Felisa Vilaubi: Good morning. Welcome to everybody. I'm going to ask Janie to share her screen.

Janie Garcia: All right, thank you.

Felisa Vilaubi: And so a couple of pieces from our end. Jenée is with us today. She's our director of our consortium. She's going to be monitoring the chat. So if questions come up as we are going, feel free to either raise your hand and ask the question or put the question in chat.

And we are definitely encouraging people to participate as we go through this. We don't want to wait until the end. We understand that things come up as you are seeing the information. So please feel free to interact with us as we go through this. Great. So we are--

Janie Garcia: You did the intro. I was like, I was going to do the intro. [laughs]

Felisa Vilaubi: Go for it.

Janie Garcia: All right. Hello, everybody. Janie Garcia here. I come to you from Foothill College. My colleague, Felisa, comes to you from De Anza College.

Today, we're here really to mainly focus on how we, in our consortium, which includes three adult schools and our two community colleges, Foothill and De Anza College, expanded dual enrollment at the community college to adult school students beyond just the high school diploma, GED programs. And we actually have done that and extended to students in all CAEP-funded programs through the state.

So today, as Felisa said, we have a prepared presentation. But we really would like you guys to be able to ask questions because that's what we found in the past is the most helpful. And then, again, like Felisa said, Jenée Crayne is here with us. I don't know if, Jenée, you wanted to say anything. So I put you on the spot. She's our director of the consortium. So she's here as well to help us with the chat.

[interposing voices]

Jenée Crayne: Yeah, just good morning, everyone. And thank you so much for joining us.

Janie Garcia: Awesome. All right. Well, thank you for being here early, too. So hopefully, you got coffee in hand. And we can get started. Felisa, you want to take it away?

Felisa Vilaubi: Sure. So we decided that we wanted to make sure-- OK, so there's a little bit of background information. Janie and I both come from the adult school world within our consortium. So she was previously at Mountain View Los Altos Adult School, and I was at Fremont Union High School Adult School.

And so we recognized that there was a need to create a pathway for adult school students into the community colleges. And for having a K-12 background, we didn't really understand why it wasn't OK to use this special admit process that the high schools had. They have it established. It's been around forever. Students can be considered a special admit. Their fees get waived. It doesn't start their college careers, right? All these things were pieces that we recognize adult school students should also be able to benefit from.

Janie Garcia: And just to add a little more context, we also should probably pause for a moment and talk about the terminology here. So we hear dual enrollment. And at least at our respective colleges, dual enrollment can look different. And even though it's like just addressing high school students, even within that population, it can look different.

As you may be familiar with, we have CCAP agreements. We also have cohort models of high school students because that was our pre-existing dual enrollment that we support. But we also have an opportunity for students to just take a one-off class from any high school as long as they have the permission from their counselor and/or administrator at the high schools.

And that's what we refer to as special admit. So it's still dual enrollment, but it's not in the cohort or CCAP model, but rather individual student ways. Let me go ahead and change the slide.

Felisa Vilaubi: So we found out then back in the day-- I think it actually might have been at a CAEP Summit in 2015 that who is a special admit criteria is actually a local board decision. Previously, we had come up against these roadblocks, where there was some misinterpretation of what special admit could be and who got to decide that and. And so we found out it was local board decision. And so we really started then in 2015 trying to figure out then how we get people to understand that adult schools need to be able to have the same kind of dual enrollment opportunities.

So then in 2017, at this point, I had transitioned over to De Anza. My role at De Anza is I'm a counselor in language arts for adult school transitions. And so we did an Opening Day workshop. Our district does Opening Days, they come together, and everybody gets to come to workshops and talk about what's happening for the year.

So we did one with a student panel. And we definitely got people that, I think, to start understanding who adult school students were. They started to understand what work they could do to get involved. And it was actually really beneficial for us to be able to have people start to understanding their role in supporting our adult schools.

Jenée Crayne: Felisa, we have a couple of questions that just popped in the chat.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah.

Jenée Crayne: Umm..yeah I see it.

Felisa Vilaubi: So special admit is a local board decision at the community college level. So who gets to be considered a special admit actually is decided by a district, a community college district. And then in 2019, we also did another Opening Day presentation. And this one was super important for us to be able to get the right people at the table.

Our old director, Peggy Raun-Linde, was really instrumental in kind of hounding our board at the community college and our chancellor and got numerous board members and the chancellor to come and see a lot of the data that we were working with students, how many students were being served by our local adult schools, and how many of them were CAEP-funded, and what that meant in terms of potential pathways in.

And so at this presentation, we actually brought up the idea that we really want to be able to have there be this special admit. We know that students being dual enrolled is a way to get students into the community colleges, right? It's a proven method.

And so when we were bringing it up, we had multiple board members, who said, really want to get this done by the end of this year. This is the goal. And one of the board members who's now are president of the board was like, that seems too long from now. Let's have your goal be December and not June. And so it really set the tone for us really trying to figure out how we get it through the channels and up to the board.

Janie Garcia: Absolutely. And all I could really add to that wonderful summation that Felisa gave us is that, prior to taking it to the board, even though SB 554 existed and gave adult school students in high school diploma and GED programs state permission to join through dual enrollment at the community college, we still were getting pushback from the community colleges, even with Felisa working on that side.

And so for us, the proposal to extend the opportunity to students from more CAEP-funded programs than just secondary education also really established this systematic opportunity for students, right? So in addition to what we extended, it was also a great gateway for us to be like, look, we have the board support. And this is instrumental to where we've become or where we've gotten to in terms of this work. Sorry. [laughs] All right.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah. And actually, technically, when we started this work, SB 554 hadn't come through yet. We started the work because we recognized it. And then what happened with SB 554 is that it legitimized that this was something that we should be working on.

So at the time-- Opening Days are in September-- SB 554, I think, happened almost immediately after that. And so it really did give us the legitimacy to continue doing the work that we wanted to. So this is the Ed Code that we use to justify how and why special admit is a local board decision at the community college.

And so we use this as part of our proposal so that we could say, look, this is, in fact, something that we get to do, we have the jurisdiction to do. And that was super helpful in our proposal obviously.

Jenée Crayne: Felisa, so we have a request in the chat from-- that, are the slides be-- could the slides be shared in the chat?

Felisa Vilaubi: Sure.

Janie Garcia: Yes, I can definitely do that.

Felisa Vilaubi: I just volunteered Janie to do that. Yes. [laughs] Sounds great.

Janie Garcia: You know me well enough to know I would be down.

Felisa Vilaubi: Right?

Janie Garcia: I just wanted to add, too, that this language is actually-- or excuse me, this Ed Code is actually cited within the SB 554 bill as well. And so that to us really signified, like Felisa was saying, the legitimacy of this. So I'll go ahead and switch slides and then drop that file in the chat.

Felisa Vilaubi: OK. So once we really had the Ed Code, we had the precedent, and we had the board on board, and we then had SB 554 came into place, it was really time for us to figure out how to physically implement this. One of the things that was really difficult for us in the beginning is when we were on the adult school side. But there's definitely a lost in translation moment that happens between the adult schools and community college. We just don't speak the same language often.

And so we were trying to figure out how we get it, put places, who needs to go, what shared governance is. And until we were on the community college side and we were speaking community college lingo, it definitely became harder for us to navigate that. So once all those pieces came into play, we really started the work.

Janie Garcia: Let me give you a break, Felisa, if you want.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah, go for it.

Janie Garcia: So we really wanted to highlight, in terms of this achievement, what has really helped in our consortium. And we've noticed that there are four primary work groups that have really, really been the greatest focus of the work that we've been doing. I'm actually going to pause for a second. I am not able to drop a file for our PowerPoint, but I am going to convert it into a link and drop it before the end. I promise.

So we found that student support was a huge workgroup focus for us. And this really is where we brought people from all institutions to make sure that we're talking about those wraparound services, and we're talking about the warm handoff and all those elements that really support adult school students, especially to such a big leap or transition into a scary world.

Felisa, I will always give her the credit of saying that most of our students, adult school and others, have trouble even getting past our community college parking lots. It can be such an intimidating experience. And so our student support group has always focused on what ways we can support a student into making as warm and as easy of a transition as possible.

And then, of course, data, right? We definitely have a lot of important work that we've had to do there to make sure that we're getting this buy-in and also keeping our work focused on the "why," that we're always knowing what the importance is of the transition itself but also what type of programs our students are interested in, what kind of jobs are going to be the most lucrative for them, and all of those things.

We actually even worked on a data dashboard, because I don't know if your community college folks are in here, but it wasn't as easy as going into Banner to get data on adult school students. And so our data work team has done a lot of wonderful work within all institutions to track the data of adult school transitions, either the ones that we don't know about but also the ones that we've been fostering.

Professional development is another consortium workgroup that we've been doing a lot of work in. And then another huge one is articulation and alignment. I would say that we split that group into CTE focus, as well as ESL focus, because for us, those are the biggest areas where we're trying to figure out how our adult schools and our community college curriculum align so that we can really inform the pathways and make that process more successful for students.

Another key element of our work groups is that we require representation from all five institutions. "Require" is a bit of a strong word. We'll take who we can get. But to give you an example, we have worked hard at making sure for student support, as an example, has college deans, faculty from both the adult school system and the college system, classified staff, especially at adult schools and community colleges.

Those are the people who really create the bonds with students and help students through the barriers that we're trying to make at least lighter on students. Department chairs-- I don't know, again, if there's any community college people in here. We probably should ask that in the chat. But the community college system is a hard system to navigate.

And so we really needed to make sure that the right people were at the table. And then, of course, counselors-- so Felisa's role, for example, on the community college but also the transition staff that are on the side of the adult schools.

Felisa Vilaubi: [inaudible] Can we take a real quick pause and have people put in the chat their role on their site, just so we can get a sense of who is in the room. We probably should have done that, like Janie said. And while you guys start to do that, I just want to say one of the things that made it really--

One of the things we did a lot of work in and getting that amount of people from both community colleges and the adult school sites in the room together was about making sure that we were defining like terms with people in the community college and the adult schools, right? There's a lot of misconception about who adult school students are. It's not just ESL. It's this whole big population. We've got CTE. We've got ESL. We've got ABE, ASE. And there's a whole language, right?

And so we really did spend a lot of time being in spaces where-- Janie and I especially were really good about squeezing into spaces where they had traditionally only invited high school partners. And we would show up as adult school partners as well and always be in the room-- and adult schools and adult schools and adult schools.

And so we've been broken records in ways that have allowed people to now understand they automatically include adult schools now in language, in our academic senates, in our budget and planning teams, at the community college side. And there was a lot of legwork that was put into that so that people understood who the adult school students were.

Janie Garcia: Yeah, it's perfectly fitting that we're right on the border of Halloween because there was even a memorable moment where I chased down the assessment director at De Anza College in a Bumblebee costume, because there's no holiday break for us in adult school. And that was actually when I was an adult school employee.

So you really got to do anything you can and take any moment you can. And you know what? He probably remembered me. So to be honest, I just completely forgot I was in a Halloween costume. [laughs]

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah. I mean, it took us a long time to be able to advocate for that language to just be part of the vernacular at community college. So if these things aren't happening already at your sites, just know it is a slow process. But you will get there.

This is definitely-- there was a lot of years of legwork. We started this in 2015. It's not like this happened overnight. OK, great. Let's go back, Jenée, to the presentation, please.

Janie Garcia: So let me make sure I'm still unmuted. So another thing was college buy-in. And Felisa really just gave us a nice introduction into that, in that-- and Felicia and I can speak to this as two people who have been in this process since the implementation stage of AB 86, to where we really acknowledge, for our consortium anyways, that the adult schools would really have to do a lot of work to get to the level of where-- especially just financially.

Where community colleges are like, OK, wait. Yes, we need to prioritize this. This may be a blip of money back then to what a community college has to shell out during the academic year. So we really acknowledge that, and we really took it head on as a consortium, especially on the adult school side. And the college buy-in has been so instrumental.

One of the greatest opportunities that has really shown improvement in our working together as institutions is having both new and existing community college positions that have added or created job descriptions that include focusing on adult school populations. And the best examples that we have of that are our counselors. And I'm going to have Felisa talk a little bit more about that role because that's the one that she actually holds on the De Anza College campus.

I hold the adult school coordinator position in Outreach. So I'm able to work with students who are transitioning and give them that specialized support that I know from working almost 10 years in the adult school. But I've also been able to support ESL and adult learner populations just in general, who really need the same kind of treatment.

I think we often say that specialized populations get this specialized treatment. But the truth is all students benefit from the warm handoff, from the transition, from taking the time to know more about AB 540 or know more about the wraparound services a student needs to be successful. All students are going to benefit from that.

And then also our CTE coordinator. CTE is a huge commonality between the adult schools and the community colleges. So we needed that buy-in to exist on the other side. And I'm going to turn it over to Felisa to please add more.

Felisa Vilaubi: So a couple of things about these positions. So Janie and I-- so Janie is the school coordinator through Outreach of Foothill and me as the counselor for adult school transitions-- we are both CAEP-funded. Our positions are 100% CAEP-funded. And that's important because what happened with those positions specifically is it came out directly of the work we were doing as a consortium.

We kept telling them they needed to have somebody at the community college that understood this population, that believed in this population, that understood what it took to be able to support adult schools and everything that makes them a really unique world that we obviously are passionate about and love. We've been are part of the adult school world, like Janie said, since before AB 86 days.

And so it was really awesome to be able to see them prioritize their CAEP funding in these ways to create these positions that allowed students to have a direct contact at the sites. Our CTE coordinator-- and this was actually a really awesome growth for us-- she's not CAEP-funded. But her job description intentionally started to include working with adult schools. And that was a transition from being like, OK, we're going to throw these CAEP-funded positions in to do this work. And then there was this extension of now creating--

So now in my program, in my language arts counseling department, we have four counselors. And of the four, two of us are CAEP-funded. And three of us have adult schools directly in our job description.

And that extension, I think, it goes back to this idea that Janie and I would do things like show up in Bumblebee costumes and make sure people knew that adult schools needed to be in this space as well. And that was important. And that just didn't... um a quick clarification about how we're funded on our sites.

Janie Garcia: And then do you want to talk a little bit about your counseling position, how that works, or no?

Felisa Vilaubi: So sure. So I mean, as a community college counselor, there was a lot of growing pains for me. I had only done alternative education. I'd only done adult schools. So just the sheer number of students was definitely a transition.

But it's nice because we work directly with the adult school transition. We call them counselors or advisors depending on the site. We have three different adult schools that we work with. And I work directly with them.

So if they have a student that's coming over whether it's for dual enrollment or otherwise, they'll help them make an appointment with me. They send me an email that says the student is coming over. I then can either-- when we were on site, would call them ahead of time and meet them at the parking lot, and walk them to my office, and show them how to do the parking.

And so my role is a little bit unique in terms of how community college positions for counseling normally go. I do a lot more outreach. We spend a lot of time at the adult schools in classrooms with students asking questions, just exposing them to community college and options whether it's CTE or an associate's or transfer.

And so there's a lot of my position that includes some outreach in it already. So I'm appreciative that they were able to understand this role needed to be unique, and that we needed to be able to create it to meet student needs.

And then some of the other things that have happened recently is, especially for De Anza, De Anza hasn't ever really had to think about making spaces that are as innovative as they have been. They've always had a really high enrollment.

And so with this adult school conversations, having adult schools come at the forefront of these conversations, we've now had our ESL departments update their course offerings and curriculum to make sure that adult school students are being benefited by that. And that was a big piece of it.

And then in our student support work group is actually, because we had all these people that were in the room, we actually said, OK, how do we create-- what do we want this special admit to say? How do we get this to be something that is working for students? And then what do we do with it from that point forward? So it actually came out of the work directly with the people that had the buy-in. Anything to add, Janie?

Janie Garcia: No, I don't think so. I'm still trying to figure out this PDF link. [laughs] Sorry. I'm multi-tasking over here, probably not very well. So that brings us to the proposal.

Really, like we've alluded to already is we knew that we had to navigate the community college system, especially within shared governance well. So the steps that we really had to do in order to get to this point of board approval is, first, draft the proposal. That was a big factor in giving us an opportunity to say, why this is so important?

Thankfully, as you notice here on the important note, we had already had significant board buy-in from 2019 when we did a PD presentation. And as we said, we had Peter Landsberger, who is like, don't wait till June. Let's do this right away. So that was a huge piece in making this as seamless as possible. But we really did want to make sure that we did our due diligence of providing the data, providing the precedents, and really showing our college in this proposal that there was a need for this.

We had to present with shared governance. So we did need academic senate approval in order to get to the board. And then, of course, we had to become part of the board agenda to do an amendment to the board policy. Anything you want to add? I know that's probably an oversimplification, Felisa, who was on the ground doing a lot of this work.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah. I mean, we-- so we started at De Anza doing this. And we had a couple of deans on campus that were our champions for this. And so we have our dean of CTE and then my dean in language arts that just said, yeah, what do you need? What do you need to be able to get this done and submitted?

And so our CTE coordinator was really instrumental in helping me think through the language, what it looked like. And we just started trying to present in every shared governance space that we possibly could so we could get it up to the board. And it was really helpful.

And one of the things that happened that was actually very cool is that Foothill-De Anza is a district, but we are very separate schools. We don't have very many policies that happen that are joint. And when we submitted this proposal, we actually submitted it as an FHDA proposal and not just a De Anza proposal. And it was definitely a big deal for us to be able to have this as a consortium-wide proposal and not just having it live in one of the schools specifically.

Janie Garcia: So I will give you a second to read this or a minute.

Felisa Vilaubi: Hopefully, this-- the SB 554 language. But this is now our board policy.

Janie Garcia: Exactly. This was the amendment added to our pre-existing dual enrollment board policy.

Felisa Vilaubi: And so the way that our district chose to read this and translate this is it's any student in an adult education program administered by a school district, period. Or any non-credit program administered by a community college district.

So that is pursuing a high school diploma or high school equivalency because SB 554 expands it to say for students that are working in a high school diploma or a high school equivalency can be considered dual-enrolled students. We wanted to really be clear that we wanted this to be something for students in the adult education programs.

Janie Garcia: I'm just going to pause for a moment, ask if there's any questions. OK. So, yeah, you can access our board document. And I can find the link. But this is it in its entirety. So we don't have the actual proposal, because it was just too much in way to college-specific. But this is the amended language within our board policy.

But, yes, I could provide a link. I'll probably have to find it. [laughs] I think the BoardDocs that we use isn't as linkable as we would like. [laughs]

Felisa Vilaubi: I'm wondering if we could show the board policy, though?

Janie Garcia: Yeah, I can look for it. I'm almost done with this PDF link. Let's see here.

Audience: I actually, I have a quick question. If I could?

Janie Garcia: Yeah, please.

Audience: Hi, there. I'm Chris Carr. I'm a transition specialist with East Region Adult Education. And we actually have an SB 554 program as well down in San Diego. And one of the things that, I guess, wondering about is you mentioned a lot of-- you were able to add, I guess, language to curriculum or job descriptions that really emphasized adult ed students and support for those.

Do you offer specific classes like counseling classes or things for these students that can address some of those more specific things perhaps for adult ed students? Or is it just kind of-- how is that woven in, I guess, to the curriculum?

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah, so there's a couple of pieces of it. One is our consortium's relatively small. We have three adult schools and just the two community colleges. And while we are grateful for that, often, one of the things that does happen is we do have a hard time getting a full class set up of adult school students to be saved for them with the restrictions of CCAPs in community college.

What we have done to work around that is-- and, again, these are positions that came out of the work with the consortium-- is to be able to take those positions that we have and do as much as we can on the adult school side. So some of our adult schools actually have transitions classes. And so we can go in, and we bring in--

We have another CTE counselor at De Anza. She'll come in and do things like a career interest inventory. We go over majors. We talk about CTE pathways. We do a lot of the work on the adult school side as much as we can to be able to avoid some of that restrictions that happen at the community college side.

We are working on a specific-- if we can get enough students to be able to justify a counseling five class that I would be able to teach for them, we could do that. We have the ability to do that. It's just been about the number of students that we can do.

And in all fairness, it seems to work out really well for us to have the flexibility of doing these things and being on the site as the community college folks on the adult school sites because we get to just be really flexible with what it looks like. So that's how we've navigated that piece of it.

Yeah. I mean, we definitely are working. We just had conversations even this week about, if we were going to try to do a class, what class would it be, how do we do that. We're not done. This work is not done. We would love for that to be something that is our next step to be able to say, yep, here's this adult school class that we're doing.

We have done in the past where we had a regular GE class taught at the adult school site. And we realized that it just wasn't necessarily set up to support students as best as we could. So we had to take it back and re-evaluate what that looks like.

Audience: Sure.

Felisa Vilaubi: So we are-- this is a work in progress for sure. Go ahead, Janie.

Janie Garcia: Yeah, I was just going to add to that that the pandemic has definitely, for most of us, if not all of us, threw a wrench in things. And so I will say that the benefit of this side of the work because we've seen local colleges in our area as well. I've been talking to Chaffey and and West Valley about the different implementations they're doing and non-credit classes and all these things that they're trying. And I'm learning from them. And it's so great. I feel like this is why I give so I can take.

But one of the things that helped with us-- and this was the same to be said for high school-- is during the pandemic, these students were able to just take a one-off class. And so because we were offering this to more programs, those students were able to just, on their own, take an extra class if they're in ESL or take an extra class if they're in CTE. For example, medical terminology, things like that we have a lot of crossover. So having the special admit option alone was really helpful.

And one of the things that our district-- or excuse me-- our consortium has done really well together-- and we'll get into kind of the process as well-- is that we don't limit our students.

Now, you might find-- and we recommend as adult school partners, and even community college partners-- when you go into your community college districts within your consortium, when you go into their dual enrollment parameters, that you really won't be vocal about how that works or doesn't work for adult school students, because we were lucky in that both of our colleges don't really put a lot of restraint on what students can take, because we didn't want to pigeonhole, for example, ESL students into taking ESL classes. We know-- huh?

Felisa Vilaubi: So, yeah, I mean, I think we're going to get to this, but we--

Janie Garcia: OK.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah. Our special admit process for the high schools does, in fact, have classes that are restricted. So students, there are some classes that they can't take if they're a high school student. When we were intentional about implementing what that looks like on the community college side for the adult school special admits, we wanted to be intentional about not having that.

So what we did to implement it was we said, OK, we're going to start with CAEP-funded programs. It was a way for us to manage who was coming in, how we were supporting them. The kind of spirit of all of this was to support students in our CAEP-funded programs anyway.

So we internally said, OK, CAEP-funded programs can be adult school special admits. And we lifted all of the restrictions for courses that students could take. And that is one of the only differences between our high school special admit and dual enrollment process and our adult school process. The only other one is that we took off the parent signature. And we were intentional about that piece. But that was a big one.

Janie Garcia: Like you said, we have more presentations.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah. So we've got some questions. So should we try to see if we can--

Janie Garcia: Yeah, I wanted to acknowledge--

Audience: Yeah, thank you so much.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah.

Janie Garcia: --both of them. So let's just acknowledge the order. Wendy, I would say, as of right now in the work that we've accomplished, our Ed Code has actually helped us. As we've cited before, California Ed Code really did put it in our districts hands to be able to expand this dual enrollment opportunity.

And that probably can hinder folks as well. That might be something that you might battle against a little in terms of district. And so that's why we really try to give you strategies as well that got us to that point.

And then for Brett's question, excellent question-- "are these one-off classes that students take through dual enrollment, especially adult school students, applied to their high school diploma requirements?" Absolutely. It will obviously go by the high school districts that houses that adult schools requirements.

But, yes, we have seen students simultaneously take college credit classes that are going to give them a leg-up in their college career but also is going back into their high school studies or even helping them prepare for GED studies. So we see students use those in that way as well.

And so quickly, because I did bring it up-- and I was right. I cannot link it to you guys. That's just how this thing works. But here's our board policy. Can you see that where it says at the top Board Policy, Chapter 5?

Felisa Vilaubi: Yes.

Janie Garcia: OK, great. So this is just our searchable BoardDocs that we use. This policy-- or excuse me-- yeah, policy amendment exists within admissions and concurrent enrollment. So like I said earlier, this was already board policy that our district had for providing concurrent enrollment, which is another term that gets often swapped for dual enrollment.

And the portion-- let me see if I can make it a little bigger for y'all because I know this is some small writing-- the portion that we referred to earlier-- and it's funny because it's literally a sentence. A lot of work to get this sentence, but it's an amazing sentence. And that's the portion that we had on the slides for you just a moment ago. So it really looks simple. But as we've described, there's a lot of work that goes into it. OK.

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah, Janie, we can copy and paste that link and put it in.

Janie Garcia: I tried. I copied and pasted it for myself to see if-- and this is what came up. So I'll copy and paste this, but you're still going to have to go in here to BP 5100, I think it is, or 5010. So you have to still go-- oh, no. That's AP. Where's BP 5010?

Yeah, so I'll do that. But this is the link you come to. And so you're going to have to click on it yourself. So it's BP 5010, and here's that link. Yeah, I tried it out for you, guys. Sorry. That's the best, I think, BoardDocs is going to be able to do.

Felisa Vilaubi: Then we have a question about, "is there a slide with the exact definition of special part-time student with an outline of the enrollment process?" I don't know that we have one in this presentation. I mean, like I mentioned before, we definitely still have work to do.

So if you go on to our websites, that process is laid out really well for our high school students. It is not available yet on our websites for the adult school students. There are still some battles for us to fight. But they parallel in terms of the processes. So we can probably continue on with our presentation.

Janie Garcia: Yeah, that actually is a great lead into our next slides. And that's really the transition process to community college and delineating all of that. So Felisa had mentioned earlier that another way that this works is something, A, that we're so proud of but also why it's pretty unprecedented for our district is we had a lot of collaboration.

And I give credit to Felisa and myself. I really do because we're both not too scared to be pushy. And so we were like, hey, we need to be at the table. We just want to help. We just want to collaborate. But we have the adult school experience. We want to be able to help you guys out on this. And that was instrumental in bringing our deans together.

So from each college, our deans of admissions and records came together to make sure we knew what the process was from application to Banner to coding to make sure students aren't charged, all of that. And so working together and making it one process really helped.

We were also able to address-- we, being Felisa and myself-- we're able to address the community college questions. What were the concerns? For example, we operate on apportionment, and we operate on funding from student enrollment and student tuition. And as a community college, we wanted to make sure we're setting parameters.

At what point are we just going to keep accepting students in the adult school dual enrollment and giving them 11 units or less at a time of free money-- or excuse me, free college? And the reason I didn't mind that concern is because one of the things that we've done in the past as a K through 12 system is we have taken students who often represent the population we see in adult school. And we've given them classes that are not meaningful or helpful for their future.

And so we also agreed with that in saying, yes, we need to be careful about the academic plan that we're providing for students. We want them to take as many classes as they can for free because it's an amazing barrier crusher for most students. But we also want to make sure that we're not doing them a disservice. As adults, we're not getting any younger, right?

And we want to make sure that students are set up and on a track that our educational expertise can foster. And so that is just an example of one of the community college questions or concerns that we were able to address and support from an adult school lens, which is another reason having adult school representation, or people with adult school experience, is so important to have them at the table.

So we did end up creating a special admit form. We were, at the time that this was happening, in the process of or we're already just past the process of making our high school dual enrollment admit forms electronic because so much had changed with the pandemic. It really pushed us to use a lot of virtual document-type of strategies. And so we decided because we knew our population was so small that we would start with a fillable PDF. And we'll share that with you in a moment.

Again, we agreed upon the process of making sure we know from application to class enrollment what that was going to look like, which included this form, which included verification. Who verifies if a student from an adult school in California outside of our consortium is coming? And we'll talk more about that in just a moment.

And then, of course, we wanted to make sure that the professional development and training was supportive for our adult school transition staff as well. We wanted to make sure they knew which steps to walk through for the students and which things to highlight, which we'll talk about more when we look at the form.

[interposing voices]

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah, so that's a really important point. Not only does our dual enrollment policy include all CAEP-funded programs but it's any school from any adult school. We are not having students coming in just from our consortium. We've expanded to other consortiums in terms of this is anybody at an adult school that is in a CAEP-funded program.

And that was actually really important to us. Obviously, we're working on-- starting with working out all of the kinks that happen with our consortium. But students from any adult school can, in fact, come and be a dual enrolled student with us.

Janie Garcia: Excellent. So I'm just checking the chat. Thanks again, Rachel. Appreciate it. If anything in education, we know it takes a village. So I appreciate your help.

So let's look at our special admit form. I don't know why I'm making myself say this. But it's not the most amazing thing form in the world, but it was such a beautiful start. And it definitely, as we grow our program, will get improved. Let's see here.

We do have a question in the chat. No worries, Rebecca. We talk fast, and then we got a lot of information to give you. So let's see here. "Would all students enrolled in adult ed be a candidate for dual-enrolled--

Felisa Vilaubi: Yeah, so it's just CAEP-funded program. So there's the seven CAEP-funded-- we just looked this up yesterday, too-- seven CAEP-funded programs that exist in the adult school world. So it includes adults with disabilities, CTE, ESL, ASC, so high school diploma and a high school equivalency. But it's any of those seven programs. Jenée, I can't think of the other ones are we just did this the other day, too.

Janie Garcia: Parent ed, you said adults with disabilities.

Felisa Vilaubi: Mm-hmm.

Janie Garcia: Oh, there was one that we didn't count at all. We had forgotten. Darn it. My brain is not-- let's see. One, two-- I'm typing them in the chat. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Oh, the last one. There was one that we were like, oh, we didn't think about that. OK, I'm going to put six in the chat that--

[interposing voices]

Janie Garcia: --I've successfully gotten. [laughs] Yeah, the seventh one, we didn't really have as like--

Felisa Vilaubi: In our consumption, we don't have a lot.

Janie Garcia: Part-time or full-time or something like that or something special CTE?

[interposing voices]

Felisa Vilaubi: Keep going. You want to show the form. I'll look it up.

Janie Garcia: Yeah, thank you. So let's see here. Yes, our ESL students would. So basically, anything that's either completely or partially CAEP-funded is what we ended up deciding on as a district.

So just to repeat in case anybody else missed it as well, our board language now, our board policy language does say essentially any adult school student. But we wanted to focus on adult school students who are coming out of CAEP-funded programs because that's who we really see this work being the highest need for. Students who are taking a one-off class at the adult school don't necessarily have that same need.

Let's see here. Yeah, ESL counts. Yes. So, again, Anne, thank you for putting up this clarification. Let me stop sharing so I can go back real quick. See, this is what we say about questions, please, because we can talk about this for years. We want to make sure you guys are walking out of this with the information you need.

So SB 554 does state that dual enrollment automatically, for community college, should be given to students from the adult education system that are in high school diploma or GED programs. But also, within SB 554 language is this reference to Ed Code. This is California Education Code that states, the governing board of a community college district is the determining factor of who a special admit is.

So even though the state is strongly requiring community colleges to acknowledge adult school students for dual enrollment who are in high school diploma and GED programs, it is up to a district if they would like to extend that to anyone else, like any kind of special admit. And what we ended up really going to battle for-- and let me-- oops. That's not what I want to do. Sorry if I'm going to give you a little bit of vertigo here.

But then what we ended up doing is working the community college system, because this was a district community college decision, to add this amendment to our current board policy for dual enrollment. And that is that, "any student in an adult education program administered by a school district or non-credit program administered by a community college district that is pursuing a high school diploma or high school equivalency certificate," and what have you.