Julio's trying to join from the-- yeah, the--

[interposing voices]

Yeah.

Oh, instead of using his link?

Yeah, I just told him, it should be from his email.

Right. If I see them in the attendees list, I'll try and promote them.

OK.

What's his last name please?

Julio Segura.

Segura, OK. Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Come on in. Have a seat. We're just wrapping up what we're going to be doing here. In just a second, I'm going to be doing some housekeeping. You might have seen it if you already went to the first session. If not, it'll be new. And if so, just bear with us. OK. My name is Melinda Holt. I'm with OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. And we are a sister project with CAEP TAP, who's putting on this summit. So we're helping out a little bit.

We're up to 30. You are going to be-- your presenters are going to be using the Q&A. So I recommend that you go ahead and click on that Q&A button. Don't type anything yet because the presentation hasn't started. But have it ready. So during the presentation, you can type questions in there. General stuff, like, hey, Patty, I haven't seen you in a long time. Put that in the chat. Questions related to the presentation should go in the Q&A. And with that, the dust seems to be settling down a little bit. I'm going to go ahead and do the housekeeping real quick.

And naturally, my windows aren't opened as they should be. And there we go. So webinar tips-- it's really simple. I need to move some windows out of the way. I'm so sorry folks. We are recording this webinar. As soon as you came in we started recording, so just keep that in mind. We're recording. All of the webinars will be uploaded to VFairs as they are made available to us through the Zooms. So we have to render, and then we have to upload. So it takes a little time. Please give us some time, 2 to 3 business days.

Your audio, I am talking right now. You should see my lips moving and some voice coming out. If all you see are the lips moving, that's a problem. Go ahead and check your audio settings, and you get to turn up your volume or turn it down. You control that, we don't. You also might want to check that carrot next door because your sound might be coming into your system or out of your system, and you think it should be coming out of your headset. So check that.

The webinar chat, again, I just went over this, use that for general discussion or the presenter might say, OK, everybody, I want you to say, yes, for this question, use the chat. So pay attention. Use the chat when directed, or just general chit chat. The Q&A, please use that for all of your questions related to the presentation. And you also kind of control your own View Options. So if you're having a hard time seeing something on the screen, you can go up to when the presenter is presenting. You're going to click on View Options, and you can fit the window or change the side to 100%. And for those of you that want to multitask, you can also exit full screen so that you can resize the Zoom window, and then open up another one.

At the end of this presentation, you will be prompted to continue in order to open the evaluation. And we had a little bit of a hiccup this morning on the first session. I think we got that fixed. So go ahead and hit the Continue button. And it should take you to the form where you can actually fill it out. If you get anything that has the Edit mode, please hit the little eyeball on the Edit mode. And then you'll be able to fill out the evaluation.

I hope you're all having a good summit so far. So I'm going to go ahead and stop share, and then hand off to our presenter, lead presenter, Mr. Thatcher Weldon.

All right. Well, thank you. And it's good to be here with everybody. And thank you for all the information Melinda. And she said, this is being recorded. And I know all of you can only see us up here on the panel, but we see all of you. And it is recording you. So you over there, don't do that anymore, OK. So OK, just kidding. But anyways, let's start this up. And you guys, what do you see on your screen?

Using data tables.

OK, just the PowerPoint, right?

Yes.

OK. All right. So using data tables to make informed decisions, we're going to start off by introducing ourselves. My name is Thatcher Weldon. I am the Director of Adult Education at Kern Community College District. And I'm the Chair of the Kern Adult Education Consortium. I've been in Adult Education in California for five years now. And overall, in Adult Education for seven years. So I really love what we're doing in Adult Ed. I think we do a lot of meaningful work. And I'm thankful to be a part of this group here today.

So it's not letting me go on. There we go. So who are we? We're the Kern Adult Education Consortium. I introduced myself. Susan, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself for everybody?

Good morning, everyone. Susie Clipperton, I'm the Principal of Mojave Adult School. I've been involved with Adult Education for over 20 years. And I love Adult education. I love the adults. And I love everything that goes along with it. But I'm afraid of data. And it's really interesting, and I've learned a lot. And so maybe we have a couple of hints for you. So thank you, and welcome.

And Cynthia Bryan.

Hi, good afternoon. I'll look at the camera for this. I am the District Special Project Coordinator at Muroc Joint Unified School District. Adult Ed is new word to our district. I've been there for three or four years now. I can't keep track. Now, I can say that finally. Our district is very unique in the sense that we are a small and necessary rural school, just as a K-12 district. And we're also on a military base. So data can be useful for me, but like, stripped down to the bare minimum. So I am going to be the counterpoint for the smaller school districts alongside Susie, where we have just like a sprinkling of, like, maybe only seven or eight in your high school diploma program and those types of things. So I will be your chat room moderator.

Thank you. And then we also have one more member. He's in the participant pool. If we can pull him out of there and get him up into the panel. That's Julio Segura. He is the Director of Delano Adult School. Delano Adult School is, I believe, it's our third largest site in this consortium. I would call them a medium to medium-large site. They serve a lot of students. And so that is who we are here on the panel. I hope Julio can join us soon. And let's see. And then let me tell you a little bit more about our consortium.

The Kern Adult Education Consortium, we consist of nine district adult education providers-- Delano Joint Union, Kern High, McFarland Unified, Mojave Unified, Muroc Joint Unified, Porterville Unified, Sierra Sands Unified, Tehachapi Unified, and Wasco Union High. We have three county offices of education in our consortium-- Inyo County Office of Ed and Mono County Office of Ed. Those two partners provide classes, adult ed classes. Kern County Office of Education is a member in our board. They do not provide adult ed classes or services, but they are a big part of our group, a big part of support.

We have for community college campuses-- Bakersfield College, Bakersfield College Delano Campus, Cerro Coso Community College, and Porterville College. We have one Community College District Office, Kern Community College District. And that is in Bakersfield. We also have, I believe, three whole locations of services with our colleges and our adult schools. Bakersfield Adult was the first to push this through. They partnered with Bakersfield College. They have two sites where they co-locate with the college and provide services to our student. And then Cerra Coso just partnered with Inyo County Office of Education and opened up a location of services on the main drag in Bishop, California.

We serve over 24,800 square miles. That goes from rural farming communities to rural mountain communities. It includes the ninth largest city in California, Bakersfield. We cover four counties Tulare, Kern, Inyo, and Mono. And if you take a look at the map, we are the largest geographic consortium in the state of California. This map over here, it shows all of our sites and members, except for Inyo. Inyo came on last year. This was a publication we put out the year before. But Inyo would be somewhere around here, I believe. So pretty large area, pretty diverse group of programs. We have Bakersfield Adult, which is a massive adult school. They're great partner for everybody.

And then we also have sites that are maybe one administrator, one staff, and one teacher, maybe just one person wearing multiple hats. So it can be challenging at times to make sure we're all on the same page, especially when it comes to data, when some of the smaller sites don't have dedicated personnel to data. So that is us.

And then I wanted to add, who can benefit from this session? Everybody, as you're coming in, I'm thinking any faculty, staff, or administrator who doesn't feel like they are a data person. This is something that can be helpful for them to learn from. Anybody who wants to learn some basic Excel skills in using data and creating data tables. We don't have enough time to go into everything, but I am going to go through kind of the basics we did as a group to create the data templates that we'll be sharing with you that we use in our meetings and you'll get kind of a sense of how you can develop those and build upon them for your groups.

Small to medium programs, like I said, that do not have any dedicated data staff and where admin and faculty, staff often wear multiple hats. That was my background when I worked as a site manager in West Texas. I was a teacher, I was an admin. And I had to do intake. I had to do everything. So you kind of learn it all in those areas. And then anybody who hears data and thinks, that doesn't apply to me, it can apply to you. And you can be tracking data. And it's nothing to get over your head about. OK.

Anything else to add?

Thatcher, I just want to let you know that I made it in.

Oh, OK. Great. So Julio was here. Thank you. Anything to add, Julio?

As far as data is especially important for those who are agencies, even the smaller agencies, is definitely beneficial for them to track and to keep up to date. And right now that we're up on the quarterly reports as usually we try and keep at it and that third quarter report the we usually get to that we want to have it more up to date than the first and second quarter. Just because we were nearing the fourth quarter and we want to have 100% correct data.

Right. Good point. Yeah so-- Yeah, we have a mix of welfare programs and then programs that are working on becoming WIOA and then just CAEP programs. So that kind of knowledge of the data is all different across those boards, right. So that's a good point, Julio.

And again as we go through this please, if you have questions, go ahead and answer them. We can stop and address them. We can go down different roads during this presentation. So please provide any feedback or questions throughout.

OK. So I have a question I wanted to start with. So what tools is your consortia use for data planning goals, et cetera. So I wanted to see what some of you are using in your consortia, your sites?

OK. I'm getting an Excel, Table Lua. TOPSpro, are.

OK. ASAP I see too. Yeah. OK. Here we go. Excel.

[interposing voices]

It's all floating now. Everybody's coming in on the same go.

Great. Great. Thank you. So-- Yeah and that was my point with Excel. I think simple tools can help consortia and schools, colleges, staff, administrators making informed decisions on our goals, right. Instruction, obtainable outcomes to create success.

And so we use these data tables that will be showing you later on. At every consortia meeting, we go over these. So that's good to know that you guys are using similar things. And when we get to more of the discussion, I'd be interested in what your data tools look like because we'll go over the Excel Export in TOPS as well.

So we all know and use these tables from TOPS, right. Everybody in adult age should be familiar with the data tables that come out when we run our manager reports or when we run our site reports. And so faculty, admin staff should all know what this looks like. What's the comfort level in reading this. I would imagine pretty good, Julio, Susie.

Yes.

Yeah. So--

Agreed.

Yeah so when I'm-- this is the manager's table. So I'm the consortia manager and I can't dig down any deeper with this data. It's just numbers. And when I run our reports, I get-- it looks nice. It's easy to read. And I can see what each side is doing. But I also don't get a aggregated report for our consortia so all the numbers added up. I wasn't getting that before. I don't know if they've improved that and it's available now. But with the tables, we created I didn't need to-- Yeah.

So Bryan is saying it took me a while to explain the three enrollment columns. Yes. Same here. And what I usually look at is the service enrollees. I want us to look at their and then I'm looking at the enrollees in column E. I got confused with B and E too.

I've talked with J a couple of times about that what those differences are and I think it was-- if they've had a pre-test over here, they show up. And this is important right because this is our pre and post-test where we can start to see how many of our students are getting those gains on the CASAS test. So-- OK. So Bryan say you can run an aggregate report now. OK. So I'll show you why I didn't know that. So-- OK.

So what does your consortia use the TOPS tables for? What do you guys use because we don't use those PDF tables for much of anything at least for the consortia level, we don't. The PDF tables I'm talking about.

May I add on to that. Our tables-- when we use the summary for our side usually what we end up running is our CASAS, things they had it right now. I don't want where I put it. Usually, running our consortia summary of how the students are doing, which is a plus a minus charge. And I had it. I don't know where I put it. And that pretty much will tell us how the students are doing by competency and that's how we turned it the instruction.

OK. Thatcher, while Julio is pulling that together, there was a question. If you're not part of a consortia, what should they be filling in on that piece?

OK, so what should they be filling in on what piece?

Sorry, let me--

No that's OK. And then while you're looking for that, there was a comment. So when you guys are posing your questions, please pose them to all panelists and attendees, so that everybody can see them and maybe it'll spark some curiosity in other people as well. Yeah, so I just wanted to share that. Thank you Greg.

That you're going to say something.

Yeah.

I felt, we get these forms, we print these forms in tops pro, we give them to the teachers. But I kind of felt that they were a little bit difficult to read for me. And so I don't think that we used those efficiently. They were numbers and they went in the pile or went in the file. We didn't use them very efficiently. We have to take another step I think, at least, for us who are not real comfortable. And it didn't really tell us-- I was-- it was basic numbers. But what does that mean? So I needed something more.

OK, that's a good point. And there is something to point out about-- so let me go back to that PDF 2 based off that. Because my consortia manager reports I can't click on any of these numbers and dig down deeper. But you guys, if we worked more on doing some CASAS trainings with our faculty and staff, what they can eventually do is look at that column B and C and say, OK, this is how many students are in my ESL class. And this is how many students have taken a pre and post-test.

So I need to click over here find out which students are not showing up here, so that I can test them. And I also need to see who is not getting those gains. So you can dig down a little deeper with these tables as well, but it takes time, right? it does take time and just studying those things. So good point Suzy. OK, did we get any feedback on that from Dan?

No. I'm wondering if he's referring to the slide where it says the one that we're on right now where it's listing down with consortia pats on the back on the SAP manager. I'm seeing any error. So I see that's what I'm assuming.

Well, my question was, so I look at this from a consortium lead perspective, how do I look at data at our board meetings with all of our partners? What can we use this for going forward? But I'm saying what can you use it for if you're not a consortia-- like you're not the one who goes to the consortium meetings? Maybe you're an instructor, well, what can you use this data for? I think there's many things. And it's about just kind of digging into it and figuring out where you want to go with it, I think as we see more and more.

Jay Micheline, if I'm saying your name correctly or incorrectly, I apologize, made a comment that they use them to prepare for quarterly performance summaries. And since the tables and agreeing with Susie, right? They're difficult for the staff and teachers to understand so they have a simplified version as well, that I believe that you're going to touch on here in just a bit anyway.

OK, yeah. So you use it all for that, interesting. Great. OK. So what do you like or dislike about these tables, and again, I'm talking about the PDF tables. As a consortium lead, I can say the positives are it's very easy to read, right? I know what they say because I've used them quite a bit. And when I worked in Texas, they were similar. It was a different management system it was called Teams, but it did look very similar because it was aligned with VOA. And much like we are here in SAP.

So the positives are, if you're familiar with VOA, if you're familiar with these tables, you can read it, you know what it says, the negatives for me as a consortium lead is it's very hard to run reports and compare to what we've done in the past or compared to what other consortia are doing. So that's what it is for me. It's just there. I can't play around with those PDF tables. I can't do anything with them. I don't know if you guys have any feedback, what you like or dislike about the PDF tables?

For me, a positive. Is I can pretty much see growth in numbers in a few general things. I can see really well and really quick but just because I can see like growth in numbers, I don't know necessarily just from the reports of what classes students are in are they in ESL are they in diploma. So in general, I think it's good it's got a lot of information in there but unless I know what I'm looking for and how to look for something else, then it doesn't give me enough clear student information.

Yeah, good. And there are some good comments from people as well in the chat so thank you. And then meaningful can be difficult to pin down, why? Right, inconsistent coding, bad coding. Yeah, that's another area, right? The inconsistent coding or bad coding that's a whole other area I think, right? And with what we're going to go over here, you can start to realize that and start realizing OK, we need to improve on these areas. And that's one of the things we did as a consortium with what we created as well. So good point about the inconsistencies. A consortium calculator. Wow, Ryan Whetstone. I like that.

The articles are just so big then that we separate it into probably three consortium at the same time, it's only when we meet together. [interposing voices] So and we also have pointed out that we have different needs.

Right. So that's a-- go head, sorry.

And one of-- a lot of our data comes out to whatever we feel comfortable with. And I know some of them-- some of us feel really comfortable with just using TOSPro without even exploring. Exporting to Excel just helps us manipulate the data. Not manipulate it, but have a clear answer on the percentage of the data or better.

Good. Yeah. So yeah, he makes a good point. Our consortium, we also have I forgot to mention this, we're four subregions, right? We're Porterville, North Kern, Kern, because Bakersfield's the largest part of it. And then the Eastern Sierra, which is a very large area from high desert up to Mammoth lakes. So yeah, that's a good point Julio. OK, so we have some positives and negatives.

And then I wanted to ask this because I just kind of assumed everybody's familiar with this, but then I realized when talking to people that not everybody is familiar with the fact that you can take those PDF tables and export them into Excel. And so I don't know how many of you are familiar with that. I'm guessing in this meeting, quite a bit based off your-- based off the feedback in the chats.

But if there are people who are not familiar with that, that's OK. That's nothing to be ashamed of especially because when you look at these Excel exports, if you aren't familiar with working with data, it can be overwhelming, right? It's not too user friendly. So it's kind of a hidden feature too, right? Yes. And so that's why it was suggested that I include this video how you can do that to anybody. It's fairly short it's like a minute and I'll talk through it. But when you get into Tops Pro, you just close that out. Go to your reports. Go to your state reports, California. I'm going to go to my consortium manager reports and then manager tables. But you could go to your cap tables if you're a site.

And then I just want up until the current date this year, right? So I'm going to generate my report with the current program near all of our programs put that generate. And boom, I've got all our PDF tables, right? And we should have 12 or 14 for our group, and then you click that export function. Let me go back. So up there, that export next to the print, put that export function and it's automatically as a PDF. You should click that, change that, go down to Excel 2007 workbook. Save it wherever you want, and it will go to your desktop.

And then close that out, and boom, I've got it down there, my manager's table, right? I open that up. Oh, that doesn't look too good. And I just locked out our consortium data but this is what it looks like, right? It's just a dump of all your data from English as a second language to total unduplicated students and then it goes right into the next program, right into the next member. So it's not put in any way that most people could read it and with any meaning. So what did I use to blur my data? Talks has a function in there. No, It doesn't. I have a movie editor I created this with, and so I just put that together with that.

So if you do use toxic sell export for teachers, staff, administrators and students, well, what do you use it for? I saw somebody, I think it was Ryan Wetstone talked about creating an Excel calculator. And I think you're going to find that this is somewhat similar to that I'm guessing. When do you use it?

So when I first wanted to start looking at data for our consortium, I started using those PDF tables and then I was like but I want to look at the student served and I want to see how we're growing from month to month from year to year. And these PDFs tables, I have to take that data entered in myself to something. So OK I'm going to explore this Excel export. And so I, you know, ran the report and exported it and it was overwhelming at first. Looking at going, well, how do I present this to our board in any meaningful way when it's just looks like that. So that is how I know--

Actually on that point, when you bring it to the board, Christine White had asked a question a little bit earlier and it was how do you structure your conversations around the PDF tables when you bring them to meetings?

OK, so yeah and I will show you that too once we get to the actual tables. But we look at-- do you want to mention it Suzy or Cynthia or Julio? or you want me to? You want me to. OK. So what-- so we look at how we're growing, right? So actually let me go to the next slide I'll show you. So I looked-- before COVID, right, I was looking at this. Because we've been doing this for maybe just under two years I think. I've been bringing this to our meetings every month in this format. And so it's fairly easy for me now to take March 2020 and compare it to March 2019.

So at the meeting, before COVID hit, we were looking at this and in March 2020, we had unduplicated students served at 10,702. The year before we were at 10,758. Now that's students in the m column coming in for services, right? And then we had 2020 unduplicated enrollees at 6,261.

The previous year in 2019, we have 5,796 students enrolling in our courses. So we had grown in the students we were getting into classes, but for some reason, the student sort of dropped 50 or so. I don't know exactly why that was. But then I also looked at like Ryan was talking about that calculator function, right? We have that built in our tables too. March 2020, and I don't know if all of you remember, but Jay, and I think Neil did webinars showing these functions, how you calculate these percentages. And we'll go over that how we included that in our tables as well.

But-- so March 2020 enrolled students who received one hour of instruction, so students come in for services. How many of them go into the classroom for at least one hour of instruction? 92% just over 92%. The previous year, we were just over 90%. So we had grown a little bit there. We were getting more students into our classes that came through our door. In March 2020, students with one hour or more who make it to 12 hours, that's making sure that they move over to that pre post-test group, right? That they're in our programs.

March 2020, 1 hour to 12 hours, 63.54%. The year before, we were at 59.8% so we increase there as well. March 2020, AEP outcomes attainment. We were at 84.86% and then the previous year we were at 87.94% so just under 88%. So we dropped a little there. And there could be many reasons for that. That's something we would discuss in our meetings. Why do we think those things happened. where-- which sites are we seeing lower percentages than the average for the consortium? How do we help those sites get their numbers up? So that's sort of what we do a lot with thesis.

Looking at that data and figuring out, OK, how do we make sure we're on a good path? How do we make sure we're planning well? We're making good goals, we're supporting each other as a group, right? So if we've got a member who seems to be struggling with some of the data, part of my job is I'll go help them. I'll go to that site before all this, I would drive out there. I've made the drive up to Mammoth lakes and back in one day multiple times. It's a long drive but, you know, we do a good job working together to make sure we're collecting meaningful data because I think it's really important for us moving forward.

Thatcher, thank you for saying that. one thing in our consortium I agree very much is helping each other. And by those of us who have new schools and very small schools like 150 students, we have to learn which data we need to look at and which was important. And so this kind of stuff. So we're looking at this and we're just a tiny school, but it still helped us like how are we going to enforce the requirements for our school? Well, we have to know the requirements. We have to know the general requirements. And so we learn how to break down the data that affects us.

So we've started this massive district level, but yet we've used it at a smaller place. To ensure our accuracy, it's real easy to just add some numbers together when you have 13 students. But it starts getting a little bit odd when you get 150, and you have to start looking at this and looking at your percentages and your growth. So thank you Thatcher.

So actually and Susie, and the chat log question when it went back in and I think that's kind of piggybacking off of what you were just going with. Maybe Julio, you might be able to jump in on this. And I'm putting this back on you guys because you have many more students than I do. But this what do you do paired significant testing benchmarking against schools and so forth? How are they contextualized in terms of how meaningful process is measured?

You know, the person that I mentioned that is by the principles. I'm not sure what you mean by this, but usually what we do, and I know Daniel Cutlasses who use CASAS trackers and that's something that we use with the teachers. We have CASAS trackers and we used all the when they were give them the other scores and then when the system would be more the scores. So the teacher has-- each student has a CASAS pre and post paper, and they keep track of their own paper and then the teacher also keeps a track. And then when we do the CASAS summary, we give them where they're doing it and whether they need to go, and what competencies they go to move on.

And one thing that we used to do and maybe we need to front load is go back to CASAS and use the-- and I forgot the name of it, but is that there's a CASAS-- in CASAS, there's a way that you can enter your competencies and it will give you either books, videos, or and different materials that you can find out in order for the students to move on in that competency and have a better scores. What is it? I forgot the name of it. Quick search, there you go. Thank you Denise.

Quick search is something that we use we used to use quite often. And last year, I think we dropped it a little bit but it's something that we need to front load and it's a good way for us to tell the teachers hey, this is what you need to do you need to work on. Because it's really-- TOSPro, when you have a better person, you can come out with those drilldown papers for individual students and also as a summary for a class and they can build on those skills.

Is there anything else? So I see that were you talking about the press question from Kristen, do paired significant testing with these data or even benchmarking against goals?

I was thinking about the pair. I think that's what she was referring to as far as benchmarking that goes with the curriculum and we just every quarter we try to get into a certain point in case a student gets to transfer to something like that, then they can. And this is something that we've been working over on our North Kern also that we have the same benchmarks throughout North Kern, in case of a student transferring from New York to McFarland or Wasco. And they're still following on the same track.

Got it.

Does that--

Another thing that we do to track the process, I'm not sure if this was the question or not, is we give the general pre and post tests. But we also use the TOPSpro testing in our diploma track for english, history, economics, for individual subjects for our students that are earning their diploma. And then we find that those tests are a really good indication of growth.

And we put that in TOPSpro. And then we can look and see if they've made progress. It is very telling, because when a student takes a history class, and they do a pre and post test, and it's telling us a lot of information, because we can see the actual growth in numbers, in facts, asked after the test results have been entered into TOPSpro. Another thing that's very telling is if people take a class and there's no growth.

And it's just-- it's something. It's a discussion jump off point for us. Why is this student getting five credits towards a diploma? But we're not seeing growth in a pre or post test. It's just some interesting stuff to reflect on.

OK. Thank you. All right, if there's nothing else there. So this is the next part of this. So would you use the Excel export function from TOPS if it was more user friendly to read? So I put a little picture here of an Excel sheet.

And this is what we use. This is what we created to use at our meetings. And I want to show you how we did that. And it's fairly simple.

So let me X out of here, and we'll come back to PowerPoint later. Sorry. Let me-- all right. So when I run those consortium manager reports and I do the Excel export function, do you see this? You guys see this? Yeah.

So this is what I'm getting. And it's hard to read. It's not broken down by sites. So I wanted to create something with this that I could bring to the meetings and we could look at different things from our data with. So I created.

We created, as a group, these consortium student data tables. And I have all of our sites in here. So we've got J Wrightville, Kellytown, CAEPtown, Paradise, Hot City, we're in Kern, Farmington, Lowland College, Round Rock, and then all the way to our consortium. And so I put in our numbers beforehand. But what I would do, is I would just copy that manager's report.

I would take this starting with A1, and I would go down, copy all of this data, and then I would go back to my student data tables. And I'd go back to the AEP manager tables here. And I would just paste that all in over.

So I'm just going to paste that in. And then that gives me my September numbers. Now, usually, these will be empty. So I don't have anything in here, or I'm updating them for the next month. So what I would do, is I would go over here and just click on all these boxes. And I would go to data, and I would consolidate.

And see, I have it already in here. But I'll go ahead and delete that. Click on this right here for the reference. Go back to the AEP manager tables. Find J Wrightville right here, because that's what I'm filling in, starting with English language learners down to total unduplicated students. Call them 123 to 133, move all the way over, make sure I got the right numbers, hit Enter, add that, and boom. It enters in all that data for me, and it's all set up.

And so I did that with all of these. And we can go to the consortium. And for the consortium, I would just consolidate all of those tables to be summed up into the consortium table. So we can look at our consortium numbers together.

And then I included, because we've been doing this for two years, I put in consortium 2019, 2020. So whatever month we're in, all I do, I have Google Drives of our meetings. So I just go to our Google Drive, and I go to whatever month meeting we were in. And I download that table again.

And then I grab that data and insert it into that table. So I'll put that in there for 2019, 2020. And then I do a simple Copy and Paste, a special Paste to multiply all these numbers by negative 1 so that they become negative numbers. And the reason why that is, because I want to subtract them from our current year data.

So we have 2019, 2020 as negatives. And then I go into 2020 compared to 2019, and all I did was sum those two previous tables of consortium and consortium of 2019 '20. And I can see where we are.

We're 456 less students right now in ESL under column C here, but column B on the TOPSpro tables. Total unduplicated students, we're just over 600 less than we were from last year. Students services enrollees, we have more service enrollees this year than we did last year.

So I can look at these things, and we can start thinking, what's going on? Obviously, we all know why our numbers are lower this October compared to last October. But we can start making decisions, start knowing more about what's going on. And then, like Ryan Whetstone was talking about his. I'd be interested in seeing what he does with his Excel calculator.

But I put those formulas in that Neil and Jay talked about, enrolled students who receive one hour of instruction. And we start collecting those percentages. Obviously, we have a lower percentage this year because of COVID. Less people-- maybe more people are afraid of signing up for distance learning classes. A lot of students are afraid of technology. So we need to work on that. How do we make them more comfortable?

And then I look at all these different percentages that they have talked about. And we also include our pre and post test percentages for all of our programs and gains and pre and post tested gains. So we look at all of this at our meetings each month. And then the sites can go back and do with this information what they choose to do with their faculty and staff.

Thatcher, Greg was asking how often you're pulling the data. And then there was also a question to make sure that we are sharing these files instead of recreating the wheel.

Let's see here. Where's the chat? So I'm pulling this every month for our meetings. We have our monthly consortium meetings. I'll pull it that week, early that week, before we have our meetings on Friday. I'll usually pull it Wednesday and put it together.

And then I'll go in, get last year's data for that month, plug that in, and then put this together. So like I said, it was a process at first, developing these. But now that I can just run those Excel exports, I can plug that in. And because, usually, they're always going to line up on the same row and column, well, my tables are all set up to consolidate from the same place each time.

So I just need to make sure I highlight those tables on each of those tabs, hit Consolidate, and it should populate with what's in there. I double check just to make sure. I want to make sure we're looking at the right thing. And one issue, I will point out, is last year, the TOPS data tables were different than this year. And I'll show you that.

And so I had to make changes, and I had to make adjustments, because you'll see, this year, we've got ESL, ABE/ASE. But last year, it looked like this when you ran the tables. You would get ABE, HSD, HSE. So I had to add all those up together and put them in the same column so that we could compare that data. So I had to make some changes to the previous year's tables so that we could make those comparisons.

So you will have to make some changes over time. But once you become more comfortable, it becomes easier and easier. And then somebody-- you said there was another question.

So Greg wanted to clarify that you're filtering for each month by the year. And are you only looking at the summary and not the DIR?

So for me, I'm looking at the summary. I'm not looking at the DIR. I haven't gotten there yet. So we will get there, and we will continue to expand on this. But this has helped us make sure our DIR's are more accurate. And we need to start looking at that moving forward.

We were getting close to the point of, how do we start setting expectations off of these numbers? How do we start having discussions over what is success in our group? And then COVID happened. And so we had to kind of put that on the back burner, because we had to address all these different issues.

So yeah, those are good questions. I would be interested in looking at how we do this with DIR data. But I haven't looked at that yet.

So is the question also, do you use the data range when you are running your reports?

Data range? Like what?

They took it out. Somebody was--

[interposing voices]

Oh, data range. Yeah, yeah. So I'm doing it for each month. So I just generate the current program year every time. And then, like I said, since I've done it for close to two years now, I have it from the previous years. So I've ran into problems with the consortium manager tables running previous year reports.

For some reason, when I tried running those reports for, like, July 1 to December 31 or whatever, I couldn't get accurate tables. I don't know why. But thankfully, since I've done this for two years, I have it all in our Google Drive already. I can just download that again and plug those numbers in.

And great seeing those numbers can be unpredictable. And we have to remember, you know, this is all a growing process. It's going to get better, all of our data. TOPS is going to get better at creating these reports as they become more meaningful for members. So yeah. So data ranges, no. I just run the current program year, because that's what I want to look at, where we are right now.

[interposing voices]

Yeah, right. But I don't do date range, because I just want to know-- oh, so you're talking date range, I'm guessing, because you're a WIOA agency, right? I'm guessing that's what that's about. Because--

[interposing voices]

Yeah, because-- so WIOA, you're reporting-- right. Not the whole year up to that point. You could do the same thing. I haven't set it up like that, but you could do that, sure.

It would just be, like I said, when I run those reports from previous years, I'm not getting accurate data, I don't think. It seems to be giving me the whole year for some reason. But if I had that, if I had done it last year for WIOA. And we ran December to-- or January to March. Then you'd have that for the next year. And then you'd just run that quarter again. And then you'd compare those two quarters.

So it's just about starting yourself, if you're a WIOA agency, and then doing that. OK, good question. OK, was there anything else?

There's a question, on the question and answer, it says, are AEB and AEC merged? The data when it comes out of the TOPSpro.

Now they are, this year. So AEB, ASE, and HSE, I think, all are one now. They just call it AB ASC. They used to have ABE, HSD, HSE-- oh, OK. You can choose to separate them.

So if I would have worked more with the TOPSpro program, I could have saved myself some time not having to add those up myself.

They're saying don't do it, don't do it. Is what we're getting back on that.

Oh, OK. So OK. All right, I won't do that then. I'll continue to do what I'm doing. But yeah, so that's how we do that. And like I said, if I run the next month's report, let me show you real quick. It's very simple.