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Speaker 1: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Arij Mousa: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Placer School for Adults Mid-Term Project Report. I would like to thank the OTAN team for selecting our school to participate in the 2022 DLAC project. My name is Arij Mousa, and I'm the CTE Coordinator. Our DLAC project is supported by our Principal Eric Vereyken, Assistant Principal Steven Casperite, and our Mentor Blair Roy.

Our DLAC team members are, Chrissy Agee, ESL Instructor and Department Chair; Beth Lanning, Counselor; Chris Anderson, Site System Administrator and CTE Instructor; Michele Raymond, Senior Administrative Assistant and CTE Instructor.

Placer School For Adults has a robust career technical education program. Every teacher in our program is an expert in their field and hold California teaching credentials. Our team's primary goal is to help our ESL students transition into career pathways, employment, and secondary education by helping them to develop academic, digital literacy, and workforce readiness skills, IELCE.

Our second goal is for our team to utilize technology and staff expertise to develop a student onboarding system that focuses on pathways for students and creation for an online individualized pathway plan, emphasizing digital literacy and career readiness in a specific industry sector that aligns with industry sectors and provides courses for career pathways.

As you can see from the list, we have five major industry sectors. And under each sector, we have career pathways. The first one is Business and Finance, second is Building and Construction Trades, Health Science and Medical Technology, Manufacturing and Product Development, and then last but not least, Workforce Preparation.

The next slide will show our Construction Pre-Apprenticeship program, and that's, of course, pre-COVID. As you can see, they're not wearing masks. This is a healthy and good class that led to jobs after the end of class. Michele.

Michele Raymond: PSA has several locations. Our main office is in Auburn. We also serve Rocklin, Lincoln, Placer, Nevada County Jails. Our program areas are high school diploma, GED, ESL, and CTE. Pre-COVID in '18-'19, PSA's enrollment was 4,390 students. Our current enrollment is 679 students. That's an 85% decrease in enrollment. And here is a chart that you can see of the students we are now serving.

Here, we're looking at a chart, and as you can see our CTE program has always been pretty robust. Even during COVID, it's still our leading program as far as serving students. Beth.

Beth Lanning: OK. DLAC 101 really helped our team come together with an effective plan to integrate our ESL students with our technology courses. Lack of technology skills and lack of technology equipment is a barrier for many of our ESL students. Implementing a plan to interface students with technology while they are learning the English language has been our primary goal.

DLAC helped us organize and build our program by providing tools for implementation. It has been nice networking with other schools as well as we gain ideas and knowledge from other programs. Next slide.

This year, we just started implementing a new tool to help students plan and reach their goals. Goal4 It! is an individualized employment academic plan to help students navigate goals and write down action steps to reach their goals. When students are on the pathway to success, they are faced with potholes and discuss the detours used to get around any barriers.

For instance, if a student is planning to go to college, they need finances. And a lot of my students say a good way, a good detour to get around that pothole is for them to get a side job to help them fund their college.

Revision of this plan is also included in Goal4 It! We use this process when we enroll students. Teachers are also able to view the plan and discuss with each student. When a student completes our program, they discuss and review this process again during their exit interview. This is the first year of Goal4 It! And we are excited to see the enthusiasm students have displayed while discussing their goals.

While we're reviewing goals, we discuss educational plans and refer them to our own transition counselor, who works with our local community college, which is Sierra College here in the Sacramento Region. And she is employed both by Sierra College and us, and she works with the students to plan their future in the educational system and then, ultimately, their long-term goal, which is hopefully a really good successful career. Arij.

Arij Mousa: And like any other school, we face some challenges. First one was COVID. It affected our enrollment. So as you saw from the slides that Michele presented, our enrollment dropped down quite a bit. Also, another challenge was students didn't understand our career pathways.

So we had to educate students, create flyers to pass it on to other programs in the school, and educate teachers about the career pathways so we can transition students from ESL and other programs into the career pathways in the industry sector programs that we had.

Technology challenges as well was not so much for our teachers, but it was mostly for our students. So we had a loaner program to loan students who didn't have computers at home some laptops to be able to take online classes. And then the other thing was unable to market the program to our students.

Like I said, we didn't have students on our campus, so it was hard to go in and talk about the programs and pass the flyers out to educate them about what we have. So to date, no ESL students have enrolled in a workforce training program. And that was a big challenge for us, and we're hoping by next year that will change. Chrissy.

Chrissy Agee: As a DLAC team, we have learned more about the different programs we represent and how we can collaborate to better support those programs. ESL teachers also started meeting as a PLC this year and focused on developing common assessments as well as transitioning in-person classes to online.

The DLAC team also worked to bridge the gap between ESL and CTE classes. ESL teachers invited our counselors and CTE teachers to visit our classes and share about the career pathways that our school offers. Flyers for all the CTE classes were also created and shared with the ESL students. Next.

For the first time, ESL teachers offered blended online and online classes. I also taught an ESL and Digital Literacy Class that incorporated the G Suite apps into the ESL curriculum. All of the ESL classes completed EL Civics Unit 48, Online Communication, to focus on teaching digital literacy skills. We also used the online resources News For You, Learning Upgrade, Read Theory, and Quizlet.

Since some of the ESL students did not have a personal computer or laptop at home, the Adult School created a Chromebook Loaner Program so those students could also access our classes. Next.

Back in March, the DLAC team created a Technology and Career Interest Survey for the ESL students. The results of the survey showed us that ESL students wanted to continue learning how to use the G Suite apps as well as Microsoft Office applications. ESL students we surveyed also said they were interested in career pathways for Health Science, Human Services, Hospitality, Office Environment, and Accounting to manage their businesses.

The ESL Department also wanted to see more process pre and post-test matches for our students. So we offered more in-person testing opportunities for the ESL students this semester. And as we plan for fall 2021, we're intentionally scheduling ESL and CTE classes so the dates and times do not conflict. Our goal is that ESL students will concurrently enroll in ESL and CTE classes next year. Next.

Chris Anderson: Through DLAC training, Placer School for Adults was able to streamline our recruitment process, assessments, and surveys to help our students, modified orientations to both in-person and both online. Where needed, we've implemented classes pretesting as well. Through this process, we were able to focus our goals to help collaborate among teachers and unify our programs. This led to advancement of our IELCE training program. Next.

We all know that team building is huge, and DLAC training has helped here as well. PSA leadership and staff embrace a great culture of working together. In our monthly staff meetings, we read Culture Code by Daniel Coyle and then reviewed the chapters among the staff.

We then tried to correlate that into our daily operations. Regarding conflict, we all completed the Myers Briggs Personality Type Indicator and used that to help build our strengths and inform others of our strengths to be better as a whole. Next slide.

Continuing with team building, we as a team met weekly to help in communication and formed a leadership team to collaborate with one another. As we collaborated, we used each other's strengths per person, which are Arij for Leadership, Chrissy for Leadership, Knowledge, Experience, ESL, and Digital Literacy Instructor. I am the director of Technology and CTE Instructor. Beth is Counseling and Working With Students, and Michele with the G Suite and being a CTE Instructor as well. Chrissy, back to you.

Chrissy Agee: OK. Here's a picture from when some of the ESL students visited the clinical medical assistant program earlier this semester. The ESL students for the patients for the CMA students, and they got to meet the CMA program instructor as well. They had a great time, and it got them excited about the CMA program.

As we move forward with promoting CTE classes and career pathways, we'll be arranging more visits like this for the ESL students. My ESL and digital literacy class will continue to be offered next year, and I'm planning on including more workforce preparation and instruction also. Arij.

Arij Mousa: So I made it a point to visit all ESL classes and speak with the students about the career pathways. And also, I encouraged our CTE instructors to be guest speakers in the ESL classes so they can educate them about the career pathways that they're teaching to encourage more ESL students transition into workforce readiness and career pathways.

We also implemented the goal-- we're piloting the Goal4 It! with our students. So each CTE teacher picked one student to work with this semester. And next semester, we'll be implementing that in all of our CTE classes. Next.

So in closing, working with OTAN team, DLAC teams, industry partners, and our consortium has helped us increase our enrollment and student growth. My team and I are glad to have been selected or given the opportunity to participate in DLAC program and would like to thank our administrators, Eric Vereyken and Steven Casperite for their support; the OTAN team, Penny, Neda, Destiny, and Dr. Porter; and in particular, our coach and mentor, Blair Roy, for their continuous support during this past year. We are looking forward to another year. Thank you all for listening, and if you have any questions, please let us know.