Peter Simon: Thank you. Thank you. Hello, everyone. We go to the next slide, Jennie.

Thank you for joining us on this webinar about supporting adult education students transition to training and employment. I am Peter Simon, one of the partners in the High Road Alliance. Just really quickly, High Road Alliance, which has now been around for about a year is we are focused on really expanding the availability of training programs that integrate teaching and learning the academic technical workplace, digital skills, hands-on experience, and really emphasizing the importance of leveraging partnerships to build high quality programs that lead to good jobs. Over the last year, we've worked with workers and unions, employers, community colleges and schools, workforce boards, CBOs-- really all with a focus on creating more avenues, opportunities for people to get into living wage jobs, and this focuses particularly on the opportunities for adult learners.

Myself, I'm a retired community college dean. Prior to that, I was a number of years basic skills English instructor at Laney College and started out as an adult educator teaching GED classes at the Alameda Adult School. I've also worked with a number of adult ed consortium as career pathways, contextualized teaching, immigrant integration, and developing plans. Jennie.

Jennie Mollica: Hi, my name's Jennie Mollica. I'm also a co-founder of High Road Alliance. My background includes many years as an ESL teacher. I also worked in immigrant and refugee services and in workforce development for a number of nonprofits.

For the past 10 years, I've been consulting mainly around career pathway development, often supporting complicated partnerships coming together. I've done some research over the last few years on English learners access to apprenticeship, and that has had me particularly interested in how to develop these strong pathways into really high quality jobs. So I'm really happy to be here with all of you today. Thanks to everyone for joining us.

We have three objectives for today's webinar. And the first is to learn about research that Peter and I have been doing over the past many months on effective transition practices from adult ed into post-secondary education and employment in California. And I want to thank many of you who are on the webinar today because you are among those who we interviewed to learn about the effective practices that you're using in your work. And it's those practices that we summarized in the brief, which Veronica has shared in the chat box. Hope you all will have a chance to read that.

It's also what we're hoping to summarize today, although what we're going to share with you today is really a very high level-- just a brief glance at what we learned from the chance we had to talk to so many of you. The conversations were really rich. There was a lot shared. We tried to sum it up in the brief, and we hope that you'll take a few minutes to read that over.

What we're going to share on this webinar is that high level summary. And then what we've chosen is to invite a panel of some of those adult education leaders who we spoke with in these interviews so that they can share with you about the work they're doing, supporting students transitions. And we invited those who are here with us today on this panel because their work is especially going deep in this area of transition and because they really represent a lot of those themes that we heard in the research.

So our second objective is to hear directly from them about their work. And then toward the end of the webinar, we want to provide a little bit of time for some Q&A with the panelists, some discussion. And this is hopefully going to invite further discussion. And we're going to share with you at the very end an opportunity to continue this conversation with us in the months to come.

Peter Simon: OK. We opened up the brief, and we're opening up this presentation with this great quote that came from, I believe, 2015. And I don't normally read PowerPoint slides, but I think I'm going to read the statement because really we see this as the overarching framing objective of the CAEP program, which is "to rethink and redesign an educational system that creates seamless transitions for students across adult schools and community colleges to accelerate academic and career success in order to earn a living wage." Just that's our North Star with this whole project. Next slide.

Jennie Mollica: So a graphic that's included in the report we produced and that we wanted to share at this point is really meant to describe what do we mean when we talk about transition support. And I think it's helpful here to see that the end goal in mind, if you think of this really from the student's perspective, is over on the right-hand side where students may have goals around getting into community college, entering employment, or in some cases, entering a short-term occupational training program. And on the left side, you see adult education, and they we're just listing the key program areas. What goes between to connect the dots for someone who's in adult education and wanting to transition into to college or employment can be a whole number of different things.

And so what you see summarized in the green in the middle is really some of the areas of this work that we heard in the interviews. And we did hear these grouped into a few areas. There were a number of examples, many, many examples actually, related to curriculum and instruction. There were also many examples related to student support services. There was also a lot said about the importance of partnerships and how those come together to create these seamless paths to really shape those bridges. And then there was quite a bit also said about intention behind the organizational structure.

And along with that, we grouped the funding piece of that. So we'll talk a little bit about the work in these four areas. Something we wanted to point out here is that really to a large extent this what falls into this transition support is what adult education has been always doing, and so it's not an entity unto itself.

It's very much a part of the adult education world, and it's a part of the adult education program in California as we've been saying. It's also-- I think we heard from the people we interviewed, it's perhaps especially important right now during the post-pandemic recovery as so many adults are struggling, needing to retool skills, needing to think about what path they need to take to get back to employment or to get to a more stable job or financial situation. So this graphic is something that we use as the organizing principle in the report.

Peter Simon: And just to briefly summarize. No, go ahead. Can you hear me OK? You can hear me all right?

We just so quickly note that we interviewed representatives, administrators, instructors, staff from 30 different consortia around the state. And we made a real effort to make sure that we had a broad geographic representation. And I think with a particular emphasis, I'm hearing from more rural or geographically dispersed consortia because I think, as you know, out there, that they often have slightly different challenges and issues than highly urbanized, condensed areas.

On the right is a list of all the areas where we ask questions. I'm not going to read you that list. You can see that. And I'll make yet another plug that we'd really like you to read the brief and we'd like your feedback on it. There's much more detail than we're going to be able to cover today.

Next slide. So here's a picture of the brief that you all should either have received or download from the chat today. And this is actually an advert for reading the briefs.

Jennie Mollica: So we wanted to share with you some of the themes that came up when we talked to consortia leaders about their effective practices. And there were a few key themes that we thought crossed over all these areas of the transition work. And then we wanted to call out here before we get into more detail.

One of these is that we really heard a lot about the need for integration and the ways that consortia are integrating their programs and services in really creative and innovative ways to make them work for their adult students. So this might happen formally in the case of an integrated education and training program that has deeply interwoven curriculum and teaching or it may happen more informally in the ways that partners work together and weave in support services.

There were many programs that we're trying to integrate many things, not just two. Those sort of a sense of the better, and often this was done to accelerate someone's movement through the program in the case of integrating basic skills and career education or just to ease navigation so that it was experienced more seamlessly for the person going through. And there was really a lot of intentionality and thoughtfulness around meeting the needs of the whole person, and often that going beyond the classroom to remove any barriers or create any conditions that would be needed to ease the transition.

We also heard so much about partnerships, and you'll see many examples of this. Often these would involve co-location of services and programs under one roof or just very, very collaborative efforts. And again, this would bridge gaps or support the navigation that would have to go on for someone to move from one program to another. We also heard a real emphasis, and I think you'll hear this from our panelists today, about the importance of personalized and very relationship-based services and those being key to supporting someone through a transition into a new program, a new system, a new campus, whatever that looks like. So these were themes that, again, I think you'll hear throughout the panel discussion, but we just wanted to call them out in advance.

Peter Simon: And again, this graphic here just breaks down really the structure of the brief and the different areas that we focused on. And I think that's pretty straightforward. I'm not going to read that slide to you. Again, I just want to note that we went into this research project with the assumption that there's a lot of practices out there that really aren't getting highlighted enough. And our assumption was really borne out that our problem was one of which is that we got so much information from all of you that our job is how to fit it all into a thing that was not a huge compendium.

So under a curriculum and instruction, and again this is really the structure of the brief so you could read the brief and get more details. We broke that down into short-term CTE programs, and there were many, many different examples of those. One that we highlighted in the brief was from the Riverside consortium where they've worked with their local school districts. And as jobs become available within their partner school districts, they actually have customized training, short-term training programs in addition to the other adult school classes people are taking to prepare them for a targeted occupation.

We heard a great deal about integrated education and training. Some of you community college folks might think of that as I-BEST where you have two teachers somehow working together, often basic skills and a CTE instructor. One notable example was out of the Stockton area with the Delta Sierra Alliance did a summer help bridge program where they had an adult school ESL teacher came up with one of the nursing staff at the community college in Stockton.

And it was really a terrific program where, I think, it was six weeks. They combined language with medical terminology and a lot of background health occupations. People got a CPR certificate and large numbers of people who went through that short-term summer bridge went on to enroll in health care-related fields after that experience.

Mirrored classes-- I don't know how many of you use mirrored classes, but it's possible for community colleges to offer a section that is credit like credit ESL or CTE and noncredit concurrent section. And that allows adult school students and allows undocumented students to take community college classes in the mirrored class format. I think one example in the brief was down at El Camino College the South Bay consortium down there. They've actually created mirrored sections for their entire ESL offering, which creates a great deal more access for adult ed students. Some of those are offered at the adult school. Some of them are offered at the community college.

Pre-apprenticeships and bridge programs-- they're really, in themselves, very meaty topics. We've done a great deal of work around pre-apprenticeship programs. A very growing number of consortia are either operating or thinking of setting up through apprenticeship programs. They're of particular importance around what's going to be needed in the massive retraining efforts as the post-pandemic recovery.

And Nancy Miller who is on this panel, can talk a bit about the pre-apprenticeship program they set up, which is around--

[interposing voices]

Peter Simon: Oh, that's next week? Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry.

Jennie Mollica: Next week.

Peter Simon: Santa Rosa consortium, the Sonoma County consortium, actually has a pre-apprenticeship that leads directly into an apprenticeship that take a look at the brief. Bridge programs-- there's many, many different kinds of bridge programs. I think I'll leave it at that. Can we go to the next slide, please?

Jennie Mollica: Sure. So this next group, and yeah, we're flying through these, but I think it's worth mentioning these different types of practices. And there are a whole number that we grouped under student support services. There was a lot of emphasis in the interviews we did among them around the important role of these dedicated staff people, transition counselors, transition specialists, whatever you call them, navigators who are there to help bridge that gap, and they're often following people from the adult school to the community college or supporting them in finding employment.

Often these positions they look a whole variety of different ways, but often they have a presence at the adult school or wherever the student is taking their adult education classes and at a community college. So they're visible in both places and identified with both places. Sometimes they co-locate with community-based organizations as well to have more of a connection in the community.

Often these individuals are bilingual. And they're also often teaching these transition support classes. Not always, but often it's in that same individual who's in the classroom supporting students around their career exploration, college success curriculum, or helping them understand how to navigate the transition from one system to another. Some of these transition support classes are required either for anyone in a CTE program or anyone in a GED program. There are interesting examples of how they're pushed forward to encourage students to think about what the next steps are beyond that class or program.

There were also a whole number of examples of how technology was being used to support the holistic case management, the consortia found to be necessary for the transition. Some of this was related to data sharing. There were also examples of online tools. Certainly more so in the pandemic, online tools being used for counselors to participate in some way in the classes, make themselves known, or to allow for students to book appointments with the transition counselor.

And then, there were some examples of using technology to help students at the adult school to apply for the community college, so helping them to access those technology tools that were available. And then these last two points here are peer tutoring and peer mentoring. And there were some great examples of adult school students who'd been able to progress to college level instruction or to the community college campus.

Being called on to be that near peer support for someone who has yet to make that transition. And this happened both supporting, understanding the application process and getting ready, and then also having a presence on the community college campus and being a support. They're a friendly face as someone actually begins their college education.

Peter Simon: Another section of the brief addresses partnerships, which, again, as Jennie noted, is really an overarching critical theme throughout what we've learned. And you may wonder why we're entering community colleges as the part of the consortium there's been a wide variation on how much community colleges in those schools really collaborate together and offer an instruction. I think with the advent of Senate Bill 554, we've seen an uptick of practices of college enrollment where the adult school students are actually involved with the college. And oftentimes non-credit classes are being offered by the community college as an adult school.

The extension of that is several consortia have developed what we call interagency service agreements where the community college can offer non-credit classes at the adult school. And the adult school can actually count those as part of their outcomes. And what that does is it frees up the CAEP funds to offer a broader range of classes and ultimately, serve more students.

We heard many, many examples of different ways of collaborating with the public workforce system some of our panelists can talk about that today. The range from co-location in services. In the North Central consortium, they actually have adult school classes offered after one-stops and also in terms of the public workforce system being able to offer really valuable material support and even placement support for people to get jobs. Other public agencies, we heard a wide range again ranging from the probation department CalWORKS, CalFresh, the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, with different programs serving adults with disabilities.

A lot of partnerships with employers and industry groups. One highlighted in the brief consortium is actually part of this whole regional consortium around manufacturing. And adult students in that consortium can take very short-term, nine-month long training programs that have built in on the job experience and placement all through this Sacramento-wide consortium. And of course, community-based organizations are critical in terms of partnering with them to serve our various populations, sometimes offering adult classes at their sites.

One consortium we highlight actually has a community program built in an abandoned school where the CBO is doing the recruitment for the program. And it's a pre-apprenticeship program, provides child care, and provides supportive services. OK, next slide.

Jennie Mollica: I'm going to speak really briefly on this slide not because the organizational structure isn't important, but because we were really eager to move on to our panel. And some of these points were touched on in the earlier themes, but there was an interest among several consortia in ways that they, as a consortium, could intentionally support transition. So there were examples like the inter-agency service agreement with Peter mentioned.

They're really formalizing some of the partnerships that made up the consortium. Maintaining funds, including funds, but also potentially other leveraged funds at the consortium level intentionally for those collaborative activities. Really designing some deeply collaborative work involving co-teaching and co-counseling and looking at the different funding sources that can be leveraged when these relationships are deepened and formalized. So with that, I think, we want to move on to our panel. And--

Peter Simon: Yes.

Jennie Mollica: --I'll turn it over to you, Peter, to introduce the slide.

Peter Simon: OK. Well, we're very lucky to have as our panelists today practitioners who are really doing exemplary work out there in terms of some of the effective practices that we've talked about. We're going to be posing some questions to them. We're going to ask them to pose questions for each other.

This is not a shy group, so I'm going to be quiet and get out of the way. And I'd like our panelists introduce themselves. Why don't we just go down the list here. Emma would you like to start out, please?

Emma Diaz: Yes. Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for the invite. And I'm Emma Diaz. And so I'm the director for the consortium for the Inland Adult Education Consortium, and we are located in San Bernardino.

Pete Gonzalez: I guess, I'm on next. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Pete Gonzalez. I'm part of the Inland Adult Education Consortium, more specifically an academic transition counselor for San Bernardino Valley College.

Peter Simon: Great. And Frank.

Frank Gerdeman: I'm Frank Gerdeman. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us. I'm the director of ADVANCE, formerly known as the Lake Tahoe Adult Education Consortium. And we're in South Lake Tahoe, California.

Peter Simon: And finally, Eric.

Eric Pomeroy: Hello, everyone. I'm Eric Pomeroy, the director of the North Central Adult Ed Consortium, which is on Sutter County, California and includes Yuba, Colusa, Yolo, and Lake County, so five-county consortium. I also have the privilege of overseeing our local adult ed program, as well as our Sutter County One-Stop.

Peter Simon: Just five counties?

[laughter]

Just kidding.

[interposing voices]

Peter Simon: OK. Jennie.

Jennie Mollica: OK. We're going to move into our panel discussion now. And the first question we came up with to kick this off is, what have you found to be most important to keeping transition front and center in your consortium's work? And we're going to start with the inland consortium. Emma and Pete.

Emma Diaz: Well, I'll start with kind of giving an overview of how transition is central for us, and I'm going to say it goes back to the beginning of AB-86. And when we put our regional plan together, we actually had a transitions workgroup. We pulled together individuals from both the college campuses and the adult ed sites, including-- I even think we had some of our ROP folks on there. And we had a facilitated discussion just on transitions.

And we used an independent facilitator to kind of help us go through all the different stages of developing a vision for transition. And initially, we started with discussing what the barriers were. Just looking at the barriers and had a dialogue around barriers that students face to transition. Then we developed practical vision for it of what would it look like if we had all those resources to overcome those barriers.

The third step was we actually came up with the strategic direction for transitions, and developed an action plan with a timeline, and actually put that into our-- back then it was 2015, our Regional Comprehensive Plan that went off to the state for approval during the AB-86 phase. So it was very early on that we developed a place to keep it front and center. It was actually, like I said, board approved. And really with the vision we set was to create a unified transition network. That's what we were trying to do very early on because we knew students were having issues going between the different systems.

And transition has been really part of the Consortium organizational structure in hiring, right now, in having dedicated individuals. We actually gave transition a place, let's say, going back to when we built the Regional Comprehensive Plan and is now part of our annual plans. And so we keep it central by keeping it as part of the plan, but also revisiting and seeing the outcomes of what our transitions counselors and advisors are doing.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Beautiful example. Should be relevant to all consortia here. We have to go through that three-year planning process. So good to keep that in mind. Pete, maybe you can speak from the perspective of a staff person that now is kind of leading the charge on this. What have you found most important?

Pete Gonzales: Yeah, I was going to say looking at it more from kind of in the trenches, that particular lens, I think for us is really staying connected with our students, faculty, and staff. Being that everything's online and virtual, it can be a bit difficult at times to try to stay connected in that way. More so importantly, with the students. Really work to make ourselves available for our students. There's many times that myself and our other transition counselor Miss Maria Lopez are working evenings, sometimes weekends, just trying to make ourselves available for our students that are working or with their kids online or whatnot throughout the day. So really, trying to make ourselves available to them.

And then really staying connected with the faculty and staff at the adult schools. I'll talk a little bit about it later when we talk about resources, but really trying to make ourselves available in their classrooms through commercials and things of that nature, where the students see that we're there, we're available for them as well as the faculty and staff. So really, staying connected with each other.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Thanks. Frank, how would you answer that question?

Frank Gerdeman: Well, I'm really, really glad Emma went because I can say, an awful lot of what Emma did and what they did in Inland with a couple of unique twist for Tahoe, it has also been front and center from the beginning. Here, in fact, the work actually predates my arrival as the Director in February of 2016. Where I think we've been a little unique in that is that Tahoe didn't have really much, if any, existing infrastructure in terms of maintenance of effort. So the money that came to this community was really new money. And we were able to take a really deep look at not only the role of transition and the need of transition in the community, but how we could focus the consortium energy on that work.

And so the early work decided that the vast majority of the funding stays at the consortium level. And our member-partners who have additional mechanisms for funding and supporting some of the work they do take small pass through amounts and continue to be our primary deliverer of instructional services. That's the community college and the K-12 system, especially around career and technical education for older adults.

So our primary core service at the consortium level has been a transition and transition navigator positions from the beginning. The first position hired that I hired after arriving was our first transition navigator in early 2016. Now, we have 3.5 FTE folks doing that job in our fairly small community. So like Emma, I was really lucky to sort of come into a consortium where they valued that. And it is almost the bedrock of the work that we do here.

Jennie Mollica: Great to hear that. It hasn't been the same evolution for a reconstruction, but it's interesting to hear how that was kind of baked in from the start and what the consequences can be with the outcomes. Eric, same question for you.

Eric Pomeroy: As Frank said, I'm glad that I went behind Em and Frank because they had a bit of good information. So for us, it's interesting. And we oversee a one-stop. Yuba County and Sutter County both were one of the two organizations or LEAs, Sutter County Superintendent of Schools and Yuba County Office a bit, that actually have a one stop under their property. So this put us at an advantage early on because having a one-stop, we already have a service model in place, where we refer, and we have interagency meetings. And so we've been doing this quite a while. Service transition is at the hub of everything we do, whether it's transitioning from a student to work, or in between programs, or out for a service.

The challenge has been making sure we have the same systems available throughout our consortia because as we talked about, we have five counties. Some of our counties are very rural. So that's been the challenge. We've had a lot of online services for COVID, which we can talk about later. We have added a number of service partners that have helped out tremendously.

But for us, just thinking about the word "transition" is goals. And it keeps us connected to the students as Pete talked about. It's good communication. It's in every one of our goals. And we really are expanding our service platform. One of the other things we did, as Frank talked about, is we added navigators in every county. So we have five navigators at this point. We utilize the one-stop counselors. Familiar with the one-stop system, typically they have counselors. So we'll talk about how we leverage translator and we're using those counselors again to work transition in between programs.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Great range of examples. I'm going to go on to the next slide for you Peter.

Peter Simon: OK. So a slightly different angle, the question is, how are you using CAEP funds and other resources, which we can hear about, and partnerships to keep transition front and center? And Frank, why don't you start off?

Frank Gerdeman: That actually works well. Believe it or not, Eric, I think I'm actually going to be able to build a little bit off of your answer to the last question. So it all comes around. It all works for us so. So again, as I mentioned, we were able to set aside and allocate funding to this service for a fulltime navigator from really from the moment we opened the consortia doors here and here in Tahoe.

As our service provision grew, as our outcomes grew, and our impact and partnerships in the community grew, that gave us the opportunity to expand that. And so while we don't run or operate or oversee a one-stop in Tahoe, we actually hold the WIOA Title I case management contract with Golden Sierra. So Eric mentioned using the case managers from the workforce development side, in Tahoe, one of my team members is actually 95% funded through that contract with Golden Sierra. So we are the WIOA Title I case managers for our community because those jobs really-- there's a lot of overlap between the work of adult education navigators and workforce development navigators.

And then because of, I think, some of our early work and some of our partnerships with outside organizations, like California Conservation Corps, which actually now has 14 statewide transition navigators, we did some technical assistance work with them to build those positions and continue to do some professional development offerings. And so we have some outside contracts that have allowed us to expand our capacity locally. So it's really building on that early success of that early vision, again, much like Emma in Inland has, and being able to use that to not only increase our own work, but bring in additional funding, which has been really, really important to us.

The last thing I'll say, and I think I'll talk a little bit more about this and data, is we also, to Eric's point about trying to find a way to get all these different partners and systems to talk to each other, we've been able to bring in some resources to help us do that. And again, I'll share a little bit more about those, I think, on a later question.

Peter Simon: How about the folks from Inland, Emma and Pete? What can you say about how you're using CAEP funds and other resources?

Emma Diaz: Absolutely. So I'll start with the high level stuff of CAEP funds directly are the funds that offset the expense of having the two fulltime transition counselors and having one advisor. That's through looking at it through the college lens of overarching the transition into the college, but we also were able to use our K-12 members have now, some that didn't before have dedicated counselors now on their campuses as well that are fulltime. And so it's working in partnership to start the dialogue when they're on their adult ed site and then having our counselors come in to help with the transition.

So I'm going to say that's how the funds directly are being used. When I look at other partnerships in resources, we do work a lot with our community. So we work with some of the churches, community cabinet meetings that we attend. The Mexican consulate has sponsored some events as well for individuals coming in. And we've had our transitions advisors come in to do workshops on what our adult ed sites offer to help these individuals as they're coming into a new community.

Additionally, like I said, the CAEP funds has allowed for additional counselors at other sites. And I'm really always amazed by some of the innovation that I see. And like I said, we have the dedicated counselors. Some of our counselors that we have working fulltime for adult ed are also adjuncts at the college. So that knowledge that goes between the two, you really can't put a limit.

So I'm really fortunate to say we have different models, just even within our consortium because being in San Bernardino County, we are the largest County geographically in the US. So we're very spread out. And even within our own consortium, we have a mix of rural areas and more urban areas. And so it's been a matter of finding what are the resources that our students need the most. So I'll let Pete share.

Pete Gonzales: And I'm a product of those funds. So I was able to come in as an additional transitions counselor just because of the demand and the way that the program was growing over the first few years. And what we're able to do, especially with those partnerships, is we're able to build and maintain those networks between the adult schools and the college.

So one thing that's come out of it recently is for undocumented students in our AB 540 students is new ed codes that have been put in place starting this summer, which will allow students that are undocumented to take under six units at our campus without paying them on residency fees. So it's those kind of partnerships that we create and we build and we take back to the ed school, now we're able to transition the next group of students in.

We're able to do that as well with our noncredit ESL and ESL classes, where we build those partnerships, we add additional courses or whatever we feel is necessary, and then we help our students from the adult schools transition. So those partnerships is one thing that really is forged with those additional funds that are being brought in. And it allows us to kind of move across more areas and help more populations of students.

Peter Simon: Great. Thank you. And Eric. And I promise not to make you laugh on the next question.

Eric Pomeroy: No, no, no. You can make the last. I like it. Because I get to hear from all the great colleagues we got here. So again, how are we using CAEP funds? Not to be repetitive, but the navigators. But one interesting thing about how we fund navigators is, again, going back to that question having transition on the forefront, we actually take the total cost of navigators directly off the top of our consortium allocations. So again, we force the fact that we will have those navigator's funded wholly by the consortium, not by the individual program.

Again, I talked to earlier about leveraging from Title I to use the counselors that we have in our local one-stops. That's a huge piece. We've also worked on grants, especially to increase support for ELL students. So we wrote an ELL grant that many of you are probably familiar with in the state. And I think we wrote it three times, and third time's a charm. So we got it last year. And we will able to add an ELL counselor for the consortium to support transition into some of our new vessel and integrated courses. So that's another thing that we're leveraging resources from. And then also supporting that from CAEP.

Another thing that we've done, and we've really expanded this lately, is our employer partnerships. So our employer partnerships have, believe it or not, even grown with COVID, because we're able to connect via Zoom and other ways, typically in our transition process because we require all students to come in our doors to enroll in a career pathway. And we have most of our classes paid for because they're on the ETPL list. So we typically funds all of our CTE classes.

And then our employer partners, 9 times out of 10, provided WEX, Or we have funding work experience, and so we're able to support transition that way. But again, a lot of our focus is community college readiness. We also do a lot of work with career readiness with our one-stop in partnership. And so there's a lot of funds and time dedicated to that to ensure that students can transition successfully to other post-secondary employment.

Peter Simon: Thank you. This is all really valuable information. And I hope those of you out there were, if you have questions, to put them in the chat. And we'll get a chance to hopefully address some of those questions. Why don't we go to the next question, Jennie.

Jennie Mollica: Sure. So this next one is getting at the challenges. And it's always good to ask about challenges. Don't be shy about responding to this one. We all have challenges. We certainly heard about some of the challenges in the interviews we did. We thought it would be valuable to share with the group on the webinar today, what have been some of the most significant challenges that have been faced in your consortium with addressing students transition goals? And if you could add to that, how do you address them, and what resources have you used specifically to address those challenges? So Eric, why don't you go first on this one?

Eric Pomeroy: Sure. So again, I'm probably repeating something that's going to continue to be repeated. But I'll start with COVID because COVID has created challenges we didn't even know we had. One of the best examples I would say has been child care. Our ESL numbers, for instance, locally went from approximately 270 students in an entire year down to 57. And a lot of it was the issue, again, just getting the students in our doors, which we haven't even talked about transitioning yet is the problem with parents not being able to have child care for their students at home. They're at home during the school day.

And so one of the ways we got around this is we worked with our local school districts, we work with Sutter County, Yuba County, a lot of our counties, and we're able to acquire child care grants and other means to basically reduce some of these challenges and issues. Other transitions employment has been an issue even in our CTE programs, where hands-on labs or work experience has been another issue because we've had our clinical sites shut down, for instance, for our CNA class, where we had to go through and get an online approval for the CNA labs. All of us have had to switch our curriculum to online curriculum. And that's been another issue.

Career readiness, for instance, we posted a lot of our career readiness programs on YouTube. So we've made those available to students throughout our consortium to be able to make sure that we can still do that. And we put them in multiple languages to make sure all students have these things.

What resources, again, are you using to address these challenges? I'd say, it's a mixture. It's CAEP funds. It's WIOA funds. It's grants. It's partnerships. And really, again, the last part is partnerships have kind of kept things going because we still have a problem with students not only that they're scared to come to school, but they're scared to go out to the workforce because of the COVID. So again, working with partners, creating online options, having more service agencies in our interagency referral system has been definitely an advantage for us.

Jennie Mollica: Great. Thanks, Eric. The theme of partnerships just keeps coming back again and again. And the resources that come with those partnerships when you invest in them, I think, it's interesting to hear all examples of that. Why don't we go next to Emma and Pete, if you could speak to some of the challenges at Inland?

Emma Diaz: Sure. I'll talk about some of the ones we had early on, and then I'll let Pete kind of complement it with what he's been having to do now with COVID. And I'll say, very early on, looking at it more through the lens of the student and their barriers because we had to figure out how to help them overcome is we did actually a presentation at the CAEP Summit last year when we were in Orange County on the barriers students have and how to overcome them. And so we had 10 kind of high level areas. And I'll just read them out.

But in the presentation, our counselors went into detail about how they were coming across facing these barriers with students and then how to help them overcome them personally. And a lot of these really, we're holding them back either from transition for being successful in the programs that they were in. And so the 10 areas were cultural barriers, socioeconomic barriers, immigration, the residency status and questions they had around that, about understanding just the financial systems here, self-esteem issues, the language barriers, academics, just learning the system here in the US for a lot of them that were immigrants, and making a decision-- do I go on to a job and go into employment, or do I stay and get another certificate or earn a degree?

I'm sure Pete can talk a lot about right now, especially with COVID about the digital literacy and that divide. And then persistence. So their presentation revolved around these 10 areas, these 10 barriers. And then they talk to each one of them. And I will say, from looking at it, fear of change is really important, and that's universal to anybody trying to transition either into a new phase of their life. And I think one of those barriers that we didn't have that I see now is misinformation. Sometimes not having the right information at the right time can put you off a whole semester, maybe a whole year. Or it could really delay you in being successful. So misinformation is a barrier.

Solutions to that we're the face to face interactions we were able to have pre-COVID with having our transitions counselors an advisor on site to be able to work one-on-one with students. That was really big because it helped them. They were in a familiar place, helped them to overcome the anxiety they were feeling and to be able to ask those questions. I think more than anything, sitting with the counselor who was compassionate and receptive to what they were going through, I think, was really important. So I would say, that's a lot of the barriers and how we overcame them. And really, it became having these dedicated individuals, kind to meet them at the adult ed sites. And Pete, you could talk about all of what's happening now with COVID.

Pete Gonzales: Yeah, and most of those barriers are still relevant now, but I think the one that sticks out the most that our students are really having difficulties with this, as Emma said, that digital literacy, pre and post transition. So we're having a lot of difficulties with the students being able to just complete the application process or financial aid application or things of that nature, especially if they lack the computers, internet. Most of them are trying to do it on their phones. So we've had to go in and get kind of creative on the resources that we use.

Obviously, Zoom is one of the main ones. And then we've been able to use some other resources such as like Calendly to help us schedule a lot of our appointments with the students. And the one that I've used the most of everything is Google Voice, and it's mainly because the students are much more comfortable having those telephone conversations with me still being able to text them or email them whatever additional information they might need. So that's just getting them through the application process, which already could be difficult, especially for working with ESL students or undocumented students.

But now, we're talking post transition. And we're still facing those challenges with the digital literacy, right? Being able to log in to Canvas to be able to complete their assignments, check their student emails, things of that nature. So we've been fortunate at Valley that they've purchased Chromebooks and hotspots for the students. So once they actually register for a course, they're able to check those resources out and utilize it and use it for the semester.

But on top of that, even though we gave them a computer doesn't necessarily mean they know how to use it. So we've been able to partner with our tutoring services on campus, and we're working on providing them tutors to be able to help them just do basic functions such as logging in or creating a Word doc or things of that nature. So I think that digital literacy, especially right now in the virtual world that we're living, is really-- it's a challenge that's being faced by many of our students, more so than what we've seen before.

Jennie Mollica: OK. Frank can you add a few words there?

Frank Gerdeman: You and many of the people on this webinar know me. So we all know it's going to be more than a few words, right? But I will try to limit myself to three minutes how many words I can fit in. I'm going to start actually with a piece about our, again, our privilege of being in a small community and being able to really focus on building navigation capacity. From the beginning, we've really focused on personalizing the experience and the pathway to the individual client. And we use 'client' intentionally, because not all of the folks we serve become students.

Many of them do but not all of them. So we look at really building these personal pathway plans to meet the goals of the individual that allows us to start where they are, put in the supports that they need individually, because no one's life situation is the same, and then pull from this broad menu of both on site, in person, in community, and now in this more virtual world, the vast array of menu services, supports, instruction that are available to us to, again, build that plan at a personal level. And when you do that, you're actually addressing-- when you address those barriers on a personal level, what we found is you experience a lot fewer barriers in terms of access to support services and outcomes.