Thoibi Rublaitus: Good morning, everybody. Thank you so much for joining our team here. Our presentation today, as you see, the topic on Shining a Spotlight on the Less Than 12 Hour Students. My co-hosts today are Jay and Omar. And just to give a little introduction for some of the people I haven't met before but I'm so pleased to see a lot of people we've met before. And my name is Thoibi Rublaitus. I'm the principal at Corona-Norco Adult School.

Before that, I had about 20 years of experience in teaching adults and basically teaching English as a Second Language. And then the last five years I've been an administrator, two years as an AP at Corona-Norco Adult School as well. And then this is my third year as a Principal at Corona-Norco Adult School. I'm also a very active member of the About Students Consortium and Jay, your introduction. You're muted Jay. Sorry.

Jay Wright: Thoibi should be responsible for writing everybody's biography because Yeah, like I'll never look any better than I do here after this one. But I've worked with Thoibi on a lot of collaborative projects and it's been great working on this one as always.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Omar?

Omar Andrade: Hi. For those people that don't know me, my name is Omar Andrade. I am the Dean of Corona-Norco Adult School. I've been at Adult School for a while. The last five years more in the administrative piece. Years prior, I've been a k-12 teacher for 20 plus years and just doing, like many of you, just started adult ed as a side job or the evening job. So I'm happy to be here, happy to get to know you and I'm looking forward to all the conversations we're going to have today.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Thank you Omar and Jay. And thank you for agreeing to join me in this presentation. As some of you see in our headline here, the three of us we are all people who are very interested in data. And why we are interested in data is to serve our students better and basically how to enhance persistence and performance. And as we were digging deeper into these, there are some things we came across and we think it is something when you find a treasure, it's better to share with the field than to keep it all to ourselves.

We are no experts by any means, but we are all learning and growing as we do this. So today, our discussion, our objectives is to look at why we need to look at people or students with 12 hours instruction. And then as we look at the why, we see the importance of looking at those numbers so that we can serve them better. So what do we do with the data is the question right?

And as we know, equity and access is a big discussion right now. And whatever we do as adult educators is already a lot into equity and access and this little discussion today is going to get us a little deeper into it. And then how do we use the data to enhance learning persistence?

So a little bit of the problems that we are all facing as adult education educators right now. First of all, we're all facing enrollment challenges ever since the pandemic hit. Compared to prepandemic numbers, some of us are getting some of our students back but the numbers are still a lot more to work on. We all need to work a little bit more on the enrollment. We are also facing financial-- if we have low enrollment, we know for sure our payment points are going to be low. And if the payment points are low, we cannot serve the community that we've been serving so many years.

And so these are all related issues, but they are big problems that we're all facing. And then there is this trust issue. Why do we need to look at the students with 12 hours or less? Because we know that these students, they made the choice. They came to us. They said that hey, we want to get our GED or high set or improve our status. And they came to us. But if we cannot retain them, if we fail to retain them, the number-- the more we lose them, the more trust they're going to lose in adult education.

Then the cost. Acquiring a new student costs six times more than keeping the students we have. So if we look at the people with 12 hours of instruction, but they left, then we're doing a disservice to the community and to ourselves. And then adding to the cost of running a school, having to bring back more students. And then the margin that we see. The low persistence rate means low performance because if we don't have the numbers to support, to teach, we are not bringing in performance either.

And so that ends to the loss of payment points. And all these things are all interrelated. One cannot be separated from the other. But these are big problems adult education in general is facing and our school in particular, as well. And so these are some things that we looked into and this is where we wanted to focus our attention on today.

So the equity and inclusion. Now we already serve students who are high need population. A lot of them dropped out from high school and then they come to us. We want to serve them and they know they want they need the help. They come to us but they dropout. And the dropout is because of many different reasons. One being the low agency in themselves. First of all, they drop out for a reason. They have situations in life. They have behavioral issues. Some of them they have circumstances in life, difficulties in life. And so when they come for a second chance, these students already are the ones who have suffered from self management and time management issues.

And so we are here to support them and by looking at them thoroughly and saying why are they dropping out in the first 12 hours of instruction. And if we can give them some intervention and support. We also know that these are the students who have the highest barriers and that could be challenges that they have to overcome. Transportation, childcare or whatever it may be. We have been collecting data for all these many years in adult education. How can we support them? What are the support they need? How can we help them to persist in terms of their behavior?

Just by giving them some support and understanding how to manage their time as a student on our campuses or how to focus on building skills to help them to be gritty or help them to be more accountable to the time that they commit to come to us as a student. All these things we get to know more of, the more we hear student voices. We need to hear what these students have to say. We need to work with them and so we can support them better. So these are some things that we are discussing here today and then we will share some examples later how to get the data that Jay will show us more and then Omar will share with us a little bit of what he's doing on our campus.

Moving forward. The solution. We have to prioritize. By looking at the students who are-- by shining a spotlight on those students who are 12 hours or less, we can focus on getting them back. We can focus on getting them to the support they need. And then by authorizing the right stuff on our campus to support these students, putting measures in place, we can monetize on enhanced learning growth through the appropriate interventions that we could have.

But to do this, we first have to get the data. And data is power. And when we have the data, both quantitative and qualitative, we will be able to look at what we can support our students with. We use data to strategize and to sustain students to support their scalable goals. We have to find out what their goals. Asking their voice. What is their goal and how we can get there. Now all these things I talk about and I say, with a little bit of authority because I was very fortunate to be able to do medium scale research in the last three four years using data from schools in Southern California.

There were at least six schools in the Inland Empire Adult School campuses. My fellow colleagues in the schools in Riverside and San Bernardino area who shared with me, who are willing to work-- allow me to work with the data. Unfortunately, I could not use the data from our own school because it was part of my dissertation. And as part of that research, what I found out was that my research-- Sorry.

Holly: I'm sorry. If you come off mute, please check your microphone settings and be sure to keep yourself on mute during the presentation. Thank you.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Thank you. So if you see this particular slide here, the graph, have a look at the graph. Take a little deep looking into the numbers. Where do you see the highest or the tallest graph? It's at the very beginning. Now this data is part of the data that I gathered from six schools in Southern California looking at the attendance of the schools and the enrollment numbers and how the drop rate was. As it says, attrition by proportion of class completed.

So if a student were to finish the class in 10 units here. So from 0 to 10 say. In the first few weeks is the highest drop that happens. As you can see, the steep drop in the very beginning. So those are the numbers. Those are the people who drop out in the zero hours of attendance. And then there will be one hour of attendance, two or three hours of attendance, four or five hours of attendance and so on, until they get to the first 12 hours of attendance. Steep drop. And those are the people who are dropping out. But those are the people who need our support the most.

What can we do to get those students to stay on and to persist and to grow? So numbers do not lie as you all know, we all know. And so this was the highest and the most stark experience I found in my study, despite the fact that my study was to see what kind of teachers keep our students longer. I do have more data on that as well. But that's something to share another time. But for now, this is where we wanted to focus.

What can we do to stop those students from dropping out and that's going to solve a lot of our problems that I shared in the beginning. So with that, I will have Jay take over now to share a little bit of the CASAS data and that's like a bigger picture. Jay is an expert, you all know. He'll share with us and then Omar will share a little bit of what we are doing Corona-Norco.

Jay Wright: OK, thank you. What I'll bring up-- there was a question in the chat here the last couple of minutes about that data you just showed, whether that data is the same now as before the pandemic or whether there was any difference like pre-COVID, post-COVID with those numbers of dropouts.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Good question. So that data was done right in the middle of the pandemic. No, I collected the data right before the pandemic. So that data was before the pandemic. And now after the pandemic, it must be even stronger. And I can say that with authority because Omar and I have been looking at our school data, just one agency data, in the last few days and we've been seeing that a lot as well. And which Omar will share later.

Jay Wright: OK, thank you. I guess somebody is going to-- Oh, there it is. My slides are changing very slowly. Hopefully, this is the first one. But what I wanted to just bring up is I'll start by bringing up some TE resources and then I'll finish by bringing up a couple little snippets from the 2021 data. So this is a little bit of a sneak preview of sessions that will be going on on Thursday. We'll have some Perform at School sessions.

So not really new, but the newest CAEP reports we have in TE are our CAEP enrollees by hours and our CAEP service enrollees by hours. So here's the first one. What both of these reports do is basically organize students into those three buckets. I've seen Neil post a little bit in chat. People like Neil have been talking about it a lot. I've been talking about it a lot.

A lot of the goals-- the forced family fun goal setting that we're all going to get to do this year. A lot of it relates to those three buckets. That is, how many have 12 or more hours versus how many are in the 1 to 11 hours versus how many might be services only or maybe it's a data error or whatever, but somehow showed up for reporting but had zero hours. So this first enrollees by hours is basically looking at those three buckets that we already have on the TE CAEP summary, and basically organizing them by those three buckets.

So you can see to the left are those that qualify for outcomes. And of those, how many have 12 or more hours to the right. Those that do not qualify for outcomes but do qualify for services and how those students break down. You know, you're usually going to expect that most students in the outcome section would have 12 or more hours. But there are sometimes students that might qualify in every possible way other than the 12 hours. I'm not sure why.

Somebody is moving slides on me. Anyway, so it's organizing it by those three buckets. So you can see, OK they look like they qualify but there might be a small number that qualify for every area but one, the hour's issue. So this allows you to look and see of all those that kind of have good data and seem to be in pretty good shape, how many of those are actually qualifying with the 12 or more hours. For those that don't, how many have 1 to 11, how many have 0.

And then in services, not everybody is going to look exactly like this screenshot, but a lot of times when you're looking at services only, a lot of those students might have 12 or more hours but they may never have enrolled in a program. So you can kind of organize those students as well. OK now, next slide.

And then here's that services section. So again, we've got the numbers who show up in that right hand section and do not qualify for official CAEP outcomes. But of those, how do they break down by hours. How many of those might already be enrolled and we really need to recoup their data. Really try to figure out a way to get them to qualify versus some of those with zero hours that we can probably safely assume are just services only. Next slide.

And then the service enrollees buy hours. So this allows us to drill down more to those that are just services only. So when we look at that first report and we see well OK, a lot of students fall into these different areas. So now you can kind of go back inside out, outside in so to speak, of those that maybe don't have hours, what type of services are they receiving and then breaking it down by the type of services received and show by service received, how many have 12 or more hours, how many have 1 to 11, how many don't have any hours at all.

So it's kind of in any way you want to slice it, so to speak, you can look at those students in terms of those three buckets by digging deep into these reports. I'll just say, we'll have a little exercise to match these with the CAEP summary in one of the Thursday sessions. It was a little bit of a teaser I guess if you want more on this. For now, we'll go to the next slide so I'm not dawdling too far.

So next slide. OK, so here is some strategies we might use for follow-up on those reports. This is kind of what we say about everything. But if you're looking at that, those buckets of hours. Look at your data to focus efforts. Look at those that might need help. And look for those hot spots. That is, what programs seem to have a lot of people qualifying versus what areas seem to have a lot of these students with less than 12 hours of instruction. Get feedback from your staff and students on this issue and make sure that your students and staff have clear channels so they can report to you when this is happening.

Kind of to Thoibi's data, early intervention obviously is kind of the key here because everybody's dropping out early. If you don't intervene right away, it's not going to really do much probably. And then the culture of data. Get all your staff involved in the data and watching this up front. OK, next slide, please.

So here is some goal setting examples. Same thing with the reports. We'll get more into this on Thursday. But how many students actually make it into an instructional program? Again, this is how we're looking at matching the zero hours verses 1 to 11. Next slide, please.

And then this is comparing the 1 to 11 to the 12 hours. We'll get more into the data details on Thursday, but another exercise with these reports is looking at, of those that have some enrollment, how many get to at least 12 hours. Again, to calculate and evaluate how well you're doing now. These reports should be able to give you those percentages and kind of give you an idea of how hard it will be to move everybody into the 12 or more hours bucket. Next slide, please.

Here's another way you might look at goals using the DIR. In particular, the 2's, quote, unquote, that is those with less than 12, and then below that we have the 0 or empty hours verses 1 to 11. I'll say historically we've used this as a way to get an idea of why you might have a lot of students with less than 12 hours. I'll just say the historical issue here is that usually, not always, but usually if you've got a big number in 0 and a small number and 1 to 11, a lot of times that suggests a mechanical error. Maybe it's an import error or a scanning error.

Usually, it suggests something with your data. Whereas that 1 to 11 hours usually means you're doing everything OK mechanically, but you just happen to have a lot of students that didn't quite stick around long enough to get 12. Now you can use this for these CAEP purposes for the buckets, just like we looked at in those other reports. Next slide, please.

OK, here is a document that to be clear this document is using WIOA numbers, not CAEP numbers. We just finished up the CAEP numbers literally in the last 24 hours. So in the next week or so we'll be posting some numbers for the CAEP DIR. But if you're itching to get some numbers right now, we've had this document posted for a few months that has 10 quarters worth of statewide performance on the DIR, the statewide averages for 18-19, 19-20, and the first couple of quarters of 2021. So a lot of data you can review and compare yourself to. Next slide, please.

Here' just an example of a way you could use your DIR for goal setting, looking at 12 hours of instruction. OK, the most recent year, 18-19, we were at this percentage. So we're going to go ahead and improve to a better percentage year over this year. Next slide, please. And then here is the information from the 2021 data. We were at about 36.7% with less than 12 hours of instruction. I'll just say that was just slightly worse actually than 18-19. We were at 34.3 in 18-19.

What is interesting, though, is when you break it down into those subcategories, that is the 0 empty verses 1 to 11, you see the number of 0 empty increased a lot. The number that just had 1 to 11 decreased a lot. So the overall number with less than 12 really hasn't changed a lot during the pandemic. But the reasons for why they're less than 12 has. I would also say that given the enrollment count is so much lower, I think the big reason for why that percentage is really not as big of a change as you'd think is just because the enrollment has gone down so much. So a lot of those students Thoibi is talking about are probably the exact students that are by far the most likely to drop out and not get involved in any of this at all now that it's the pandemic.

And I think this is my last slide, so I better turn it back over to Thoibi. Thank you.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Thank you Jay for the detailed numbers that we can get easily now. In the past at our school under my mentor, Omar and I really worked at looking at our 12 or less students by looking at our ASAP data and manually finding all those numbers. But thanks to CASAS, now we have all that very handy and already done for us. Now, thank you Jay. I will pass the mic on to Omar who will share a little bit of a case study. Some actions that we've been doing at Corona-Norco. It's kind of a pilot project. So without further ado, Omar, here's your first slide.

Omar Andrade: So Thoibi kind of painted a picture of what the focus area is. And Jay has given us some tools. I'm going to add another piece as one of the tools. One of my favorite reports in ASAP is the class enrollment with hours and the home school. Now, you can break it down per program. I'm going to focus specifically on high school diploma and high school equivalency, ABE/ASE type programs because those are the ones that I work closer with.

But this is a report that gives you very specific detail. And so this is just-- think of another additional tool that you have to pull data. So go ahead and turn it to the next slide. So when we're looking at this project or this initiative or the focus area that we're trying to-- this is not a-- we're not the only ones obviously facing this type of issue. So this is, as we work together and we collaborate with other schools and we have this discussion today, this is going to be relevant to every single one of us.

So we're looking at the total numbers for about August through October just kind of quarter one and enrollment specifically ABE/ASE. So we took a number of 382 of our students and then we automatically took out or kind of discarded the dropped students. There's 47 students that dropped. And we really want to look at the active students. These are students that came in, did the registration and so we have some hours. So we're going to really focus on that.

So active students, about 335. Within these numbers, you have the students that have 12 hours or less, which are 103. And we have students that have zero hours. So in general, when we're looking at our numbers, it's usually about half. Half of the students are getting things done, moving forward, completing hours, getting skills, getting going with their programs. But a lot of them, about half, are in that sweet spot, in that area that we're going to be looking at.

So just keep that in mind because that's going to be important as the quarters continue, especially getting that started and getting that focus. Quarter one is going to give you a better numbers, I think, by the end of the year. Go ahead and go to the next slide. So why high school equivalency, why ABE? Well, if you notice, a lot of our students are landing in those type of programs.

Yes, we have some ABE students. But the majority are in HSC and high school diploma. So if you just look at the numbers of the percentages, there's 21% of our students based on that data that have zero hours. So maybe we can look at the type of service we granted them. Maybe we can go back and check that data and see if it's correct. We can definitely do something now with that number where we can analyze how many students have 0 and why is that 0.

But really, one of the areas of concern is that 1 to 12. Like 27 students, 27% rather, are in there. And so if more than 50% are on track, 13 hours plus, and about half of them are between 0 to 12, that's definitely a concern, especially knowing that as far as payment points and earning and reaching those skills and getting that financial return on your investment, meaning the student in this particular program, is definitely an area that we need to look at.

Go ahead and go to the next slide.

So here's part of the plan. Yes, we don't want you to ignore or lose focus on those students that are doing what they're supposed to. And there's definitely the bigger group is that 13 hours more. This is the opportunity to retain. So these students, hone in on those. These are the students that are enrolled, that have their pretest, have attendance hours, by now probably has a post-test. So this is the area that you are doing well. So we don't want to ignore it. Just know that that's there and continue to add to it. So this is your opportunity to retain. Great, great, great group to have.

The next two are the ones we're going to really dive into, and this is where the data is going to come in handy. Because the 1 to 12 hours, this is the opportunity to reconnect. This is what we call-- these are the students that you can re-enroll, maybe get them back. You're going to have to either send them an email, make a few phone calls. You can have a plan of action for this group. Because you already have some instructional hours, you already have a pretest, you already have a lot of investment as far as the personnel and everybody that was involved with this process on getting the student involved and you know that student was also interested.

So you know there was a need that we were serving. Now again, the zero hours, still opportunity to re-enroll, but that's more of a enrollment and assessment because really, nothing really happened with them. So keep that focus. Those two groups are the ones you're going to get more return on your investment, especially because you already had the opportunity to talk to them, to see them, to have those conversations. And many of them even met with a counselor.

So we already have a lot of money into it. We already have a lot of time and man hours invested. This is the time to have a system in place and have some steps so we can get those students back into a program. And the main important reason is to really get them to complete. Get them to graduate. There's a lot of financial points that that's going to bring as far as your school and earning, but really, it's getting the students and serving them better and analyzing what is it that we can do, multiple times during the semester, to get them back into their program and back on track.

Go ahead and go to the next slide. So here's the plan. And this is-- think about it as a cycle. So the first level is reconnecting. In September, once we got the students enrolled and as we open enrollment additional times in September, we realize there are some students that we need to touch back on and we need to really reach out and find out what happened. Obviously they enrolled. Obviously they were interested and they came in and did all the paperwork and the pretest and all of that.

So we created-- with the administration, we created a mass email for all students kind of like, hey, I know you were interested. We really want to connect with you. We're concerned of how come we haven't heard from you and we're here to help. Just reaching out and setting that platform, that foundation of we're here, we want to just kind of get back to your program and just come back or reconnect with us. A lot of the students immediately responded, Oh Yes, I'm still interested, please reach out, give me the next registration date.

So these are students that we sent a mass email. And there were some that automatically responded. Some of them didn't necessarily come back and some of them did tell us there were some barriers and some health issues they we're running into. But at least you're getting some feedback, which is going to be good because you're going to be able to separate that group of Yes, I want to continue. Please get back to me and let me know how. Or the ones that say, you know what, maybe at a later time.

Students that responded, we rescheduled them. We set up another counseling session even if it was by the phone to get them re-enrolled. The survey was great just to give us an update on some of the reasons we wanted them to continue. And so we had one more opportunity to really not only re-enroll but reconnect with them and give them maybe the support that they didn't get the first time around. As we were getting the year started, maybe there were too many students or the processes happen. They were too long for them to get back in the class. There's a couple of things that we were concerned about.

So we connected with students by phone. We left the messages. Then we scheduled appointments. So now that we reconnected with them, we re-enrolled. So here in October, early October, the first two weeks I started making some phone calls. I sent a survey. We started calling, with the teacher's help and the counselors, hey, either soon or in person or by phone, let's have a conversation. Let's get you back into the program. Let's find out what happened.

Some students did give us feedback. But the main thing here is to connect the teacher and the student. And once again, bring that awareness because we kind of forget. Once we get busy and we get back into the classroom and we get back into the machine of education starts moving, we forget that there are some students that start falling behind. So help with the teachers, get them informed, get them re-enrolled and resume their program. And so we continued to reach out with those students.

A lot of them we left messages. Some of them didn't return the message. But it was after the second or third try of calling or seeing an email that we were able to connect with them. And the main point after doing the reconnection and re-enrolling is restart. This is what we want the students to get to. To resume their program. We have a class called Steps to Success so they can help them if they have issues with technology. Maybe they didn't have all the right links or they felt somehow with the technology piece they were not as experts as they could.

And so the last two pieces is to check in with the teacher, to talk with the teachers to say, by the way, here are some of the students that maybe the health concerns were greater, maybe their barriers became more significant. And so we started to really talk to the students, talk to the teachers and get them back into the program. And we were going to review. At the end of this month we're going to review the student data to see how many students actually went through the process of reconnecting, re-enrolling and restarting.

So that's something that's going to be coming because we want to see, out of all the students that kind of drop off, how many are actually re-enrolled with us. So go ahead and go to the next slide. So here's a brief timeline just so you know. Registration happens early August. In September we started looking at data. How many students have zero hours, less than 12 hours. And I get it. There's not a lot of instruction yet, but you have to be aware. You have to keep your finger on it.

And so early October, let's start sending some messages. Let's have the teachers help us connecting maybe through a message. Hey, we're back, we missed you. That kind of thing. Second or third week, re-enroll. A lot of the students that got back to us, hey, don't worry. You're already re-enrolled. You've been reinstated. We're going to work with you. And let us know what else we can do. So many of those students, as you see in the data coming up, they were back on track.

And then at the end of October, we'll review. Some of the things that we did during this process is one, bring the awareness like Thoibi said, to look at the data and use the data to give us that specific information on those 0 to 12 hours of students. And to make sure we get them to restart. And the point is, quarter one now is over. We have that data. We have done all the processes. We've gone through this timeline. In November, we will get back to it. So now we have new students, new 0 to 12 hours, new focus area and so new opportunities to go through this process once again.

Kind of like a system of getting back to the students. Then perfect. So here's a sample of as we survey students, I wanted to find out what is their reality, So I just took a small sample of the students that reconnected either through, in this case it was a survey, and I wanted to find out, how many were ready to start now, how many were ready to start as soon as possible and how many were really not interested. They were like not interested. I'm not coming back. Something happened.

If you look at the colors, obviously the red or students that could not come back, they were thinking, you know, I'll do it again maybe next semester, maybe next year. So that's clear, right? Very, very easy. Some of the students, you're just going to leave a message. You're just going to send the email. That's pretty much, that's the result of the survey. That's as far as you got.

But if you look at the green, more than 50% of the students were either Yes, re-enrolled, when can I come back, Yes, please let my teacher know I'm ready or you know what, maybe not right now but next week, and we were able to schedule an appointment for them to come back. So by doing this process and by looking at those students and actually setting something, even having something in place rather than ignoring it-- as they have mentioned and obviously Jay has mentioned and Thoibi has mentioned and many of us that work in Adult Ed, we know how fast and how important this first 12 hours are.

Having something in place that you can cycle through your quarters is going to be better and more beneficial because you have invested so much time and money into that and you have spent so many manpower hours. This is perfect by having some system to reconnect and get students back on track. So this is just the sample. I know we're continuing to do this through the next quarters. But the next conversation is the part that we're interested in, because there's a lot of us here have a lot of ideas, different dynamics and some of the things that are best practices that we can all share in our firm. Thank you again.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Thank you Omar and thank you Jay. So friends, we are all colleagues here and we all are facing the same problems. This is just a sample of what we are beginning to do at Corona-Norco. And as my description of the presentation said, it's about learning from each other. Crowd sourcing, sourcing from each other. And so I would like to now open the floor to questions, answers or discussions on what are some things we are doing, you are doing. What are your thoughts and ideas to use data and how are they related and how are we going to enhance persistence and performance of the students we serve.

Each of us, we all have different demographics as well. So depending on the kind of students we serve, our needs are going to be different. But then hearing from others and we can always tweak and adapt what we hear from others. Then of course, there are all these barriers and solutions. And I know we have barriers, but I think we need to focus more on the solutions. And then if you have some strategies on equity and access. The way I'd like to do this is open the floor to everybody.

You can unmute yourselves and speak. And I haven't had a chance to look at the chat box yet. Jay and Omar, if you'd like to help me with some of the chat box questions.

Omar Andrade: We do have some questions, but if you want to do this piece and then we can get back to the chat.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Yes. Also, I wanted to apologize because I think I'm on a presenters mode. So every little thing I touch to manipulate what I can see or do I am clicking forward button instead. It's so sensitive. I'm sorry Omar and Jay that I continued to mess up your slides. But how about we stop sharing and have a discussion. And then I will add more to the persistence performance and these three boxes. And then once that is done, I'll be uploading this to TAPS so that whoever is a participant here can get the updated with some of the crowdsourced ideas in the boxes.

Jay Wright: For starters in chat, there seem to be a few iterations of your data about when students drop out. And there is a couple questions of people wondering if there's any data that speaks to how many of them return after leaving?

Omar Andrade: So I don't know if you want to do some of those questions first Thoibi and then we can do these three pieces. It's up to you.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Yeah, let's do the question and answer first.

Omar Andrade: Awesome. So we can go back up.

Thoibi Rublaitus: The data on how many returned, we do not have concrete data. But I know for sure from what Omar and I have been seeing in our school, at least 15% are coming back out of those 50%. And you already saw at least about 50% of the 12 or less saying that they would like to come back. And do they really come back and stay? That is yet to see. But from the previous year's data too, at least reaching out to the students gets them the feeling that the school really still cares for them and they can still come back and finish.

So maybe not in quantitative terms but we're getting a lot of qualitative. Remember that trust we talked about. We build that trust with the students. They have a feeling they have a safe home. I cannot come back right away but I'm ready to come back when I can come back because the people here they are invested in my learning. That kind of qualitative investment is also still there.

Omar Andrade: So there's a question with how different would that look for English learners or students who struggle with digital literacy. I know this is specifically for ABE but what would you answer to that?

Thoibi Rublaitus: So for ESL as well we've been beginning to do that and looking at the 12 hours or less. And that's why we started the Steps to Success class. Basically from hearing the students reaching back to us or our calling to them, what we hear is they dropped out because of lack of technology, digital literacy. And that happened in the pandemic years as well. And that's why when we could bring back students on campus, we have made sure that we have beginning level students on campus so that at least the first few weeks of attendance they learn to use the technology, the teachers hold hands and support them.

And then some of them are staying on and in-person. But the ones who get a little bit more comfortable with technology, they are now on online classes alone. So we are offering online and in person. So we have about 40% of our students in online, but the ones who are in online are mostly intermediate and advanced students as most of you also might have experienced.

Omar Andrade: Yeah. We have Francisco. With the loss of so many students they're trying to reconnect with them but the staff shortages can be difficult to bring them back and not enough staff. I know that's something that a lot of schools are facing.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Yeah, that's part of the barriers that we have right? So I'm writing that down. So that's not a question but that's a comment. So how about friends we do something to get the crowd sourcing done. If you have any thoughts on persistence and performance, please put them in the chat right now. Write as many things and I will make sure that I summarize and/or compile all of them in the last slide that I just showed. And that will give us all more information to work with later and to mull over as well.

And if there is anybody who would like to unmute and talk about something, that's also a very good way to continue with our conversation here.

Thank you. Google Voice. Yes, all of our teachers have Google Voice and that's helpful. Send students reminders. Goal meeting with teachers. Thank you Michele. Is there any brave person who would like to unmic, unmute?

All the comments that's coming in is also really good.

Any thoughts?

Jay Wright: Well one thing that I'm seeing a little bit that I've been hearing a lot lately, not really all year long but literally in the last month, is that whole what do you want to say, self-fulfilling prophecy or whatever of this where you've got a lot of agencies with problems with low student enrollment and issues like 12 hours like we're discussing. And at the same time everybody's also having a lot of difficulties with staffing shortages and lack of teachers and all of that as well.

So I've seen a couple of things in the chat where that kind of tends to-- those two issues tend to reinforce each other where hey, we have short staff, we have too few teachers, so we can't really serve all that many students. So we don't really have as much offered as we normally do. So of course, the number of students that are coming in has decreased. The number of students that have come in has decreased so we don't really need as many staff or as many teachers as we normally do.

So we're not spending a lot of time hiring teachers that we really don't need for way lower numbers of students. So we're not going to waste time and money hiring teachers we don't need with so few students. So we have too few classes so we end up with fewer and fewer students. And again, they'll tell two friends and so on and so on and so on. That is, staff shortages seem to enhance the issue with student shortages and in return student shortages seem to enhance issues with staffing and teacher decreases.

So I've seen a little bit of that here. I'll just point that out that that seems to be an interesting thing for my two cents how that staff shortage issue and the student shortage issue does seem to feed off each other quite a bit. Sorry I had trouble getting that one out of my craw.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Yeah, no that's very true. So I'm thinking about solutions. One possible solution might be a blended model. In the blended model, you have staff shortage but instead of having the five days a week class you have two days a week where you're meeting with students three hours or four hours two days a week. But the other time students are given work to do on Burlington English or some kind of asynchronous work. And we can still account for those hours and we've noticed that some of our students are really good in asynchronous work.

Jay Wright: Francisco has come on camera and I'll just say I was purging his comments with what I just tried to get out. I was blatantly stealing from him and he's asking to talk so I will bring up that hey, he's ready to speak.

Thoibi Rublaitus: Thank you Francisco.

Francisco: Good morning. Well, one of the-- prior, I would always use a lot of technology with my beginning students and I would lose a lot of them. And then I started figuring out the reason why I was losing them was because they didn't have the appropriate training or the technology to use. So now what we've been doing, especially this year with my colleague and I, is that we spend like the first couple maybe one or two weeks just onboarding them. How to use Canvas, how to use Zoom, how to use the different platforms that we use and just taking that time to really train them how to use the technology just in case if we were to go back to distance learning.