Peter Simon: Hello, everybody. My name is Peter Simon. Myself and Jenny Mollica are partners in High Road Alliance. Very briefly, High Road Alliance is we've just been around for six months. We're, as our moniker says here, we're really about opening doors to equitable, inclusive employment opportunities for the broadest possible population. And that includes integrating teaching and learning, hands-on experience, helping build access to good jobs, preapprenticeship/apprenticeship programs.

We work with a range of programs. We've, clearly, with this-- you'll hear about this project. We're also working with a number of entities around building access to apprenticeship and preapprenticeship programs. We also do direct technical assistance to people, building programs, and are currently helping create pathways and apprenticeships in the building services and agricultural sectors.

Myself, very briefly, I'm a retired community college CTE dean, but I've also worked doing consulting work with a number of adult ed consortia, helping build career pathways, do planning, contextualized teaching and learning, integrated education and training, and most recently with the topic of today, which is immigrant integration. Jennie.

Jennie Mollica: Hi, everyone. I'm Jennie Mollica, also with High Road Alliance, really delighted to be here with all of you today. Thank you for joining us. Just briefly about my past, I was an ESL teacher for many years and worked in Immigrant and Refugee Services in Oakland before starting consulting, mainly around convening partnerships of education, workforce development, community-based organizations around career pathways and good educational opportunities.

I did some research starting last year on English learners' access to apprenticeship, and that got me especially interested in the role of adult education in supporting access to really strong training and career pathway programs. And with High Road Alliance, I've been very happy to be involved in this partnership with the California Adult Education Program to learn more about immigrant integration in adult education in California.

So we wanted to give you a brief overview of our objectives for the webinar today. A definite highlight of this webinar will be number four here. We have a fantastic panel who you'll meet a little later in the webinar. But before we get into that panel, we want to do a few things.

One is to talk a little bit about immigrant integration in the California context specifically, AB 2098, which will tell you a little bit about and California's commitment to immigrant integration. And then related to that is the state's adoption of this Immigrant Integration Framework, which we want to share with you, those of you who aren't familiar with it, or just introduce as kind of a framing for the way we're talking about this today.

And then Peter and I are going to tell you a little bit about our recent research on effective practices in immigrant integration across California's adult ed consortia. And following this fantastic panel, we're going to have some time at the end for questions and for you sharing ideas, sharing ideas among our panelists a little more freely on what we're doing around immigrant integration and future directions.

Just to note that the research presentation we're going to do today is really just a taste, and you can learn more by reading the brief that was just released by CAEP. And I believe you'll find a link to that in today's chat.

Peter Simon: Great. Next slide. So first, we're going to talk a little bit about just the Cal-- as Jennie said, the California context. And again, many on this call know well about this because this is what you deal with daily, but just a overview that 26.8% of California's population are immigrants. And currently, the CAEP consortia around the state are serving a little over 350,000 English learners. So it's a main part of adult education offering.

And we were going to be talking about the sort of broader framework, but just that CAEP, CAEP as a system, supports language acquisition but much more now being documented in the EL Civics Objectives and the COAAP metrics, and we'll have a little brief cameo by Jay Wright in a moment about this.

I also just want to say, in terms of workforce development that we're talking about, that immigrants, when you look at the demographics, that immigrants are not just a group that needs to be served. But when you look at the demographic data, immigrants are a significant portion of the workforce of the future in this state and in this country, really. Next slide, please.

Jennie Mollica: OK, so before we go any further, we wanted to pause here and just make sure it's made clear what we mean when we're talking about immigrant integration. And we thought the best way to share that with you was by referring to a definition that was put together by a work group that came together related to California's legislation AB 2098. And this work group gave a lot of thought to how to approach immigrant integration at the state level and came up with this definition.

I won't read it to you. You can read it here. But it's worth noting that it's really seen as a two-way process, immigrants integrating into the society that they're introducing themselves to and the society welcoming them. And there's an emphasis here as well on programs and services, because that is what many of us provide, and then also, at the same time, an emphasis on the individual and the community. So there are individual benefits to this when people can gain economic mobility, civic participation, but they're also the secure and inclusive communities that result.

Peter Simon: So just very briefly, again in terms of just the California context, that in 2015 they established a new position, which is the director of immigrant integration, which is part of the governor's office. And in 2018, CAEP included immigrant integration as something which is included in what's measured, which was mandated by AB 2098. And in 2019, the AB 2098 Work Group released a whole series of recommendations, and these you can read more about in the opening part of our brief. Next slide.

Jennie Mollica: So we also wanted to share with you a framework that's come to be adopted by California. This grew out of work that was done in the area of the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education. We're very, very lucky to have some of those leaders on our call today, on our panel. So you'll hear more from them shortly.

But the adoption of it by California is really significant. And what you see here in this graphic is a 10-element framework that shows how an individual can benefit from these whole 10 areas related to linguistic integration, social, and economic. And something I think you'll hear emphasized as we get into our panel is that there's an important role for adult education in this.

It's a dynamic process. Adult education has an important role to play-- and that this really isn't new to adult education. We talk about it. I've heard one of our panelists refer to it as "old wine in a new bottle" as we look at this framework in terms of what can go on, what roles adult education can play.

So there's most definitely here a message that this goes beyond career education or workforce development. This goes beyond more basic ESL, English as a Second Language, education to really look more holistically at a person who is interested, has some goals in integrating into their new community. And so you see as you look around the 10 elements here that this can be a more holistic approach to providing services but also to an individual thinking about their goals and the directions they want to focus on.

Another point that certainly, certainly came up in our interviews as we talk about the research we did is that when a adult education program or a consortium embraces this, it can provide a kind of a shared language around the work that we can do together as a consortium. It can help everyone to get on the same page across consortium members, across community partners. It can help us think about how to measure what we're doing and look at whether we're successful or not. It can really become more of a culture rather than an individual program.

I'll also say a few words here before we go on about how this framework can be used, and these little points here are really reflected in those AB 2098 recommendations that have come out. An important, important point here is that none of this is mandatory. There's nothing about this framework that's an obligation on the part of adult education providers or consortia.

It really serves as a guide, and it can help to make decisions about what's done together collaboratively, how resources are distributed, how metrics are defined. And it can most definitely support a kind of intentionality around partners, and that's something that we heard in our interviews with consortia is that they're using this framework to think harder about what it is they're trying to do related to immigrant integration and how they want to go about it.

So these points here, if you can just look at these on the screen, I think you can see that it's a whole range of ways that the framework can be useful to a consortium, to individual providers, to the kind of collaboration that can come together.

Right now, I think we're going to turn it over for just a few minutes to Jay Wright from CASAS who can talk to us a little bit about COAAPs. This is just a teaser because, fortunately, Jay will be providing an entire webinar on this topic one week from today on next Thursday. Jay, are you there? Can you unmute yourself?

Jay Wright: Yes, I am. Thank you. And yeah, I was going to borrow Peter's term. This is going to be a real quick movie trailer for next week.

Peter Simon: [laughs]

Jay Wright: So if you can go to the next slide, please, I think we have a couple new ones that have some screenshots. So this is just an example. What we'll be talking about is how we've aligned our EL Civics COAAPs. That is our civic objectives and additional assessment plans to these areas of immigrant integration.

So you can see a couple examples here where we've got a couple of those immigrant integration areas, economics, and credentials, and residency, and we've worked for three or four years now on aligning those EL Civics COAAPs to those areas of immigrant integration.

So you can see an example here. We went through our almost 60-or-so EL Civics COAAPs, that many of you have been using for several years, and aligned them to these different areas. So in this example, this shows that COAAP numbers one through six in some way relate to that immigrant integration area of economic security. You can see some other COAAP numbers below that relate to the other area of immigrant integration of credentials and residency.

We align them to all the different areas. I don't think all EL Civics COAAPs align, but just about all of them do. So at the end of the day, I'll quote-- I quoted Peter, so now it's Jennie's turn, kind of back to that old wine in a new bottle. Everybody's been using COAAPs for 15 or 20 years now to measure these same EL learners in different areas. So we figured out that a lot of the priorities in immigrant integration are the exact same priorities we've had in EL Civics for many years.

So we've aligned the two together. And still, we'll show some new reports in TE as well as what a lot of you have noticed. In that TE CAEP summary, there's a new out-- there's a new column called "I3 outcomes." That's what this is about.

I3 stands for "immigrant integration indicators." On your report now, when students complete COAAPs, that now directly equates to an official CAEP outcome. And I think that's been a couple minutes now. I think that probably takes care of the trailer.

Peter Simon: [laughs]

Jay Wright: I'll pass it back to Peter and Jennie.

Peter Simon: Tune in next week.

Jennie Mollica: OK.

Jay Wright: And OK, sorry. The final slide is the same example I just explained. It's just another example to that immigrant integration area of health and well-being-- same process, just a different set of objectives that relate to that end.

Jennie Mollica: OK, thanks. Thanks, Jay. That was a good, quick overview. You've enticed us, and now we want to join your webinar next week.

Peter Simon: OK, now we want to just talk very briefly, and speaking of trailers or advertisements, we're just going to give you a very brief overview of what we cover in our brief. I'll just say that we've set out with the assumption that there's a lot of work going out there that has not really been fully highlighted. And our problem quickly became one of riches because we got so much information from all of you, many of you on this webinar, that the trick was how we can kind of whittle it down in a way that didn't become a huge magnum opus.

So we interviewed 20 different consortia around the state, trying to really pay attention to the geographic distribution with a particular emphasis on hearing from some of the rural and more geographically dispersed consortia because they have somewhat different issues than highly urbanized consortia. And you can see on the right the list of areas that we posed a number of questions around curriculum instruction, student support, partnerships, how they staff their various programs, how they handle management data, and a final question about funding. Next slide, please.

Jennie Mollica: So here's just a picture of the cover of the brief just to encourage people to look for the link to this that's in the chat, and you'll find a lot more detail. We're going to go over some of the highlights just in the next few, few minutes, but really want to save most of our time today for our panel.

Peter Simon: So in terms of curriculum instruction, and again, we have a tremendous amount of information, that, just quickly, one area that came up a great deal was integrating ESL with other content areas or immigrant integration topics. For example, it could be an ESL class that was part of a preapprenticeship program or another ESL program that was linked with a Spanish-language base, early childhood provider program. And there's many other examples in our brief.

A lot of you are familiar with integrated education and training where an ESL teacher and another subject matter, sometimes CTE, maybe credit community college class, teach together. Some of you in the community college world know that as I-BEST. Family literacy was another area that came up a great deal, particularly in the K-12 realm where children's education, there's a number of consortia that have what they call "parent resource centers" where fam-- parents are getting ESL instruction along with support around parenting and helping their children with their education.

Mirrored courses, we could do a whole webinar just on mirrored courses. But it's where community colleges can offer concurrent noncredit and credit sections. When I first heard about it, I said, that can't be legal. But it is, and it has many, many advantages.

It provides access for adult learners. And specifically, undocumented students can take community college classes. It also gives students an opportunity to explore and dabble in different areas without worrying about either the financial aid issues or getting a grade and the impact on their transcript. Next slide.

Oh, we have an example. OK, I forgot about the example. One example with the mirrored classes is the Madeira College State Center area. They took all of the six levels of the ESL they offered at the college, and made mirrored sections, and offered them, many of them, at the adult school so that adult learners and, notably again, undocumented students, of which a number of their students were, could take advantage of the entire ESL offering of the college.

It also gets them enrolled in the college, which really helps with the transition from adult school into college classes. And we found many examples like this. This is just one. Next.

Jennie Mollica: OK, we also certainly heard a lot about the importance of student support services. And this touched on many, many areas. There were a lot of fabulous examples, but I'll name a few here.

One interesting use of the Immigrant Integration Framework was actually using that to help students identify their goals, their interests, their needs and barriers, so actually using the framework as a tool in that sense. There was also a lot of emphasis on the importance of language access, really being very aware of access issues and barriers. And so many, many programs are investing in making sure that staff have language skills or bilingual materials, or multilingual tutoring is offered by bilingual tutors, so a real emphasis placed on that.

There was also a lot of attention being given to support services that were deeply integrated into educational programs, so embedded or somehow support service staff coming to the students rather than expecting them to come, and this being a way of kind of removing some of the barriers to accessing those and making them as welcoming and as accessible as possible.

Several programs name that they really tried to talk openly about residency status and had built some very intentional supports around helping students with DACA, with financial aid eligibility, reviewing out-of-countries' transcripts and dealing with those, so really making it very, very clear to the student that those shouldn't be barriers.

There was also a lot of attention given to supporting the bridge between adult and post-secondary education. And actually another area of the research that Peter and I have been doing is around transition between adult ed and post-secondary employment. And there's so much being done across our adult ed consortia right now in this area and many, many good, good examples that were really focused on immigrant students and the particular benefits that come to them when some-- either a bridge program or the bridge counseling, transition counseling is there available.

Just one example of this is at State Center Adult Ed Consortium where counselors put a specific emphasis on serving undocumented adult ed students. They work with them on financial aid. They make very sure that there's a warm handoff so that that transition to other partners in the consortium can be very smooth. And they're helping them with some of these particular forms and regulations that could really open doors for them. Oops. Hold on. There I go.

Peter Simon: Can you go back one slide, Jennie? There, OK.

Jennie Mollica: That was that. I think that one next to it.

Peter Simon: There we go, right. We could easily talk for a long time about this topic because part of the glue that makes all of these collaborative efforts work are the wide range of partnerships that we heard about in talking with consortia, and that's with community organizations, legal services.

And I think to highlight the public libraries. Often, they don't get mentioned. But the public libraries that we talked to really pointed out that they really are often a first landing place for both immigrants and also low-skilled adults. And we're thinking about in your community.

Again, seamless ESL pathways, I think, compared to the old days, now a lot of consortia have aligned their curriculum. So it's more like now when you drive from Belgium to France, you just wave, and it says "Welcome to France." You don't have to get out your passport and do all that. Just it's a seamless transition. Make it really welcoming and easy.

We've heard a lot about people remodeling their admissions and records and training people so that-- eliminating barriers in the enrollment process, particularly when undocumented students are entering the community college. Colocation, there's a whole, in the transition set-- brief, we talk a lot about the workforce system, the career one-stops where a number of adult schools now are offering-- either offering classes at the one-stop or, in other cases, the workforce staff are at the adult school at the college in sort of a mini-one-stop where the students are.

Transition specialist staff often are not just at the college or the adult school but are out in the community. And there's any range of examples of working with community-based organizations. I'm not going to say that much because our panelists are going to also talk about that in just a minute.

I will note, our example here has to do with-- we're highlighting Coast Adult Education Consortium, but this is a practice that's kind of gaining traction out there, which is called an "interagency service agreement" where you actually work it out in an agreement, a legal agreement, between the community college district and the partnering adult schools where the college can offer noncredit classes at the adult school or in the community, thereby freeing up the adult schools, which have a limited, finite amount of funding, to offer more classes.

And also, they can count legally the students who are in these noncredit classes. There's an outcome under CAEP as an adult school as well. And it's quite an amazing practice that we think is going to become widespread. Next slide.

Jennie Mollica: It feels like we've just barely touched on all of the things we've heard--

Peter Simon: It's like way top, yeah.

Jennie Mollica: --from everyone we talk to. And to those of you on the call who are part of our interviews, thank you for your time. It was really fascinating hearing from everyone. And there's so much going on, we can't do it all justice.

But that's why we're excited to move now into a panel because we did invite a few who we feel were really strong to speak today, and to just answer a few questions, and share some things with you that I think will really be illustrative of some of the strong work that's going on, touching on these themes that Peter and I have just gone over. So I'm going to ask our panelists to introduce our-- introduce themselves before we get into a few questions. Usha, could you just start?

Usha Narayanan: Sure. I'm Usha Narayanan, and I am from the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education, which is in the Silicon Valley, San Jose region. And I'm the co-chair of the consortium, and I'm also the director of Campbell Adult and Community Education.

Jennie Mollica: Thanks, Usha. Ilse.

Ilse Pollet: Hi, everyone. My name is Ilse Pollet. I'm with the South Bay Consortium for Adult Education with Usha, and so we're in the San Jose area in Silicon Valley. And prior to my role with the South Bay Consortium, I was with ALLIES, which is a nonprofit where the Immigrant Integration Framework originated. So I was part of a team helping to develop that.

Jennie Mollica: Glad you're here, Ilse. Thanks. Naomi.

Naomi Sato: Hi, everyone. My name is Naomi Sato, and I am an ESL instructor in the noncredit program for Glendale Community College, and I also am the vocational ESL program coordinator for our college as well.

Jennie Mollica: Thanks, Naomi. Jan.

Peter Simon: Where is Jan?

Jennie Mollica: Do we have you here, Jan?

Peter Simon: Are you on mute?

Jennie Mollica: Jan, your microphone is muted.

Jan Young: Ugh.

Jennie Mollica: There you are, Jan.

Jan Young: Sorry about that. I'm having a great conversation with myself.

Peter Simon: [laughs]

Jennie Mollica: [laughs]

Jan Young: [laughs]

I'm a division chair at Glendale Community College. And I guess the best way to describe my job is I'm everything but ESL in noncredit, so I have the short-term vocational, the adult basic and secondary ed, the parent ed, and the lifelong learning. I'm also the statewide president of the Association of Community and Continuing Ed for Community Colleges.

Jennie Mollica: Glad to have you with us, Jan. Thanks. And Nancy Miller.

Nancy Miller: Hi. I'm Nancy Miller. I recently retired, yay--

Peter Simon: [laughs]

Nancy Miller: --after five years as the director of Regional Adult Education Programs for Sonoma County Adult Education Consortium and Santa Rosa Junior College.

Jennie Mollica: Thanks, Nancy.

Peter Simon: Great. So we're just going to jump right in. What we'll do is we'll just go through some questions, and we'll kind of mix it up in terms of the order people answer. But the first question is, what does immigrant integration mean to you? How about Glendale folks start?

Jan Young: Sure. Well, you picked the person with the least amount experience of ESL to begin the discussion. But with that, I want to say, it's not unlike any noncredit student in the sense that self-efficacy, I see, is kind of the hub of what we do in noncredit and adult ed.

Oftentimes, we get students that are very bright, but they just don't have the self-confidence to move forward. So I really like this initiative in the sense that it's looking at-- and I know you used the word, but the word that came to my mind was of "holistically" looking at the student. And particularly, from my vantage point, I'm looking at ways that I can migrate them into the world of work and help them along their journey in that way. Naomi, do you want to add to that since you are ESL?

Naomi Sato: Yeah, I guess so, since I'm a part of the ESL program. I think that-- well, we get a lot of immigrant students, and our immigrants are coming from many different countries. We have a large population of Armenians as well as Spanish speakers and others. But our biggest population is Armenian and Persians as well, Armenian, Iranians, and Spanish speakers coming to us.

And I think from the consortium point of view, I think our consortium does a really good job of integrating the services that are available to immigrants, whether it be coming into our community college, getting services at the local library, the Glendale Public Library, getting career services at the Verdugo Job Center, as well as we have partnerships with disability organizations and other homeless prevention organizations.

All of that is really nice to have as part of integrating those services for our students, that are quite available to the students, and that we can refer them very easily to our partners. So part of our job as a college is really helping to provide that education, and that education then leads into the other services with our partners as well as through the college to getting degrees and certificates in both the credit program and in Jan's program, the noncredit program.

Peter Simon: Great.

Jan Young: I just want to add one thing because our consortium is quite unique. We had an MOU with our high schools for adult ed services over 20 years ago. So we literally are a very small group, and we do not have adult ed programs in our district. So we really put the major thrust of our energies looking at our job center and our supporting ESL services in the community to compensate for that, in a way.

Peter Simon: Thank you. How about South Bay? I think it is-- Usha, are you opening up this question or Ilse?

Jennie Mollica: Ilse.

Peter Simon: Ilse, OK. Sorry. Go ahead, Ilse.

Ilse Pollet: Thank you. Jan used the word "holistic," so I actually wanted to build off on that because that's how we think about immigrant integration in the South Bay as well. And when you look back to that Immigrant Integration Framework that Jennie and Peter just shared, in the center of that is kind of like the Venn diagram of economic integration, linguistic integration, and social integration. And those three together really make for a holistic integration experience.

And the three of them are equally valuable, but they're not mutually exclusive. So when you achieve a balance between those three areas, that's when you are coming closer to full integration. And one of them-- one supports the other, like learning the language, speaking English will contribute to economic integration and to become-- to immigrants becoming more engaged in their community life, so they're really supportive of each other. And that's how we wanted to think about immigrant integration.

And all the work that happens with the development of the Immigrant Integration Framework really came as a response in the early days with AB 86 and AB 104 when we noticed in our community and network of ESL providers some concern about the perhaps narrowing definition of success in that reform to economic and post-secondary success, which is no doubt this is very important for our students because many of our students are coming to our schools and colleges and in search for economic advancement, workforce development, and career pathways.

But we felt like we've also wanted to tell the complete story of adult education, and we had to bring focus back to that social and civic engagement piece of immigrant integration that happens in adult ed. So the nice thing about that is that those areas are valid in and of themselves, and they're also supporting that economic and educational advancement that we're all seeking for our students. So it's really the word "holistic," whole person, and the unique space of adult education where that naturally takes place in many of our ESL programs and adult ed programs is what we wanted to look at.

And I can add to that maybe a little bit from my own experience as an immigrant who's been here, who's been in the US for 15 years. It's a work in progress. Whenever you think you have it all figured out, there's something new to learn.

Peter Simon: [chuckles] That's exactly what I'm talking about.

Ilse Pollet: So there's always something to work on.

Peter Simon: Mhm, thank you. Nancy.

Nancy Miller: Ilse was wonderful in her description of immigrant integration. As a community that really is still agrarian and service-based economics, for us, we need to understand, and respect, and celebrate the contribution that immigrants have in our community, particularly economically and socially. And it's supporting students in their foray into the American academic system and, again, finding out what they want, or need, or have an interest in, and being able to direct them to services if we don't directly provide them or engage them with services within the college and adult education community.

Peter Simon: Great. Why don't we go on to the next question?

Jennie Mollica: Yeah, let's move on to this one. Now, this is a very large question, but you'll choose how to answer it in a few minutes. I want to pause before we get into this and just say that, for all of you listening today, if you have any questions, encourage you to write those into the chat box. We do hope to have a little time at the end.

We're going to just move through the panel without taking questions, but we hope to take some. I'm sure you're going to have some as we get closer to the end. So feel free to put those in the chat. And here we go. So the question here is, what are you doing to support immigrant integration? And I'm going to start with South Bay. I think Usha was going to speak to this one.

Usha Narayanan: Thanks, Jennie. So in South Bay, of course, all of the things that the panel has said, so which means addressing the needs of the whole student, is what we are focusing on. And of course, a very basic thing that we can do in our ESL classes is the EL Civics Assessment that Jay spoke to and is going to speak to, the trailer that you got from him, and then what you're going to get in the future next week.

So that's the very basic that we try to do, that our EL Civics Assessment kind of speaks to the needs of the students. As most schools do, we survey our students. We find out what their needs are, and then we offer those COAAPs that meet the needs of students. So that's the very first thing.

And just to give you an example of what's happening in our school right now is on cultural competency, cultural awareness, and cultural understanding of other cultures. And I was assessing students this week, and I was just blown away, blown away by what was happening in the classes, which is it's not just about speaking to each other and understanding what other cultures do for holidays. It went way beyond understanding the countries of other students in the classroom.

And it's almost our teachers are building, taking our students from cultural competency into the cultural intelligence realm. So imagine these people being part of our communities. When these students have the ability to be in the community to talk about and engage with people, they're going to do with some acceptance, with so much more of an understanding that people come from different cultures, and there is an understanding that goes into it. So it was just amazing.

And then the other element that I think was spoken to was the IET part of it, which is we have offered classes. Our ESL teacher teaches a class with a community college which is providing accounting language, contextualized language for students taking noncredit accounting classes through community college so that they are successful in the accounting class and get a bookkeeping certificate at the end of it. So again, this speaks to the economic independence that students receive. So we've had a lot of IET classes that address that part of it.

Now, speaking to that whole student, what we did, this was a major endeavor in our school last year-- and I'll to keep it really, really short-- is we surveyed our students to understand what their needs were. And the most needs that became from our students was health care, not having access to health care and child care. At the moment, in our school, we didn't have the ability to provide child care.

So what we did was we partnered with community partners, our community partners, and sought to provide health care to the students who needed it. More than 100 participants or 150 students said they needed health care. Not everybody wanted to provide their information to get the health care.

However, our community partner, which is Gardner Health Care, Health Network, was able to sign up students, about 79 to 80 students00 for health care, health insurance. So that gave them that access that so many of them were denied until that moment. So these are like ways in which addressing their linguistic needs, addressing their economic needs, and addressing their social and other welfare needs that they have, so that's how we are addressing it. And of course, addressing the needs of the whole student means you're scaffolding them so that they get to the economic independence.

Jennie Mollica: Thanks, Usha. I'm glad you pointed out. Those are good examples of what can go on at that intersection of the linguistic, social, everything at the center of the framework there. Thanks for that. Why don't we turn now to Nancy?

Nancy Miller: Well, I think, over the past five years as we've developed in the California adult ed programs, we've gotten more sophisticated about how we're providing immigrant integration and support. Initially, it was really finding out, when could our students take classes, what times, what locations?

And now what we really do, I think, the most and the best is to partner in multiple agency framework so that we can address all of the needs of the student, not specifically the college or the adult school. But as a consortium, we really work together with our community partners, and that's government agencies, community-based organizations, our one-stop, to provide holistically.

And I'll give a quick example. We partnered with a community-based organization in Healdsburg. It involves the city of Healdsburg who provides the location for our classes, and that's ESL, short-term career education, parenting classes, and high school equivalency preparation. The school district is also involved, and then our community-based organization partner is Corazon Healdsburg.

And they are the ones that really provide food distribution. They help us with outreach to students about the classes that we're providing. And we provide the academic supplies and the curriculum to students free of charge, obviously, to any of those partner agencies.

We were really instrumental, our organization, in helping when they had to transition to online learning for the K-12 school district, in training parents how to use the Google platform so that they could provide assistance to their students and help maintain their students' education.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Thanks for that specific example. Interesting. Jan or Naomi.

Jan Young: I'll start. What we did-- I kind of feel like the universe all came into-- all the planets came in alignment a couple years back with the IET programs blossoming. And also, we were able to secure not only that-- not only using our CAEP funds but using a strong workforce grant to develop opportunities for short-term vocational programs. And after working with the Verdugo Job Center and also for our Center for Excellence, we developed a kind of a stacked allied health program that was desperately needed in our area.

So we started with actually probably one of the most difficult to implement, which is the medical assistant program. But we had been doing the front office course for quite some time, so we integrated it with the clinical and used our funds to buy the equipment and lease a building with our CAEP funds to set this whole kind of center up.

And obviously, there was a lot of work to integrate the curriculum. And it's the I-BEST model as well. And then Naomi really created a program to help. Because it's a rigorous course for ESL students.

But one thing I'm particularly proud of is that we worked with our Verdugo Job Center to get-- they're using their WIOA I fund money, and also we're using some of our CAEP funds because we cannot do internships yet-- I say "yet." I'm working on the state level-- for noncredit students. So what we're doing is we're doing externships with them, and we have openings now for all our students to take an externship that is paid in the medical assistant field.

And to me, that is really taking the knowledge they learned and applying it. And now, I see this as equity issue, that they have the same opportunities that our credit students have of being able to have that experience to go out and get the job.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Naomi, did you want to add anything to that?

Naomi Sato: Yeah, I guess I could. So from the noncredit division, the way we try to help support immigrants is by offering a variety of classes that really fulfill students' needs. So we have a six-level ESL program. And the kinds of classes that we have for the students include general ESL.

We have citizenship classes. We also have college English for college readiness that give them extra writing support. We have English for work classes. We also have English for older adults, and we have English with support in Spanish and Armenian that really helps the students.

In addition, we try to have-- before COVID, we had classes pretty much all over the city, not only at our two college campuses, but we also had classes at churches. We had an English for work class at a hotel where we trained their housekeeping staff. We had a class at the Verdugo Job Center where our students could get ESL instruction but also be co-enrolled in their services and participate in job fairs, and attend job fairs, and get career counseling through the Verdugo Job Center.

I'm trying to think where else we had classes. We had classes at community centers. And then we had classes at all different times of the day. We had morning classes, afternoon classes, and evening classes. And, oh, we had conversation classes as well. So we tried to provide a variety of classes that really support students' needs.

And then we also do surveys with our students to find out what their interests are, and so that also helped us work together with Jan's division. Because one of the surveys I did with our students was what career interests were they interested, what kind of ESL classes would they be interested in taking. And I think, in one of our surveys, like over 50% of the students said that they would be interested in taking an office ESL class, or they were interested in health care.

And when Jan approached our division saying that they're interested in doing an IET with us for administrative medical assisting, I thought it was-- what a great way, what a great opportunity to work together, and especially in a content area that's really rigorous. I mean, this program is very, very rigorous.

So I'm now working with her two AMA instructors, Administrative Medical Assisting instructors. Students go to their classes four days a week, and then they come to my ESL class one day a week. And I do a lot of support and scaffolding in our ESL sup-- we're currently calling it the ESL Success-- the Administrative Medical Assisting Success and Support class to really help those students who are-- need the extra vocabulary instruction, the scaffolding, a little bit of grammar, a little bit of pronunciation to help them be successful in that course.

Jan Young: But Naomi's so good. She's getting also people that aren't ELL learners. I mean, it's just a good reinforcement regardless.

Naomi Sato: Yeah, it's interesting. We've had generation 1.5 learners coming to our classes as well as some native speakers who want to come to the class that really appreciate the extra scaffolding. They like being part of a cohort. And they're also great role models for some of our other students, our ESL students as well.

Jennie Mollica: How great. Well, it's an interesting point. It's something we heard a number of times in our interviews, that many of these really creative approaches that we take on with immigrant integration in mind are really beneficial to all of our students, so it's worth sort of stepping back and seeing, what are we learning from this intentionality around immigrant integration to inform our broader efforts? Thanks to all of you. I'm going to go on to the next question.

Peter Simon: OK, next question is, how are you capturing data to show success? And I think this is really an important question in terms of supporting what we're accomplishing to really be able to refine and improve practice, continuous improvement.

And importantly, it's very important in terms of securing future funding. This is to show the positive outcomes from all of this work. So who should start? How about Nancy? You start this time.

Nancy Miller: The Sonoma County Adult Education has three bilingual outreach specialists, as well as a data and accountability manager. And the three of these people work togeth-- or the four, one manager and three outreach specialists really work together to capture both the student intake data. They actually go into the class, do the forms with the students, or they'll go into the Zoom now that we're not face to face.

At the end, on the last night of class, we do the student update record with the students. The forms are in English and in Spanish. They're all electronic, so students can fill them out electronically through their phone. And then we also have a certificate tracking program that we do. And all of our short-term career education courses are developed into certificate programs, non-credit certificates.

So we, on the first day of class, give students a certificate tracking form so that they can follow up on how they're doing in terms of passing their classes and what they have left to do at the end of class. We give them an update on their certificate tracker. The students that have completed all of the courses for their certificate, we actually make virtual appointments with them to help them fill out the form to get their certificate so that they can celebrate their accomplishments.

And then if there is a second certificate in their career pathway or on their transition plan to credit, then we'll enroll them in the next pathway program, or we transition them over to a credit counselor at the college. So we track all of these in spreadsheets, and then in TOPSpro Enterprise, and then share that data with the management information system for the college.

Peter Simon: Great. Thank you. How about South Bay?

Ilse Pollet: Thanks, Peter. How are you capturing data to show success? I think that may literally be the million-dollar question that you're asking here.

Peter Simon: [laughs] Literally.

Ilse Pollet: And I just want to point out the significance of AB 2098 and the opportunity that consortia now have to report data on immigrant integration. That's how we tell our story to the legislature, and that's how we get funding, for better or worse.

So when the Immigrant Integration Framework was developed, it was very important for us to think about metrics for each of the goal areas, for each of those three domains that we were talking about, linguistic, economic, and social. And immigrant integration can be something that's hard to measure. We all have expertise in how to measure linguistic achievement and linguistic proficiency. We have CASAS. We have pre- and post-testing. But that's what we do in the ESL world.

Economic integration is another one that can be maybe less daunting to measure. We're aligning ourselves with WIOA metrics. We are looking at who got a job, who got a better job, wage information. Sure, it can be hard to track down that information, but it's a pretty hard metric to come up with. Where it gets tricky is, how do you measure something like social integration or civic engagement?

Peter Simon: That's right.

Ilse Pollet: So that's where we really have to get creative, and call on the experts, and see how we can-- which metrics and which indicators we can use for that. So our first question was like, where are those kinds of elements are already captured within our systems? And Jay shared about EL Civics and COAAPs, and that was the first thought that came up.

And the first response we got from adult educators is, well, we do EL Civics. We do COAAPs. And we report that so. So that was an obvious place to go look. And it's no surprise that the elements of the Immigrant Integration Framework align so well with the EL civics, COAAPs. Both EL Civics and the Immigrant Integration Framework were created through a robust kind of community engagement process, so it's no surprise that there's a great alignment between the two.