(DESCRIPTION)
Voice of Zoom Tech Host Melinda Holt on black screen.

(SPEECH)
And people are allowed to come in. Here's hoping the vFairs is working. Come on people.

(DESCRIPTION)
Justin Gorence with an illustrated "Lunch with LARAEC " background.

(SPEECH)
Michele, you're going to put the Mentimeter slide up or no? What are we going to do?

(DESCRIPTION)
Michele Stiehl with a "Lunch with LARAEC background."

(SPEECH)
I think that if we're going to do the Mentimeter poll, we should just put it in the chat box, yeah.

OK. Let's just put it up.

Because Keith is going to present like--

Yeah. I don't want to distract from him. So it's menti.com, right?

Menti.com.

OK. I'm muting myself now.

It's OK.

Hey, Keith.

Nobody's here. I'm trying to figure out why.

Yeah, but you're recording. Melinda, are you going to chop the video so they don't have this part on there?

No.

[LAUGHS]

We have attendees. Awesome.

We have attendees. We have four people. All right. Come on in, everybody. My name is Melinda Holt and I am with Outreach and Technical Assistance Network, and I'm providing support for this webinar. We are here to listen to Michele Stiehl, Justin Gorence, and Keith-- oh, I'm going to screw up his last name-- Thode. He'll tell you, OK? So come on in and have a seat. There's lots of room up front. Everybody, crowd towards the front, lots of open seats here.

I am going to go ahead and share my screen. We're going to do the housekeeping right from the get-go so you all know what to do and don't do.

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide deck: Webinar Tips.

(SPEECH)
All right. Here we go. So before we begin-- let me move that over a little bit-- we are recording this webinar. This webinar will be recorded and it will appear on the vFairs platforms, so you will all be able to see the video after the fact. But it's going to take a couple of days, so please be patient with us.

The webinar has to render, and then we have to download, and then we have to upload, and then we got to make sure everything is working, and blah, blah, blah. So give us two to three business days, please. Your audio, you control it. That's one of the few things you control here, your audio. So turn up your sound, or turn it down if things sound too soft or too loud. Just turn up your own volume controls on your computer or tablet, or whatever you're watching this with.

You also have some options-- down at the bottom of your screen, you'll see an Audio Settings with a little carrot, which if you click on that, it will give you the options to choose your output-- which would be a headset, internal speakers, something to that effect, OK? So you control your own audio. There's a couple more buttons down there. If you see a Raise Hand button, don't click it. We're not going to use that, but we will use the chat. The chat will be used.

You'll listen to the presenters. And if they ask you to chat something or to say yes or no or something really simple like that, use the chat to do that. Please make sure that you have All Panelists and Everyone selected, otherwise only the panelists will see what you're chatting. So make sure your questions or answers go to All Panelists and Everyone. The Q&A will be used. So if you have questions related to the presentation, please put them in the Q&A.

General chit-chat should go in the chat, and then questions related to the presentation go in the Q&A. View Options. This is something else you can control. Up at the top of your screen, you should see something to the effect of View Options. It's right next to the green bar. You can Fit to Window or make it bigger. So if you can't see something, change the aspect ratio, make it 150%. Or you can also exit full screen so you kind of work off to the side while you're listening to the presentation.

There will be an evaluation. Hopefully it opens up to the evaluation today, to where you can't edit it. So please hit the Continue button for the evaluation. It should open to where you're filling it out, not edit mode. If you are in edit mode, apologies. Please just hit the eyeball up at the top of the screen-- that's the Preview button-- and then you'll be able to fill in the evaluation. We hope you're all having a great summit and that you continue to.

(DESCRIPTION)
CAEP Summit 2020 - C.A.E.P. Summit 2020 dot v fairs dot com.

(SPEECH)
And I'm going to hand it off to-- I believe-- Michele Stiehl. I'm going to stop sharing, and you all have a great session.

(DESCRIPTION)
Justin Gorence.

(SPEECH)
Good morning, everyone. I'm just going to take a moment. Keith is being gracious enough just to give us a quick moment to put a plug-in for our menti.com poll that we're going to be doing on funding formulas. So if you'll take a quick moment and look at the chat, you will see the website menti.com code number to join our poll, just to give your opinion about funding formula priorities. We'd really, really appreciate it. We're looking forward to seeing everybody in just a few minutes. But Keith has some really important information to share and we're really excited to hear it.

So I'm going to mute myself, Keith, so you can get started.

(DESCRIPTION)
Title slide, AdvanceNet Labs. Work Ready Mobile Overview for CAEP - Keith R. Thode, C.E.O. and Chief Scientist, AdvanceNet Labs.

(SPEECH)
And Keith, you are muted.

Yes. Good morning, everybody. Can you hear me OK?

Yes.

And can you see my screen?

Absolutely.

Two for two. I'm Keith Thode. I'm the CEO and Chief Scientist at AdvancedNet Labs. We're going to talk about one of the programs that we have, specifically for adult ed. And with the financial folks here, we have a tech grant opportunity that I want to share with the finance folks here. So I will do this for a few minutes, then we'll get into your main show for the day. Let's see.

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide, AdvanceNet Products and Clients - Government, schools and community colleges, corporate and banks, NGO's. Screenshots of education materials, a mobile app, and an interactive game.

(SPEECH)
[AUDIO OUT]. So about AdvancedNet, very quickly. We are a Tech For Good organization. All the work we do is in the Tech For Good space, most of that is in the education space, and most of that is in the adult learning space.

We are very passionate about adult learning-- as you are-- and we just love getting the chance to work with adult ed professionals-- just always such passionate people with such deep skills caring for folks and really making a difference in people's lives.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile - An image of graduates throwing up their caps. Keith contact: K.T.h.o.d.e. at AdvanceNet dot com, Work Ready Mobile dot com, cell: 630-235-3542.

(SPEECH)
Most of our work is in education-type technologies. We actually do our own virtual conferencing, some in the adult ed space. Louisiana's kicking off at the end of the week. And so if you want to hear-- if you just can't get enough virtual adult ed conferences, you could join the Louisiana conference going into the end of the week and into November.

We really love doing our virtual conference type work. But today, we're here to talk about WorkReady Mobile.

(DESCRIPTION)
Who We Are.

(SPEECH)
WorkReady Mobile is an application we've built-- a mobile app-- and some background software that we've built specifically for the adult basic ed space, or the adult education and literacy space. Its goals are to help you retain your students, help them stick with the program, and then help you capture their gains. So we kind of keep that virtuous cycle going of helping more people.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile - What if retaining students, achieving more measurable gains, and tracking completions were easy? Benefits of the program and screenshots of the app.

(SPEECH)
We built it, originally, with Dallas County Community College District, or Dallas College, and then now we have programs using it from-- as of last week-- from Alaska to Florida, so all over the country using this program. The WorkReady Mobile becomes your own mobile app. So when the students download the app, it's got your branding, your messaging, all of that-- and gives you a secure place for you to communicate with your students.

So your teacher-- both from the teachers and from the administration standpoint, you can communicate with your students in a secure platform where you're not off sharing phone numbers and things like that, and it's all monitorable. Share documents. This communication engine really keeps you in contact with your students. And then there are some other functions that relate to that, like calendaring-- like all your class calendar, class meetings, things like that, meetings with your-- whether it's your registration folks, or with your navigators or counselors, anybody. That's all tracked.

Personalized goal setting. So those of you that do the goal setting exercise, used to doing that on paper and things like that, now it's all in the app and available to you on your computer. And with the power of technology then, we can know all this stuff about individual students or about students' class meeting times, about their individual appointments with the counselor, even about their personal goals and their steps. Well then through automation, we do a lot of automated reminders, back to communicating with these students about their individual goals and plans and tests they plan to sit for.

All that work that normally doesn't-- a lot of your team's positions are so overwhelmed keeping up with each student and trying to communicate with each one and their individual plans too. It's just too much to ask. Well now, this happens, and we help retain those students, capture their gains and help them both be more successful in life and for you to have the data you need to then have more money for your programs.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile Roles - Student. Mobile screenshots of a menu pane, direct messages, and career goal section.

(SPEECH)
We're very passionate about that. Not to get too deep into the features, but there's a student view, and then there's teacher views and administration views.

We talked about it as the mobile app, but there's also a test desktop version for each person using it. So if you're thinking about a student who only has a flip phone or no phone, they can use that. While some of the teacher work, you'll prefer to do on the computer-- because you can do your individual scheduling, it's got attendance, you can then do appointment scheduling with your teachers right from the app, and it only picks the times that teachers want to have available or their folks doing registration. And it's available in multiple languages.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile Roles - Teachers. Desktop screenshots from an American History class.

(SPEECH)
Teachers, again, have the web and app versions of the technology. They can manage all of their class communications-- shared documents-- again, a lot of the work of reminding students, getting them to show up to class, all gets taken care of for you. Attendance you can do or the students can do, or you can do it in combo. Again, it integrates with your personal calendar, so you just set up the office hours that you want to receive, potentially receive times to meet with students, and the students will be able to just pick from those.

If right now was a normal time that you'd be willing to have meetings with students, but today you're at the conference, as long as you blocked off your personal calendar, that time won't show up for the student. Again, it's sort of a set it and forget it, until you get your reminder to show up for the meeting with the students too. So everybody gets reminded. It's got a little bit of a case management function as well. Most of our students we're dealing with are vulnerable and have a lot of challenges.

So you can have individualized personal notes, or notes that you would want to share with the other faculty on each student.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile Roles - School Admin. Desktop screenshots of a class list and messages.

(SPEECH)
And then all of the reporting you use. Teachers start to get reporting. The administration-- there's several levels of administration, depending on how large your program is. If you're one of these-- there's a consortia, and then want to have-- individual programs can have their own version of the app. And then you, overall, can have a different administration view.

So there's some different levels there with more reporting, messaging out to your students. Again, during the time of COVID, a lot of these programs are using it for the other social services that are coming up that are popping up that students need-- feeding programs, job opportunities. There is a standard job board, but then there's this other messaging you can do. Some of our programs are in the southeast and with these hurricanes that come through-- hey, campus is closed today, or the different changes that are happening.

All of that happens within the app. And again, a secure place for you to communicate with your students.

(DESCRIPTION)
Work Ready Mobile Roles - Organizational Admin. Desktop screenshots of dashboard and messages.

(SPEECH)
There's more of that reporting to go into your state compliance and your other grant compliance systems. It's nice dashboarding, so you can see how things are going. And in each level, you can communicate individually with students, leverage the job board. It provides this one home base for your students. So right now, in this time of-- especially when so many students have had to go remote and programs are going remote, and now you have all these different online resources for your students.

And let's face it, a lot of times our students weren't great with all of these things, to keep track of in the first place. Well now you just send them to the app. They can find everything through the app. Just go to the app. So you don't have to keep trying to have them keep track of all these different tools and websites and things like that. And then even for some programs, like essential education, we have what's called Single Sign-On. So they just click on the button in the app, and all of a sudden they're just logged into essential ed, if you use that one.

We bring along some other partners who have some free resources that have been optimized for personality-based employment and hiring, some other things through the app.

(DESCRIPTION)
Brief Demonstration.

(SPEECH)
Just to give you-- I know it's a bit of information all at once, but we're just trying to take you on a quick tour. I won't give you the whole demo, but you can see some of it here. It becomes your own mobile app, and students kind of get-- they see where their messages are from each of their classes.

(DESCRIPTION)
A student logs in, checks their class list, searches by teacher name, enters a class code to enter an H.S.E. class, and checks messages and announcements.

(SPEECH)
They can exchange information back and forth with their teacher. Their teacher can communicate to the students.

It can be more than one class. Or recruiting, you can have that as a class. We don't charge for alumnis, so your alumni could be in a group. Here, you could see a student messaging-- or a teacher messaging with students, the students replying back. They can have one-on-one private conversations with the teachers. They can share files and homework and things like that. And keep track-- so again, if the student misses class, here's a list of all the classes right now for a given student. And then you saw there, in the back there, there was-- if it was an online class, it also lets you have the Zoom link right there, right?

Again, students not forgetting to show up to virtual class when the kids are driving them crazy and everything else that's going on in their lives.

(DESCRIPTION)
A picture of a young man laying in a hammock as a notification pops up on a cell phone screen.

(SPEECH)
Here you can see a student, and all of a sudden they got a reminder on their phone to show up to class, right? And there's the link, and they just jump right in. Anything we can do to help students just do the right next thing and keep showing up to class. You can see a bit about the attendance and things like that. And again, if they're going to miss class, find that out early. Get them the resources they need to keep them moving forward.

(DESCRIPTION)
A screenshot of admin messages.

(SPEECH)
There's a lot of other features. There's the Spanish. A bit about the infrastructure, it's not tied to a student's phone number, like most apps. Most of the students we deal with and our work at advancement overall are folks that are in poverty and struggle with poverty. So we know to make apps that aren't tied to a given phone number. So if they're on a prepaid cell phone plan and it changes, or maybe they don't have a data plan at all and they're just using their smartphone while they're on the free Wi-Fi at the McDonald's, this can handle all of those situations. It's built for that.

And of course, they can use-- if they have just a flip phone, well they'll get just text messages. And then they can go on the computer and do the rest. So it's very flexible around all of that that-- those type of situations. And it's built for-- you don't have to have the greatest cell phone or the most robust data plan and things like that because we know of the challenges our students are working with. It will translate-- it has a Spanish translation version of the app, as well as, there's some translation within the messaging where they can just hit the button and it'll translate the message to the home language of their phone.

(DESCRIPTION)
Returns to slides. Get started - Email for slides and other info - Keith underscore Thode at AdvanceNet Labs dot org.

(SPEECH)
We're very flexible in that, meeting students where they're at and really making it easy for teachers, really taking a lot of the administration and communication burden off of them, and really helping them be as effective as possible with their students and everybody in a secure, protected communication environment. I don't want to overstay my welcome, so I'll just point out that if you reach out to us, right now we have some technology grants available.

So a lot of you do-- are responsible for some of the financial pieces here. And really, this application-- among the other things-- the passion that drives us is student success, but it will help you have more gains, more attendance, and more things that you can have more funding for your programs as well. So it's kind of a virtual goodness piece and we can start off with some technology grants to really adopt the program, help it go well, changing lives.

And then by the time you're chipping in towards it, it'll already be also a net positive for you from a financial standpoint. So we'd love to talk more. Our information is here. And while we still have those tech grants, definitely have your folks reach out to us to take advantage of that. And with that, I want to thank you for your time and the attention today. Have a wonderful conference.

Thank you so much, Keith. Appreciate it. Well good morning, everybody. I am excited to see you this morning. Thank you for coming. There is Michele Stiehl, my partner.

(DESCRIPTION)
Quick Poll: Menti dot com, code: 43 39 72 8 - Funding Formula 1. An illustrated race car on a curvy road.

(SPEECH)
So a couple of things real quick. One is, if you happen to check the chat-- if you will-- there is a link to menti.com. We're doing a poll. So if you will go ahead and check in on that and weigh in on your opinion on priority areas for funding formulas. I know at 8:30 in the morning, that's what everybody is thinking about-- funding formulas.

So we'd be excited to get your input on that. Thank you so much. The other thing is, I wanted to just welcome you. Thank you for coming. Again, my name is Justin Gorence. This is Michele Stiehl. In case you wandered in here and we're wondering what this is all about-- like, hey what is this? I see a race car. What the heck are you guys talking about? Well what we're talking about this morning is funding formulas. And just to give you a little background, just to make sure you're in the right place.

We began the process a few years ago of how funding was allocated with our consortium, and took a look around and decided what was out there, what people were doing with funding, how we could look at the structure of funding, and get some input on what people were doing outside of the consortium, and get an idea of what things we need to consider when we were putting a funding formula together. So we did a lot of research. We did some simulations. We talked to a lot of people. We put a bunch of different components together. We ran the numbers.

And we really took a look at how the funding formulas impacted each of our member districts. It was a long process, took a long time to put everything together. If you are here looking for answers, looking for that magic formula, the answer to all your questions-- Michele, will they find their answer here in this presentation today?

There are no definitive answers today. What we have, though, is we will share with you everything we went through to create our funding formula, the considerations, the conversation that we had within our consortia. And then we'll share with you what we finally decided on too-- what we're going to be using in Los Angeles.

Cool. And Michele, are there any handouts associated with this presentation today?

There indeed are handouts. So if you went through the CAEP portal, there was a place where you can get to our handout. We didn't have our handouts ready right at that time. So there's a sheet there, and if you click the link, it'll take you to our handouts. And we have two things for you. We have a research document that has everything that we're going to talk about and then some in it, all in writing. And then we also have a copy of our spreadsheets that we used for working out our funding formula.

So they're the live spreadsheets that you can manipulate and plug in numbers to.

Awesome. Hey, Michele. Also, I wanted to ask everybody-- it's kind of a limitation for us. I know, Michele, when we present, we love to see the people that we're working with, that we're presenting to, so we can talk to you. It's a little bit limited here, but if you don't mind, can you go ahead and throw in the chat your name and where you're from and maybe how you work in the consortium-- whether you're an instructor, or an administrator, or a consortium level personnel. We'd love to get an idea of who's in the presentation today. That really helps us out. Thanks guys.

So I got my first one. Melinda Holt is here. Thanks guys, appreciate it.

(DESCRIPTION)
Lunch with LARAEC - L.A.R.A.E.C. dot org.

(SPEECH)
And while you're doing that, we are going to give a shameless plug for something [AUDIO OUT] consortia. And one of the things that we loved this year with LARAEC is that we have an annual conference. And typically, we have it reserved for people within LARAEC. But because it's online now, and because we're in this environment, we're able to open it up to everybody across the state of California. And we were super excited to have about 200 people from outside of LARAEC join us for our conference that we had in September.

And then as an outgrowth from our conference, we decided to keep the magic going with doing [AUDIO OUT] And so we're doing Lunch with LARAEC every Thursday from 12:30 to 1:30, and we have all sorts of general interest sessions. Anybody is welcome to join. If you go to LARAEC.org, you can register and you can see the list of topics that we have coming up. Our past sessions, we've done three now. We had a fabulous one on social media. If you're interested in that, you can check out our recording.

We also just released our new ESL revised curriculum. The links to all the curriculum are on our website. And then we had a great presentation by our community colleges on SB68 and how it impacts some of our students, so you can check that out. And then coming up, we have skills for teaching online. We have some sessions coming up on collaboration between teachers and counselors in a remote school environment. And then January is going to be our ESL engagement and persistence months.

We'll have a whole host of speakers throughout January that deal specifically with dealing with low-level English language learners and how do we keep them engaged in coming to class. That was our shameless plug.

Awesome. Shameless, but important plug. Engagement and persistence, important. Quick shout out. I see our friends, Thatcher and Ryan, are on this presentation call. We appreciate it. They were very, very helpful and supportive of us as we were going out and doing governance research and having those conversations to put this presentation together. So thanks guys for coming. We really, really appreciate it. Thanks for everybody who put their name in the chat, we really appreciate it.

I love there's a consortium that's about students. That's awesome. The name is what's important. Very good. All right. Thanks, guys. So let's get started.

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide, Why a formula?

(SPEECH)
So Michele, a funding formula wouldn't seem to be the first thing that people would think of. A lot of times it's a difficult conversation because some people see it as a zero sum game, like hey, if you win, I lose-- can be contentious, can be difficult. So what happened in LARAEC. Why did we take this on as something that would be a priority for us? Why a formula, Michele?

Well originally, when the funding first came to our consortia-- the original allocation out to all the different members. We have five members. So we have four K-12 districts, and then LA Community College District, which is 9 colleges. But in the early days, it was a conversation. It was a negotiation between the five-member districts on how much would be allocated to each one. And then since that time, we've kept that same distribution.

So as new money has come in, it's just been distributed evenly based on the percentage-- so straight up, so all these years. But a couple of years ago, we started looking at those numbers and started looking at enrollment and the sizes of programs. And what we noticed is that there was kind of an imbalance, that we had some districts that are-- if you look at how many students they get in their allocation, they were getting like $1,500 per student, and others were getting more like $3,000 per student.

So the conversation came up called, hey, we need to look at putting that a little bit more in balance. There was lots of research that was happening all at this time a couple of years ago. And lots of things out there are just looking for equitable student funding formulas. And so that was definitely something that our board was interested in and charged Justin and I with, hey, go out and do some research. Tell us what's happening out there in the field. How are people deciding how the money gets spent, and what are some different strategies for allocating those funds if we wanted to do it in a little more equitable way?

So Justin and I set off into the sunset looking for how we can best distribute this money.

(DESCRIPTION)
Research - Four phases.

(SPEECH)
Yeah. And it was an epic journey at times that we thought we might not get through. So some of the things that we did were, we started with our own consortium. We took time to interview all of the board members, take a look at what they were doing, what their ideas were, what-- philosophically-- their thoughts were on funding formulas. With LARAEC, we have a great group called the Point People that are the go-betweens. They're charged with implementation of what happens at the consortium level.

We got their input as well, to get an idea of those thoughts and those ideas. We also did a lot of research online to find out what was going on, what research was out there, what information was available. And this is why I teach English, I can talk. So we found out what was out there. We looked at the LAO report, measuring our success, visions for success, AEBG reports, class prosperity through partnerships. So we looked at a lot of different areas and reports to get some ideas, to push us forward.

And I'll just take the rest Michelle. I'm sorry, I know I'm going out of order here. So the other thing that we did was-- we were in the middle of doing some governance research as well. And as a part of that, it allowed us to interview consortia directors from outside consortia so that we were not only talking about some governance ideas, but also funding ideas at the same time. So it worked in two ways for us.

And the other thing that we did was, we took all of these ingredients and put them together in these funding scenarios with different parts, different ideas, different thoughts-- so that we could evaluate them, take a look at them, take a look at the formulas themselves, but also add considerations and limitations for each one so that as we looked at them, we also knew what was good and what was bad, what things we need to think about when we're going to use them or potentially use them.

(DESCRIPTION)
Outside Consortia - Allocations and Considerations.

(SPEECH)
And then, when we were interviewing outside consortia, we started looking at, how did people decide how much money each member in the consortia was going to get. And it really varied. It varied widely across all the different consortia that-- some people just used the maintenance of effort funding that-- that's how they allocated it. And then others were looking at-- what's interesting is-- the nature of adult education providers in that region-- that when you look at some regions, the community college, it really is the main provider of adult ed in that region.

And so, in those places, there's lots of allocation for the community college and they were-- piecemeal the funding out. And then others are very heavily K-12. So it really depended on the structure of that consortium. Also, how the allocations were dealt a lot with the size of the programs. We have such a huge variance in how big our school districts are. And then, one of the things that we noticed, too, is that some of the smaller programs needed a lot more supplemental support.

Some of the things that we heard when we were interviewing was that big school districts have lots of extra advisors and support services that are available through the school district, whereas a smaller district might really only have their teachers and administrators to rely on for all of those support services. So they needed a little extra funding to support those things. And then some of the programs really focused on-- some consortia focused on rebuilding programs that maybe were eliminated or diminished when flexibility came into focus.

And then others looked at building new programs, like looking at areas of need-- like, where do we most need more adult ed, and then they focused their money on building programs there and putting new schools in or new classes in. Some consortia have a lot of consortia-level staffing and collaboration and coordination. Others have the money just going out to the field and to the school sites. And then some of the consortia just looked at, what are our priority projects?

And we want to fund priorities, rather than funding individual school sites.

(DESCRIPTION)
Consortia snapshots with summary of responses.

(SPEECH)
[AUDIO OUT] that we're getting is also some snapshots of these schools. We've removed names to protect the innocent, but we did want to provide some snapshots of how schools decided-- how consortia decided to allocate their funds. So we have some consortia that use tiers of priority approach that wanted to-- their first priority for funds is rebuild capacity.

Their second tier is really looking at scaling up some best practices that really work and then putting extra money into innovations and new projects. But you can read about these in the guide when you have time. You can go through these and look at some of these. But there's really such a range of how people decided to allocate their consortia funds.

Yeah. And Michele, I think that's a really good point because those support documents that are available to people watching today are really, really good in order to do a deep dive into what we're talking about.

(DESCRIPTION)
A.E. Program Reports - L.A.O. Report, Measuring Our Success, A.E.B.G Effectiveness, CLASP Report.

(SPEECH)
And they just give you, really just a collection of all the different things to consider when looking at funding formula, because it seems like, oh great, just create a funding formula. But there's so many-- you can go down a really deep rabbit hole of just considerations and things that you want to think about including in there.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you. So yeah. As Michele said, it would seem it's not a very linear task because there are so many pieces that you have to look at. One of the things that we really did-- and we referenced this earlier-- was how we really looked to see what publications were out there. At the time, there were a number of publications that were available to us-- or items that came out-- that really affected and informed some of the choices that we made.

We took a look at the legislative analyst's office report that talked about this per student funding formula that we align-- us, adult ed funding with K through 12-- talked about consistent fee structures, which would level the playing field-- that certain agencies have to charge fees, like for CTE classes, certain agencies don't-- the idea of leveling the playing field. And the idea of having consistent access and quality-- the funding would really ensure that.

And this idea of performance measures to improve outcomes-- typically what happens is, if there's an outcome, you get those outcomes that you fund for because people are specifically looking at that idea if it's attached to funding. The other things that we did were, as you can see, measuring our success as well as AEBG effectiveness, and the idea that-- philosophically-- that the funding should be used to accelerate adults into some sort of employment or engagement in society.

And this idea, again, of performance incentives that maybe target needs or accelerate pathways. And also, the idea that prioritizing communities of need was a good thing was something that needed to be done, or those potential students that have barriers to employment needed to be looked at-- class, but also-- Had a wonderful report that Michele and I read multiple times, that really talked about allocating resources for identified communities of need.

This idea of metrics that involved immigrants was an idea that we really looked at. And as we were looking at funding formulas, it was something that came into play for us.

I saw a question in here that was asking for the link on where you can get the handouts. It's part of the CAEP summit website. When you looked at our workshop, the handout link is right there. And it'll take you right to where our handouts are and you can download them.

(DESCRIPTION)
C.C.C. Student-Centered Funding Formula - Base, Supplemental, Success.

(SPEECH)
OK. OK. So one of the areas that we looked at, too, when we were considering what components to put in our funding formula is that the community colleges were creating a funding formula and implementing it at the same time that we were looking at something for us.

And so we really looked at this one. And it was made up of these three components, and this is the very, very quick view of what this is. You can read volumes on this particular issue. It includes-- but basically, it's a base. There's a base amount for everybody, it's based on their FTES. And then, in addition to the base, then there's some supplemental money that's for equity, right? So it's looking at those harder to serve populations and providing additional funds for anybody who's in that population.

And then it has success-- a success component where there's additional money provided for having outcomes. And these are the kinds of outcomes and these are the qualifications for equity that add the extra money. What we thought was really great about this is it really addressed that notion that we saw in a lot of the reporting about-- we want to have those success measures built into a funding formula and we also know that we need to provide additional funds for some students.

Maybe they need extra support services and they might not have those successes during that year. What we like is it included those three components. Also we liked the idea of how this model was-- this formula is phased in over time, that it's not something that just takes effect right now and that everybody has to just deal with the new number now. It also had kind of a hold harmless built into there where you couldn't really backslide too far, or if you had to take a cut, then it was over a period of time.

So we thought that this model had a lot of really great features that were part of it that we consider when we were looking at our own funding formula.

(DESCRIPTION)
L.A.C.C.D.: Proposed Adult Education Funding Formula - A memo listing variables for A.E. funding.

(SPEECH)
The other thing that also happened in our consortia is that the LACCD Adult Education department was building its own funding formula. So they're looking at, when they get their allocation from their piece of the pie of the consortia, that they had a formula for how they're going to allocate that out to their nine colleges.

So they were also looking at providing this base funding for each one, so a straight dollar amount that each college gets. And then they wanted to build in some success and innovation metrics into theirs as well. So they have-- when students have-- we have a certain percentage of students complete the course, that they get additional funding. If students finish the CDCP certificates, they get additional funding. And then they have this piece they built in that was around innovation, that they wanted to have schools continue to innovate, so they wanted to reward those.

Any time schools got approved for new courses or new certificates, that there was additional funding provided for those. And then they had a mechanism built in that, if there's carryover, that it comes back to their central office for adult ed and then reallocate it out. So I thought that it was really interesting that the college had a way of allocating out the CAEP funds to everybody, and to all of their nine colleges as well. OK.

So we had our Menti quick poll, and we want to just check in with that really quick. And we're going to look and see--

What did that look like? I'm curious.

What does that look like? Hold on one second. Let's look in here. So here's our Menti quick poll. Let me move my picture around again.

(DESCRIPTION)
Scales - strongly disagree to strongly agree (1 to 5).

(SPEECH)
So I feel-- so here's our questions, right? I feel funding's distributed fairly in my consortia. It looks like people are in 3.5 category for that. So moving towards yes, kind of fair. My district program has what it needs to serve the community. A little bit on the lower end. I think the state should determine a funding formula. So people are kind of in the middle ground on, should it come from the state.

And I think funding needs to be determined locally, seems to be strong support for local funding. And that's one of the things that we keep looking at. I mean, it would be really great-- we went back and forth on this-- it'd be really great if the state would provide some funding formula so everything's equal. But then you continue to go back to, yeah, but every single consortia really looks different and really has different needs and really functions in a different way.

So it's really hard to come up with some straight formula that's going to work for everybody.

Yeah. I think that was one of the things that was the commonality, right? There is no one size fits all.

Yeah. And then our second question was, what kinds of things should be considered in a funding formula?

(DESCRIPTION)
Shifting word cloud.

(SPEECH)
So it looks like enrollment was a big one, need is a big one, outcome seems to have a lot of support there, the demographics of the students. Oh, capacity is interesting too. Filling to capacity or also, some school sites only have the capacity for a certain number of students as well.

Very interesting.

OK. So we want to do is get into our funding scenarios and go back to--

Michelle, I hate to interrupt. You both have some questions in the chat.

I'm going to-- Thanks so much, Melinda. I'm going to go back over to the chat right now while we start this and I'll go ahead and take care of those questions.

Awesome.

But I have to tell you, Melinda, I was ignoring Neil Kelly specifically and directly, so, just--

Understood.

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide, Assumptions and Definitions.

(SPEECH)
OK, great. OK. So as we begin looking at our funding formula, we wanted to review a few things before we get to the actual formulas so we can understand what's on that page. So we have some things that-- some decisions that we made early on that impact how the formulas that we came up with work. So we wanted to go through those really quick here.

(DESCRIPTION)
Community College in the Formula and Base Funding.

(SPEECH)
OK. Number one is that we kept looking at, how are we going to deal with the community college? And the community college a little bit special in the world of creating a funding formula.

And the reason why we kept running into some challenges with putting the community colleges in the funding formula is that our base for collecting data and using data to make decisions is TE. That's the thing that we all have that's uniform. And the problem with the community colleges is that TE is not their way of reporting all of their students. It is their way of reporting students that they claim for WIOA, but it's not-- it doesn't capture all of the students that they have enrolled in adult education.

And in fact, with our particular community college district, there's only a small portion of the students that are in TE. So that produced a challenge in trying to include them in some of the formulas. The other thing is that there's other funding for the community colleges. A lot of the classes and the sections are primarily supported through general funding and not part of the CAEP money. The CAEP money is used more for the consortia-related items and more of the management side of it, not necessarily funding the courses in the teachers.

So it created a particular challenge about it. So one of the things that we determined early on is that instead of having the community college in the formula, it's [AUDIO OUT] going to be an off-the-top number. So you'll see, as we get into the funding scenarios, that you don't see community college really in the formulas at all. You'll see it just as an off-the-top number.

The other thing that came up, too, is we started looking at, OK, so we want to provide some kind of base funding-- again, just as a note, in our district we have such a huge disparity in terms of how many students districts have. We have two very small districts that are like 1,500 students and 2,500 students, and then we have LA Unified, where they have 11 different school sites and many of those school sites have more students at the one school than the entire districts-- those other districts do. So there's a huge difference in size.

We did want to-- the smaller districts did make sure that we knew that there is a minimum operating cost, though. If we go with just the strict per student, sometimes they'll run into a fact that, they definitely need administrators, they definitely teachers, they definitely need lights on buildings and classrooms. So there is a minimum amount of cost that it takes to have a school, so we wanted to make sure that we kept that in mind. And then one of the things that came up for us, really, is this notion of right sizing-- that we wanted to bring those all the schools into an alignment though, in terms of how much funding.

We don't want to have it that one school district gets double the amount per student than the other school districts. So there was this notion of right sizing that came up over and over again as we looked at the base funding. Like, how do we get us-- how do we get us to be about the same size in terms of per student? And then it was determined that TE was going to be the thing that we had to use for our formulas. This was the commonality. This was the only way we had to collect data in a uniform way, was using the TE data. OK.

(DESCRIPTION)
Equity and Success Measures.

(SPEECH)
And that's you, Justin.

Oh. Thanks. I'm sorry, I was doing a chat. Yeah. So thanks, Michele. So some of the ideas-- basically, we looked at what were some of these factors that would impact funding formulas. When we looked at equity or success measures, what would that look like. What would those considerations be? In terms of equity, it could be response to legislative initiatives that focus on service to students and communities of needs. We referenced that before, about that focus on those communities of need that may have higher needs or more impactful needs than other groups.

Immigrant integration metrics that we talked about with class, low-income students underrepresented in categories, students who may experience barriers to employment or education, some of the success measures that we mentioned. What could be some of the considerations that we looked at would be like, could they be completions, competencies, graduations, high school equivalencies, could be transition to post-secondary, or transitioning careers.

It could also be transitions within programs themselves, from noncredit to credit, or within a certain metric.

(DESCRIPTION)
Innovations and Consortium Management.

(SPEECH)
OK. And then one of the things that came up over and over again in our discussions, really, was this innovation. We wanted to highlight innovations because it's something that we wanted. And if you highlight things and attach money to it, then you get more of that, right? We know that. And so we're looking at, what kinds of things would constitute innovations. So we're looking at curriculum programs, pilot projects, scaling up current initiatives that we have and taking them to more school sites.

And then, one of the things that came up a couple of times was looking at, are we allocating funding for completion of new initiatives or are we putting seed money in to fund new initiatives to happen. So that was a conversation around the innovation thing. And then consortia management. We decided in our consortia that off the top would come consortia management. So we have our director, we have two advisors, a fiscal analyst, and a secretary that comes off the top. And so on all the consortia members are contributing towards that.

And then if we expand that in any way-- there's a lot of really great things that we found out in our governance research that we'd love to expand, like adding transition support services and advisors. So as we add those, then it increases the off-the-top number.

(DESCRIPTION)
LARAEC Funding Now, Soon, and in the Future.

(SPEECH)
OK. All right. So what we're going to get into next is we're going to get into the actual funding scenario. So what we're going to-- we were charged with-- Justin and I-- come up with a bunch of scenarios.

Take all these things we said and then show us what that would look like. Because sometimes we say things like, yes, we want success in there. Yes, we want equity in there. And then once we put it in and we see what those numbers really look like and what does it really mean for each of our districts, and then people are like, oh, yeah. No, no, not that. That's not what we meant. Or it sounds like a great idea and then as soon as we try it, then that's when all of the considerations and limitations and issues pop up with, oh, but what are we using, and how do we use it and is that number accurate? Are we sure that's how we want to measure that?

So a lot of interesting conversations came out of us trying to create the actual funding spreadsheet for these visions that we all had about how it should look, right? So we're going to get into the actual spreadsheets, what it looks like with LARAEC's actual funding numbers.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #1 - Images of a report and spreadsheet.

(SPEECH)
And this is really going to-- looking at these things-- is really going to come from these two documents. So these are the two documents that we have that we made available to you via the CAEP website, right?

And one is the research document where it's really the text, and then the other one is the live spreadsheet, right? And why it's great to look at the funding research text is that it has, for every scenario, what the considerations and limitations are, and our talking points that were around this. So what happened when we put this together? These are all the considerations that popped up for us. So they're really good to look at side by side. So we will go ahead and launch into this. OK. Hold on one second.

Let me move one thing on my screen because I want to have my two documents up on my screen. OK.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #1 - Simple Per-Student Formula. A spreadsheet with multiple tables for 2018-2019 enrollment, current year 2019-2020, district consortia level funding, L.A.C.C.D., and equal per student multiplier.

(SPEECH)
So simulation number one. Funding formula number one. This one was our, what's the simplest way to do this. And the simplest way to do this was to do it by a straight per student funding formula. Every single school gets this much dollars per student. So if you look at this spreadsheet, you'll see that right here, there's going to be-- these are our consortium funds that come in, so you have-- I'm going to make this bigger for myself.

I know that it's going to be hard to see these actual numbers, so don't try to pay attention to the numbers themselves. Just try to look at the general gist of what's going on the spreadsheet rather than the numbers themselves. But you can see, here's our total amount of funding that we have come in. Then you see the LARAEC office taken off the top. And then you see LACCD here, also taken off the top. So remember, we made that decision that we would just take out the community college there. And then we're left with the total amount to allocate.

And then what we did is we just took all the students that we had enrolled in the program for a particular snapshot year, and we just made a simple division. And we got, this is how many dollars per student that we're going to allocate to each school site. And then all we did is take that number, multiply it by how many students, and then that's where you get the new total amount of funding to go to each site. And then you can see here what the percentage changes.

So what you'll notice here is that, yes, there are a bunch that go up, and then there's some that come down. And really what this one is about is leveling the playing field so that we don't have $1,500 and $3,000 per student, and we bring everybody into an alignment. So what you'll notice is the two smaller districts are the ones that moved up the most. And then the one that had a little bit more funding per student was the one that got balanced out.

So that's all this one does. Now the limitation, of course, of this one is it doesn't take into consideration all those things that we saw that we wanted to put in it, right? It doesn't include anything for equity. It doesn't include anything for innovation or outcomes. This is just straight up per student. The other thing that came up with this one, too, is that, what is your student enrollment? How do you determine what the student enrollment is? And in this one, we went with the simplest thing, which was just straight up TE unduplicated count.

It didn't have anything to do with hours. It didn't have anything to do with pre and post-testing. It was just straight up, if you had the student in TE for that year, then they counted into that unduplicated count. That seemed to be the easiest way to do it. So that was funding scenario number one.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #2 - Qualified enrollment. A spreadsheet with tables for 2018-2019 enrollment, new base allocation with current year comparison, formula for multiplier, and L.A.C.C.D.

(SPEECH)
And then we have our funding scenario number two. One of the conversations that came up-- and then Justin, just stop me if somebody has a question or you want me to slow down a little bit.

Yeah, you got it.

I'm just watching the time and I'm trying to make sure I get through everything. So stimulation number two was a conversation that we had around, well you know what? The TE unduplicated enrollment counts students that maybe came in and tested and maybe were just barely in the program and then left. And so maybe we should have more money allocated to things-- to students that were more persistent students, students that maybe had the 12 hours, or that students that were there longer require more funding.

So then we started looking at, OK, let's qualify the enrollment a little bit. Let's look at students who had 12 hours versus students who have less than 12 hours. And let's see if maybe we can pay out more for a student who has 12 hours or more than a student who has less. So that was one of our considerations. Now down here, you'll see there's a calculation that's made. We have our per student funding for the 12 hours or more, and then the student who had less than 12 hours, we paid that one out at-- we just picked a number at random. 60%, right? And this number can change. It could be anything.

What we had to do is we had the spreadsheet run Solver-- you'll see this thing here. If you don't have Solver installed on your spreadsheet, this function won't work. So if you want this function to work you have to install Solver. But it runs an equation and it figures out how much are we going to allocate per student with the under 12 allocated at a different rate. And so it comes up with these two dollar amounts, and then it just does the straight multiplication.

And then here's the totals that we wind up with, here in gold. One of the things to point out with these spreadsheets-- if you're looking at them-- anything that's green is an input field, anything that's gold or white is something that's calculated. So the green stuff is stuff that we let all the consortia members play with and they could change those inputs, but everything else is connected to some other cell and is calculated.

So this one-- what we found with this one is, it moved around a few thousand dollars but essentially, people wound up with about the same amount of funding as before-- plus or minus some money that moved around a little bit. So there was that. That was our simulation number two.

Michele, I apologize for interrupting you. So I know you referenced this. In formula number one, can you reference why the community colleges-- along with the office, the LARAEC office-- were taken off the top, as opposed to being a part of the formula-- specifically the community college?

Yeah. So we talked a little bit about that in the beginning, but just that it became challenging to put the community college into the formula itself because we had to come up with a way-- we had to come up with how we were going to use the snapshot for enrollment. And there's two issues with including the community college in the formula. Number one is that all of their numbers are not in TE. All that's in TE is students who they're counting for WIOA, and that it doesn't represent all the students they have enrolled in adult education programs.

And then the second issue is that the-- most of their programs-- the teachers and the classes and the sections are funded through the general fund versus using the consortia dollars for that. So there's a whole other factor of, there's funding-- a big chunk of funding coming from somewhere else that, unlike the K-12's, where this is really nearly 100% of the funding, comes from the CAEP grant. Not grant, CAEP funding. Sorry. Did I answer the question, Justin?

I think so.

OK.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #3 - Base + Equity + Success. A spreadsheet with tables for current year, new formula scenario, success indicators, L.A.C.C.D., formulaic distributions, and equity indicators.

(SPEECH)
All right, so now we have stimulation number three. This is where we looked at, OK, what if we added equity and success? What would that look like in a formula? So then we went through this and-- you'll see that this spreadsheet is cut off because the spreadsheet is very wide. You have access to the actual spreadsheets so you could see the whole thing. But just assume that everything over here to the left is the same as it was on the previous two sheets, OK?

But all we're looking at now is these new things. So we're looking at-- so right here-- if you look right here, we had to first figure out the distribution. What percentage did we want to go to base? What percentage of funding do we want equity and what percentage do we want success? You'll see these are green fields so that means there's something that can be altered or changed, depending on the group's feelings. So we put, for the sake of this, we put 60% to base, 20% to equity, 20% to success.

And then we looked at, OK, these are the dollar amounts. And then we went over here and looked at, OK, what are our success measures? Well, with success and with equity, the only-- again-- the only place that we have uniform data collection is in TE. So we went to TE and looked for what are the ways to measure success. So we have those same ones, the EFLs, the diplomas and equivalencies and the transitions, and those things, right? So we put all of our success metrics here, and looked at, how many of these points do you have?

One of the things I thought was really interesting about the community college when they did their formula, is that they had these all weighted. So you can also-- if you wanted to get way weedy in it, you can-- also, we just gave every one of these as counted as one point. But you could also say, maybe high school diplomas and equivalencies are weighted higher than somebody increasing on a CASAS test. So you can always put some weighting in here to make some worth more than others.

But we just did straight up numbers for this and figured out how many total do we have, and then we added that into the equation and divided that 20% pot evenly and then we multiplied it by how many each district had. You can see on the spreadsheet how we did the math. But these are the success indicators. And then we have down here our equity indicators. And the only thing that we could come up for equity that's in TE is those barriers to employment. So we looked at students who have one barrier, students who have two or more barriers, and then counting those students and putting them into the equation so that you get additional funding for your consortia if you have students with barriers to employment.

So again, here are those totals for that. And what we found with this really is, again, it's essentially the same as the other two except a few hundred thousand dollars moves around between the different member districts. And some member districts were better than others about marking these success indicators and about marking the barriers. What was it I wanted to share about the limitations on that side? Hold on one second. I'm pulling up my sheet.

The thing that kept coming up with this is that in order to do this, we need to make sure that everybody is aligned with all those common definitions for the success indicators and the various employment-- everybody's marking the same way. One of the things that kept coming up with this is, how accurate is our data? How accurate are these inputs? Is this a viable way of allocating our money in terms of, are these measures really accurate right now? So that was something that came up a couple of times when we were talking about these measurements.

And is this the best way to measure equity and success? Is TE the best way to measure that? And then somebody-- oh, other considerations around this one too is, is this double jeopardy? You're already getting paid out for some of these things through pay points from WIOA, and then now we're adding on that you're going to get additional money through the CAEP grant for these same items? So there was some conversation around not having it be the same measure two times for two different funding pots.

And Michele, not to interrupt your flow. Quick question for you. So this is more in reference to formula two with the two different funding levels based on 12 plus or less than 12. As we were putting the formula together-- it's a two-part question. One is, were there any discussions around the services or the putting a premium on services for those students that had less than 12 hours, and why was that 12 hour figure chosen for that formula?

Well the 12 hour figure was chosen because-- again, we keep going back to the fact that we can't-- we needed to have a uniform way of grabbing the data and 12 hours is a mark that's already used in TE, so that became a way of doing that. We grabbed it because it was already something that we counted. Did I answer that question?

Yeah, you did. Thank you.

OK.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #4 - Base + Equity + Innovation. A spreadsheet with tables for current year 2019-2020, new formula scenario, success indicators, L.A.C.C.D., formulaic distributions, and sample innovation indicators.

(SPEECH)
All right. So now let's look at-- OK, so simulation four. Simulation four is going to be very similar to the previous one, except we swapped out success for innovation. So that was one of those areas where people were like, yes, we want innovation to be included. We want money for people who are doing great things in their schools, and let's put that in. And then we just sat there with like, OK, how are we going to measure innovation? What exactly is going to count?

And if it counts, how are we going to actually have people report that data? Do people just self-report, like, yeah, I did these things, so this counts. Or is there some uniform way of reporting these pilots and these programs that we're going to put in place? So we made this formula. And what we found is that this piece right here is very challenging because there's really no way for us to go collect that data and to put numbers in here. So the numbers that you see in here really are just a distribution of what percentage of the total funding that these districts are. We just put in there for the sake of a placeholder.

So this spreadsheet is really just showing that, this is really hard. This particular scenario, trying to figure this out, is hard. Unless you've had some pet projects and you had-- I think last year, we saw a presentation at the CAEP summit about, there's a proposal system. So I thought that might be a way to do this, is just have a pot of money set aside for innovation, and then there's a proposal system that people submit proposals and then they get funded that way.

I can't remember which district that was, but it was interesting.

(DESCRIPTION)
Simulation #5 - Other Funding Sources. A spreadsheet with tables for district totals with per-student funding. other funding sources, and equal per-student multiplier.

(SPEECH)
OK. So that's scenario number four. And then scenario number five was something that kept popping up over and over and over again, about some districts have additional funds that they get from other sources. And so there was this conversation that we want all peoples sources of funding to be considered in this funding formula, and that it's not fair that some have these big pots of money from other places and other school districts don't have the access to those, and they're having to only rely on the CAEP funds.

And so we started looking at, how would we do this? And one of the things that came up are these program error reports and that we report expenditures by program area in these different categories. And so we started looking at, OK, well if we use what we're already reporting, this is what this looks like, you know? You could see what money is coming from Perkins and what money is coming from fees and all these different areas. And then what if we took all of those things and had that be part of our total allocation, and then we did the even distribution-- like, everybody gets the same per student funding and then we did the new calculation based on that.

It was a grand idea, but we kept running into a few hiccups with this particular scenario. Number one is that the reporting that we do is expenditure reporting, it's not allocation reporting. So school districts are only reporting what they spent of the money they receive, rather than what they actually receive from that particular funding source. So that was particularly problematic. And then the other thing that came up right away once we put this in is that-- sorry, my dog-- I'm just closing the door.

It became a question of, is that fair that you have some districts that would go out of their way to apply for grants and to bring extra money into the school to maximize their WIOA pay points and things like that? And is it fair to have that be part of the formula? Because then it seems to create a disincentive for going out of your way to bringing extra money if it's just going to be leveled out in the funding formula where everybody's still going to get the same per student regardless. So that was kind of the challenge with this particular scenario.

We liked it. We went ahead and did it because this was a notion that we all had-- like, hey, we have to include all this stuff. But as soon as we put it on paper and we started looking at it, then we just ran into a lot of problems with why this might not be the best scenario. So those are our five scenarios that we had to look at. And then began the multiple meetings full of discussions around these five scenarios and what was going to be the best fit for our particular consortia.

Any time you want to jump in, Justin, you could just jump in too.

I was just going to reinforce what you just said. It would seem that so much went into this, that this was just the starting point for those discussions about what to do next and how it would be implemented, and which one would be implemented. And as you can imagine, because there were multiple voices, the challenge was coming up with something that everybody could agree on. And one of the things that we noticed was we kept coming back to the data and what data was available to us, what data that everybody trusted, that could agree on.

And so when we looked at innovation and success, it created a lot more plates in the air-- for lack of a better word-- of variables that made it difficult to agree on what would work and how it would work. And at the end of the day, we came back to simple might be best right now with the option of changing that funding formula as data became more precise and more available and everybody felt that data was reliable. And so ultimately, Michele, what was the answer? What happened? How did this play itself out?

(DESCRIPTION)
Slide, Considerations Moving Forward - Sections of the report detailing guiding principles, base funding, measures of equity, and measures of success.

(SPEECH)
Well after all of those-- and it was important to go through all of those different iterations and spend the time to create all those funder formulas-- but in the end, the consortia eventually went with funding formula number one. They went with, this is the simplest way to just level the playing field for everybody. And so they just went with the straight up per student funding formula for each school. So they decided just to keep it simple. Now, students made the decision to choose funding formula one. We all went, yay! And we're like, that's not the end of the conversation.

There's still a whole bunch of things that we have to consider to put into the formula in order to make it work. So we did go through-- in the document they were giving to you, we actually put all of our considerations moving forward as well, and the conversations that happened thereafter deciding number one. And one of the-- so these couple sides here just deal with the equity and success and all the different components that go with those. And ultimately, we didn't choose to include equity and success, but we did reserve the right to probably put them into a future formula if we decide to go that route, like Justin said.

Some of the things that we had to talk about though, afterwards, was, what year are we going to use for data, number one. So we know that with TE and LaunchBoard and all those different data places, is that often the data is well behind where the planning happens for the budget.

(DESCRIPTION)
Considerations continued - Sections detailing measures of innovation, new money, staffing and central support, and timeline, re-evaluation, and stability.

(SPEECH)
So that's one of the considerations that, if you're creating a formula, is really to have everyone agree and get clear on, what year's data are you going to use as that snapshot to base the formula on.

And is it something that you're going to use that one time or is it something that you're going to use and reallocate the funding formula every year? One of the conversations that we had was that we want the stability of having a set number for a few years at least. So one of the conversations we had was really just looking at our three-year planning cycles and having our funding formula calculation match those three-year planning cycles so that our new formula is not recalculated every year where people have to wait to see how much money they're going to get to do planning.

We wanted it to keep it as fixed as possible, except for maybe some cost of living adjustments or the adjustment that's probably coming next year. But we wanted to keep some stability in there. So we did say that we will refigure our funding formula every third year to coincide with the three-year planning cycle. So that was important, to come up with that timeline. If new money comes in-- any word during there-- the group determined that they would be allocating that money based on the current percentages.

So the school sites, they would just allocate it out based on the current percentages that they get in that funding formula. And then there was a notion that in the future we may increase the staffing and central support to include some more positions, like transition and things like that. And if that's true, then, again, that will still just be an off-the-top number. We also talked a lot about the community college and reserved the idea that in the future when data gets to the point where we can have those snapshots of data equivalent for everybody and that we're able to figure out some of the limitations with having the college in, that we could put the college into the calculation at some point in the future if we get all the data parts figured out.

And Michele, question for you. Neil was talking to me about-- on the chat-- regarding how members look at services in the funding discussion. And I think what he's getting at is that discussion of students who have maybe fewer than 12 hours-- when we were looking at those services, how we value those services. And you can expand on this, but as I recall, there was discussion about that and how you value those services and what those services may cost at different member districts. The costs may not be the same for them, and the services themselves may not be as involved as other services. So can you expand on that idea of what that discussion might have looked like and how it may have played into the funding formula discussion?

Yeah. So definitely we talked about the fact that there are things that you provide for students that have less than 12 hours, right? So there's still counseling services and people do testing. They might even do practice testing for the HiSet or things like that. And that even if they don't get into a class that they stay in for 12 hours, there's still services that were provided to those students that we want to make sure that we fund.

And then ultimately, the reason why we didn't choose that funding formula number two where it broke down the difference between a 12 hour student and a less than 12 hour student was because some of our board members felt very strongly that they didn't want to view students as-- I want to say more special. They didn't want to focus on students that had 12 hours or more, like that they were some hierarchy of students and that the 12 hour plus student was more valuable to us than the other ones.

They wanted to keep that playing field level, where every student matters and every student is valuable and every student counts. And so they really had a hard time with that-- with the 12 hour student getting paid out at a higher rate-- because of that purpose, because it creates an inequity of looking at the student, that we look at the less than 12 is less than, when they're not, right? We may have outcomes-- we still may have outcomes with them, even if they don't count for WIOA, right? Did I answer the question, Justin?

Yeah. Thanks, Michele. I think that's exactly what it is. Neil, if you would like us to expand on that, just go ahead and put it in the chat.

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Considerations continued - Sections detailing data confidence, multi-year scale back for cuts, and simple to more complex.

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And then, these are some items that we talked about before that they just happen to be in our document as well that just-- we want to make sure that we have confidence in the data that we're using as part of the formula since this is very high stakes. So that's always a consideration. And we have a data and accountability work team that's looking at, how do we get everybody in line with definitions, how do we make uniform decisions about what does enrollment mean-- those kinds of things.

But we're not quite there yet. Definitely, when there's schools that are getting cut, we wanted to make sure that we didn't do it all abruptly at one time. We have one school that was a little bit higher funded per student than the others. And you could see on the funding formulas that there's one district that has a cut a little bit greater than the others. So there was a two-year step down process that was put in place so that-- this funding formula actually-- funding formula one-- doesn't go into effect until the '21-'22 school year.

So the first school year where we're going to use it is going to be next year. And then we begin a three-year planning cycle at the same time. So really, this funding for him is going to be for the one year-- '21-'22-- and then the new cycle of three-year planning will have us re-evaluate the funding formula again to look at, do we want to change anything. And then, like Justin said, simple seemed to be the better choice for right now and then we can move to something more complex in the future.

Oh my gosh, we got to the questions slide. So I know that was a lot of information, a lot of data. I think the easiest way to deal with our presentation is really just go back to the two documents we provided. We just wanted to share our experience of trying to create the funding formulas. There's been so much talk out there in the world about, we should do this and we should do this and we should do this. And what Justin and I are really trying to do with our scenarios is try them out and see what they look like.

Sometimes, something sounds good in theory, but then in reality when you try to do it, it's a whole different experience. So that was our intent here with putting this together for you and then allowing you guys to just benefit from the process that we went through. And again, I have no answers. I have no idea what's the right way. I just can tell you that it was a lot of conversation and a lot of discussion. And where we wind up with is this one for now, and that in the future, it may be very different.

Right. So Michele, a couple of questions for you. One is regarding the funding formula and bylaws. Is the funding formula and its practice policy included in the bylaws that have been adopted by LARAEC?

Yeah. So this is a great question because this is a thing. So we have-- so tomorrow we're giving a conversation-- at the same time we're doing funding formula, we're also creating our infrastructure for our consortia through our bylaws. So we're doing a presentation tomorrow morning on bylaws. I know, Justin and I have the most exciting topics, funding and bylaws. But we're doing that tomorrow. Yes, it should be in there.

What happened was, by the time we finished this funding formula and that we wrote the new additions to the bylaws, then COVID happened and we got off on the distraction of dealing with that. But yes, we have new sections of our bylaws that are not yet finalized, but ideally, they're going to be also into the bylaws funding formula structure and in our agreements. I mean, really the intention is that the bylaws-- so you don't have to go back to multiple board meetings and look for what our policies and procedures and our decisions that everything that we decide that's a high stakes item like that should be included into our bylaws.

And just so you know, Michele, there are other people that do love bylaws as well. Jodi was saying she thinks it's a great conversation topic. So you do have--

I think it is.

There's somebody that also loves bylaws. So next question is, the idea that the funding is uncertain coming up-- obviously because of COVID, we don't know what's going to happen coming up. So the question is centered around that. This funding formula you referenced-- obviously, we know LARAEC is putting this in place. It hasn't been put in place yet. But the effect of any cuts that will have on the implementation of this budget, are we able to answer that question about, how will budget cuts affect the implementation of this formula?

Well the great thing about having it be a formula is that you're really just changing the inputs, right? So if there is a 10% reduction in the amount of funding coming in, then it's just plugging that new number-- the new start value-- into the formula and then it would recalculate itself and give you a new per student formula and then just recalculate all the districts. The only thing that I would want our consortia to consider-- if we just plugged in a new lower number-- is that at some point we're going to hit that number where a small district might struggle to provide basic services because the per student number is so low.

I know I've worked with other grants where, when they do per student, as soon as you get a small school with 30 or 50 students, the per student number doesn't give you enough to even pay for a teacher, right? So they might be at some point where we have to consider that, yes, we could do the per student, but for the small districts they may need an extra cut just to provide a minimum level of service. That would be the only thing for me that would come up.

All right. And you are getting a significant amount of support on bylaw excitement, just so you know. You're not alone.

And it's 8:30 in the morning. It's the perfect time to talk about bylaws. But again, I invite you to go and get those documents because that'll make-- it has everything we've said today and then some-- is in the documents. So get those documents, lay them side by side. You can play with them and see what you think. And if they're useful to you, great. If they're not useful to your consortia, OK. The great thing is that-- we just wanted to be helpful and share our experience of talking about this conversation, really in-depth.

Perfect. All right. So at this point, I believe we've answered-- Michele, you've answered-- the outstanding questions in the chat. Let me just double check to make sure I haven't missed one.

I'm going back to our shameless plug.

Yeah. So if anybody has any other questions that they haven't asked yet, please put it in the Q&A and we will go over it right now.

Yeah. And while you're typing questions-- just as the aside-- if you weren't here at the beginning, we are all about collaboration across consortia. Now that we have Zoom and we can have all y'all play with us, we're definitely invite you to come to our weekly Lunch with LARAEC. We don't have one this week because we want to be at the summit. But going back to next week, we'll have them through November and December. January is going to be our month of Lunch with LARAEC, focusing on ESL engagement and persistence, specifically the low-level learners-- the lower level ESL learners.

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L.A.R.A.E.C. dot org.

(SPEECH)
But definitely, we'd love to have you come and participate. If you have something that you would love to share with us-- if you go to LARAEC.org and the Lunch with LARAEC, we have a proposal submissions. So we would love to benefit from your experience as well in our consortia. So you're welcome to sign up to be a presenter for Lunch with LARAEC too.

Yeah, absolutely. And we really appreciate that because the more we can collaborate across consortia boundaries, really, really benefits all of our consortium members. We've been really fortunate to get people from outside the consortia that presented at the conferences-- Michele may have referenced-- as well as doing it during the Lunch with LARAEC, and it's been really, really helpful.

We always like to say that we have everybody from about students to Yucaipa. That's the range of people we have participating in our conference and our Lunch with LARAEC. Got to love Yucaipa.

Very good. All right, Michele. I do not see any more questions in the chat. I'm just scanning to make sure I haven't missed anything. All right. So actually, I did send a message to this, but I want your input. I answered this, but I'd be interested in your input on this, Michele. So the question was, how did you consider the inequity of cost of delivery among members? Because we did talk about that.

That is interesting. Yeah. We didn't spend a lot of time down that road. I don't know. Is your memory better than mine? We didn't spend a lot of time down that road. We did have a consideration around LA Unified and LACCD being the big giants in our consortia. They have a lot of resources that are available to them that the other districts don't. Yeah, we didn't spend a lot of time looking at that piece.

What we spent more time doing with is, how do we collaborate more so that the smaller districts can benefit from being with the larger districts, in terms of staff development and in terms of support services and things like that. How can we use the advisors that are generating curriculum in LACCD and LAUSD to support the smaller ones that don't have curriculum development departments, right?

Yeah, exactly. And that's my recollection as well. It's about leveraging the larger districts to assist those smaller districts that may not have the same resources. But it's something, moving forward, as we add additional pieces to the funding formula, that definitely would have to be examined in regards to how smaller districts are impacted by any funding formula that would include maybe innovation or success.

Yeah. It'll be interesting to look at. How would you even calculate cost per student in terms of spending? I don't know how you would do that. It would be an interesting avenue to go down. So anyway, we appreciate you spending the morning with us. This is one of our topics that we've poured our life in to the last couple of years. So it's nice to have an opportunity to share with a wider audience so that someone else can understand our-- I'll say pain, but I meant joy-- understand our joy around funding formulas and bylaws.

Absolutely. So thank you everybody, as Michele said. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you for taking the time with us. If you have any questions and you would like to ask outside the webinar here, I'm going to put our email addresses in the chat and you can go ahead and reach out to us directly. We're fine with that, unless your name is Neil Kelly, then please don't bother us. I'm kidding, I love you.

All right. Thank you, everybody.

All right. And on that note, everyone. When I hit the End Meeting button, you should be taken to a page that has a Continue button on it-- lots of buttons. Just click the Continue and the evaluation should open up for you. Please do the evaluation. This was a great presentation and I'm sure you all have great things to say, and Michele and Justin are going to want to hear and read those. So I'm going to hit the big red End button here. Have a great rest of your conference.