in the chat, we really appreciate it.

I love there's a consortium that's about students. That's awesome. The name is what's important. Very good. All right. Thanks, guys. So let's get started. So Michele, a funding formula wouldn't seem to be the first thing that people would think of. A lot of times it's a difficult conversation because some people see it as a zero sum game, like hey, if you win, I lose-- can be contentious, can be difficult. So what happened in LARAEC. Why did we take this on as something that would be a priority for us? Why a formula, Michele?

Well originally, when the funding first came to our consortia-- the original allocation out to all the different members. We have five members. So we have four K-12 districts, and then LA Community College District, which is 9 colleges. But in the early days, it was a conversation. It was a negotiation between the five-member districts on how much would be allocated to each one. And then since that time, we've kept that same distribution.

So as new money has come in, it's just been distributed evenly based on the percentage-- so straight up, so all these years. But a couple of years ago, we started looking at those numbers and started looking at enrollment and the sizes of programs. And what we noticed is that there was kind of an imbalance, that we had some districts that are-- if you look at how many students they get in their allocation, they were getting like $1,500 per student, and others were getting more like $3,000 per student.

So the conversation came up called, hey, we need to look at putting that a little bit more in balance. There was lots of research that was happening all at this time a couple of years ago. And lots of things out there are just looking for equitable student funding formulas. And so that was definitely something that our board was interested in and charged Justin and I with, hey, go out and do some research. Tell us what's happening out there in the field. How are people deciding how the money gets spent, and what are some different strategies for allocating those funds if we wanted to do it in a little more equitable way?

So Justin and I set off into the sunset looking for how we can best distribute this money.

Yeah. And it was an epic journey at times that we thought we might not get through. So some of the things that we did were, we started with our own consortium. We took time to interview all of the board members, take a look at what they were doing, what their ideas were, what-- philosophically-- their thoughts were on funding formulas. With LARAEC, we have a great group called the Point People that are the go-betweens. They're charged with implementation of what happens at the consortium level.

We got their input as well, to get an idea of those thoughts and those ideas. We also did a lot of research online to find out what was going on, what research was out there, what information was available. And this is why I teach English, I can talk. So we found out what was out there. We looked at the LAO report, measuring our success, visions for success, AEBG reports, class prosperity through partnerships. So we looked at a lot of different areas and reports to get some ideas, to push us forward.

And I'll just take the rest Michelle. I'm sorry, I know I'm going out of order here. So the other thing that we did was-- we were in the middle of doing some governance research as well. And as a part of that, it allowed us to interview consortia directors from outside consortia so that we were not only talking about some governance ideas, but also funding ideas at the same time. So it worked in two ways for us.

And the other thing that we did was, we took all of these ingredients and put them together in these funding scenarios with different parts, different ideas, different thoughts-- so that we could evaluate them, take a look at them, take a look at the formulas themselves, but also add considerations and limitations for each one so that as we looked at them, we also knew what was good and what was bad, what things we need to think about when we're going to use them or potentially use them.

And then, when we were interviewing outside consortia, we started looking at, how did people decide how much money each member in the consortia was going to get. And it really varied. It varied widely across all the different consortia that-- some people just used the maintenance of effort funding that-- that's how they allocated it. And then others were looking at-- what's interesting is-- the nature of adult education providers in that region-- that when you look at some regions, the community college, it really is the main provider of adult ed in that region.

And so, in those places, there's lots of allocation for the community college and they were-- piecemeal the funding out. And then others are very heavily K-12. So it really depended on the structure of that consortium. Also, how the allocations were dealt a lot with the size of the programs. We have such a huge variance in how big our school districts are. And then, one of the things that we noticed, too, is that some of the smaller programs needed a lot more supplemental support.

Some of the things that we heard when we were interviewing was that big school districts have lots of extra advisors and support services that are available through the school district, whereas a smaller district might really only have their teachers and administrators to rely on for all of those support services. So they needed a little extra funding to support those things. And then some of the programs really focused on-- some consortia focused on rebuilding programs that maybe were eliminated or diminished when flexibility came into focus.

And then others looked at building new programs, like looking at areas of need-- like, where do we most need more adult ed, and then they focused their money on building programs there and putting new schools in or new classes in. Some consortia have a lot of consortia-level staffing and collaboration and coordination. Others have the money just going out to the field and to the school sites. And then some of the consortia just looked at, what are our priority projects?

And we want to fund priorities, rather than funding individual school sites. [audio out] that we're getting is also some snapshots of these schools. We've removed names to protect the innocent, but we did want to provide some snapshots of how schools decided-- how consortia decided to allocate their funds. So we have some consortia that use tiers of priority approach that wanted to-- their first priority for funds is rebuild capacity.

Their second tier is really looking at scaling up some best practices that really work and then putting extra money into innovations and new projects. But you can read about these in the guide when you have time. You can go through these and look at some of these. But there's really such a range of how people decided to allocate their consortia funds.

Yeah. And Michele, I think that's a really good point because those support documents that are available to people watching today are really, really good in order to do a deep dive into what we're talking about.

And they just give you, really just a collection of all the different things to consider when looking at funding formula, because it seems like, oh great, just create a funding formula. But there's so many-- you can go down a really deep rabbit hole of just considerations and things that you want to think about including in there.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you. So yeah. As Michele said, it would seem it's not a very linear task because there are so many pieces that you have to look at. One of the things that we really did-- and we referenced this earlier-- was how we really looked to see what publications were out there. At the time, there were a number of publications that were available to us-- or items that came out-- that really affected and informed some of the choices that we made.

We took a look at the legislative analyst's office report that talked about this per student funding formula that we align-- us, adult ed funding with K through 12-- talked about consistent fee structures, which would level the playing field-- that certain agencies have to charge fees, like for CTE classes, certain agencies don't-- the idea of leveling the playing field. And the idea of having consistent access and quality-- the funding would really ensure that.

And this idea of performance measures to improve outcomes-- typically what happens is, if there's an outcome, you get those outcomes that you fund for because people are specifically looking at that idea if it's attached to funding. The other things that we did were, as you can see, measuring our success as well as AEBG effectiveness, and the idea that-- philosophically-- that the funding should be used to accelerate adults into some sort of employment or engagement in society.

And this idea, again, of performance incentives that maybe target needs or accelerate pathways. And also, the idea that prioritizing communities of need was a good thing was something that needed to be done, or those potential students that have barriers to employment needed to be looked at-- class, but also-- Had a wonderful report that Michele and I read multiple times, that really talked about allocating resources for identified communities of need.

This idea of metrics that involved immigrants was an idea that we really looked at. And as we were looking at funding formulas, it was something that came into play for us.

I saw a question in here that was asking for the link on where you can get the handouts. It's part of the CAEP summit website. When you looked at our workshop, the handout link is right there. And it'll take you right to where our handouts are and you can download them. OK. OK. So one of the areas that we looked at, too, when we were considering what components to put in our funding formula is that the community colleges were creating a funding formula and implementing it at the same time that we were looking at something for us.

And so we really looked at this one. And it was made up of these three components, and this is the very, very quick view of what this is. You can read volumes on this particular issue. It includes-- but basically, it's a base. There's a base amount for everybody, it's based on their FTES. And then, in addition to the base, then there's some supplemental money that's for equity, right? So it's looking at those harder to serve populations and providing additional funds for anybody who's in that population.

And then it has success-- a success component where there's additional money provided for having outcomes. And these are the kinds of outcomes and these are the qualifications for equity that add the extra money. What we thought was really great about this is it really addressed that notion that we saw in a lot of the reporting about-- we want to have those success measures built into a funding formula and we also know that we need to provide additional funds for some students.

Maybe they need extra support services and they might not have those successes during that year. What we like is it included those three components. Also we liked the idea of how this model was-- this formula is phased in over time, that it's not something that just takes effect right now and that everybody has to just deal with the new number now. It also had kind of a hold harmless built into there where you couldn't really backslide too far, or if you had to take a cut, then it was over a period of time.

So we thought that this model had a lot of really great features that were part of it that we consider when we were looking at our own funding formula. The other thing that also happened in our consortia is that the LACCD Adult Education department was building its own funding formula. So they're looking at, when they get their allocation from their piece of the pie of the consortia, that they had a formula for how they're going to allocate that out to their nine colleges.

So they were also looking at providing this base funding for each one, so a straight dollar amount that each college gets. And then they wanted to build in some success and innovation metrics into theirs as well. So they have-- when students have-- we have a certain percentage of students complete the course, that they get additional funding. If students finish the CDCP certificates, they get additional funding. And then they have this piece they built in that was around innovation, that they wanted to have schools continue to innovate, so they wanted to reward those.

Any time schools got approved for new courses or new certificates, that there was additional funding provided for those. And then they had a mechanism built in that, if there's carryover, that it comes back to their central office for adult ed and then reallocate it out. So I thought that it was really interesting that the college had a way of allocating out the CAEP funds to everybody, and to all of their nine colleges as well. OK.

So we had our Menti quick poll, and we want to just check in with that really quick. And we're going to look and see--

What did that look like? I'm curious.

What does that look like? Hold on one second. Let's look in here. So here's our Menti quick poll. Let me move my picture around again. So I feel-- so here's our questions, right? I feel funding's distributed fairly in my consortia. It looks like people are in 3.5 category for that. So moving towards yes, kind of fair. My district program has what it needs to serve the community. A little bit on the lower end. I think the state should determine a funding formula. So people are kind of in the middle ground on, should it come from the state.

And I think funding needs to be determined locally, seems to be strong support for local funding. And that's one of the things that we keep looking at. I mean, it would be really great-- we went back and forth on this-- it'd be really great if the state would provide some funding formula so everything's equal. But then you continue to go back to, yeah, but every single consortia really looks different and really has different needs and really functions in a different way.

So it's really hard to come up with some straight formula that's going to work for everybody.

Yeah. I think that was one of the things that was the commonality, right? There is no one size fits all.

Yeah. And then our second question was, what kinds of things should be considered in a funding formula? So it looks like enrollment was a big one, need is a big one, outcome seems to have a lot of support there, the demographics of the students. Oh, capacity is interesting too. Filling to capacity or also, some school sites only have the capacity for a certain number of students as well.

Very interesting.

OK. So we want to do is get into our funding scenarios and go back to--

Michelle, I hate to interrupt. You both have some questions in the chat.

I'm going to-- Thanks so much, Melinda. I'm going to go back over to the chat right now while we start this and I'll go ahead and take care of those questions.

Awesome.

But I have to tell you, Melinda, I was ignoring Neil Kelly specifically and directly, so, just--

Understood.

OK, great. OK. So as we begin looking at our funding formula, we wanted to review a few things before we get to the actual formulas so we can understand what's on that page. So we have some things that-- some decisions that we made early on that impact how the formulas that we came up with work. So we wanted to go through those really quick here. OK. Number one is that we kept looking at, how are we going to deal with the community college? And the community college a little bit special in the world of creating a funding formula.

And the reason why we kept running into some challenges with putting the community colleges in the funding formula is that our base for collecting data and using data to make decisions is TE. That's the thing that we all have that's uniform. And the problem with the community colleges is that TE is not their way of reporting all of their students. It is their way of reporting students that they claim for WIOA, but it's not-- it doesn't capture all of the students that they have enrolled in adult education.

And in fact, with our particular community college district, there's only a small portion of the students that are in TE. So that produced a challenge in trying to include them in some of the formulas. The other thing is that there's other funding for the community colleges. A lot of the classes and the sections are primarily supported through general funding and not part of the CAEP money. The CAEP money is used more for the consortia-related items and more of the management side of it, not necessarily funding the courses in the teachers.

So it created a particular challenge about it. So one of the things that we determined early on is that instead of having the community college in the formula, it's [audio out] going to be an off-the-top number. So you'll see, as we get into the funding scenarios, that you don't see community college really in the formulas at all. You'll see it just as an off-the-top number.

The other thing that came up, too, is we started looking at, OK, so we want to provide some kind of base funding-- again, just as a note, in our district we have such a huge disparity in terms of how many students districts have. We have two very small districts that are like 1,500 students and 2,500 students, and then we have LA Unified, where they have 11 different school sites and many of those school sites have more students at the one school than the entire districts-- those other districts do. So there's a huge difference in size.

We did want to-- the smaller districts did make sure that we knew that there is a minimum operating cost, though. If we go with just the strict per student, sometimes they'll run into a fact that, they definitely need administrators, they definitely teachers, they definitely need lights on buildings and classrooms. So there is a minimum amount of cost that it takes to have a school, so we wanted to make sure that we kept that in mind. And then one of the things that came up for us, really, is this notion of right sizing-- that we wanted to bring those all the schools into an alignment though, in terms of how much funding.

We don't want to have it that one school district gets double the amount per student than the other school districts. So there was this notion of right sizing that came up over and over again as we looked at the base funding. Like, how do we get us-- how do we get us to be about the same size in terms of per student? And then it was determined that TE was going to be the thing that we had to use for our formulas. This was the commonality. This was the only way we had to collect data in a uniform way, was using the TE data. OK. And that's you, Justin.

Oh. Thanks. I'm sorry, I was doing a chat. Yeah. So thanks, Michele. So some of the ideas-- basically, we looked at what were some of these factors that would impact funding formulas. When we looked at equity or success measures, what would that look like. What would those considerations be? In terms of equity, it could be response to legislative initiatives that focus on service to students and communities of needs. We referenced that before, about that focus on those communities of need that may have higher needs or more impactful needs than other groups.

Immigrant integration metrics that we talked about with class, low-income students underrepresented in categories, students who may experience barriers to employment or education, some of the success measures that we mentioned. What could be some of the considerations that we looked at would be like, could they be completions, competencies, graduations, high school equivalencies, could be transition to post-secondary, or transitioning careers.

It could also be transitions within programs themselves, from noncredit to credit, or within a certain metric.

OK. And then one of the things that came up over and over again in our discussions, really, was this innovation. We wanted to highlight innovations because it's something that we wanted. And if you highlight things and attach money to it, then you get more of that, right? We know that. And so we're looking at, what kinds of things would constitute innovations. So we're looking at curriculum programs, pilot projects, scaling up current initiatives that we have and taking them to more school sites.

And then, one of the things that came up a couple of times was looking at, are we allocating funding for completion of new initiatives or are we putting seed money in to fund new initiatives to happen. So that was a conversation around the innovation thing. And then consortia management. We decided in our consortia that off the top would come consortia management. So we have our director, we have two advisors, a fiscal analyst, and a secretary that comes off the top. And so on all the consortia members are contributing towards that.

And then if we expand that in any way-- there's a lot of really great things that we found out in our governance research that we'd love to expand, like adding transition support services and advisors. So as we add those, then it increases the off-the-top number. OK. All right. So what we're going to get into next is we're going to get into the actual funding scenario. So what we're going to-- we were charged with-- Justin and I-- come up with a bunch of scenarios.