Holly Clark: Started today. Joy?

Joy Lewis: Good afternoon. Hi, I'm Joy Lewis. I'm with the West Ed team here, and I'm really thrilled to be able to be with you all today. We are here to share this second of a grouping of ELL Healthcare Pathways Communities of Practice.

I don't know if many of you were able to participate with us back on November 5, when we did the first one. This is the second one we're having. And I'm going to run through some initial the agenda.

But I see some of you are already doing but as a way to help build the community and kind of let us all know who's here. If you'd like to, you could share your name and your role and the institution or consortium, if you like, in the chat so we kind of have a sense-- so you all have a sense of what's here that's for your purposes.

We are WestEd. I'm going to pass this over to my colleague Megan to introduce the project and who we all are. But this is a list here on the slide of our teams.

Meghan McBride: Hello out there, California ELL Healthcare Pathways grantees or potential grantees, if you're going for round three. The ELL Healthcare Pathways Professional Development Technical Assistance Initiative is led by WestEd and IRC.

As you can see, there are a lot of people at both organizations supporting you. You've probably encountered a lot of us, whether it was in the needs assessment that kicked off our project, or during our communities of practice that are led by Joy Lewis, and our office hours that are led by Debi, in our regional events that are led by myself, Debi, Anne, and Andrea. Actually, Debi going to go through all of our activities in just a moment. But it's good to see all of you here.

And again, this is our team. If you need anything, you can reach out to anybody on this list, and we are happy to help you individually. So thanks for being here, and I'll kick it back over to Joy.

Joy Lewis: Great. The agenda for today, after we kind of frame where this effort sits in the larger set of technical assistance, we're going to run over our norms for the day and then dive right into the topic that we're focused on today around recruiting, onboarding, retaining, and helping students persist in your programs, and hearing about lessons learned from a group of grantees, and hopefully engaging in some really good discussion and questions with those folks who are sharing with us today. And that will take the bulk of our time.

We listened to-- last time we had the community practice that the desire was for the bulk of this time together to be spent hearing from each other, talking to each other, and sharing. So that's what we're doing here today. And then we'll talk a little bit about our topic for the next community of practice, and then we'll close out before the time is up.

So I'm going to pass it over briefly to my colleague Debi to talk about the whole effort. If you've not seen this before, Debi will run through it.

Debi Pezzuto: Hi, everyone. Debi Pezzuto, Senior Program Associate from WestEd. And thank you all for joining us. If this is your first time joining us for the community of practice, welcome. If it's your second time, welcome back. And please know that for the future community of practices, people are welcome to join even if they haven't been to the first two. So bring a friend.

As we like to always do before we start anything, we want to walk through the timeline for this project. We started off with the needs assessment, fishbowl activity at the CAEP Summit. An analysis was just completed of our needs assessment and which has informed the topics for our community of practice, our special topics webinars, and our virtual office hours that are monthly.

These are going to be continuing for ongoing technical assistance throughout the next-- the life of the project. And then we will also have-- we have now the regional events and the statewide convening that's going to happen in September, down in Irvine. Does that sound right? Anne's nodding and thumbs up, yes.

So the community of practice that you can see is in the center of this project. The topic comes from the needs assessments interviews that we did in the fall. And after meeting with many of the round one and round two grantees, we identified that there are several implementation challenges that you're all facing, but there are also many fantastic practices throughout the state that you are all doing to support your students from orientation to wraparound services.

So this COP today provided by us is going to explore those, bring some examples in for you. And it's going to be great. So have a great day. That's about as much as I've got in me. OK, Joy, what's next?

Joy Lewis: Great. Just a reminder, here's what we try to do here in this community. Try to listen. Have our cameras on when we can. Engage. Ask questions. Don't hesitate to drop questions in the chat. Drop resources in the chat. This is an opportunity for you all to share, get to know one another. And so here's sort of the norms we've established for this community. You can just take a little look at those.

And then I just wanted to outline the last community practice, we had a little poll where you all voted on what topic should we focus on for the next Community of Practice. There were five or six options. And basically recruitment, retention, onboarding and retention rose to the top of the list. And so it sort of shakes out like this.

And we found four wonderful grantees that were willing to share some of their experiences, some of their strategies, some of their challenges that they've encountered in their implementation of their pathways. So you're going to hear from them. But this is just-- I wanted to give an overview of the focus of today's Community of Practice.

So with this topic in mind, here's a little bit more detail. This is probably more than you want to read, but this is kind of how we defined or thought a little bit about how to engage in this topic. But to get right to it, we're going to ask you to all think about this topic for a moment. And I'm going to give you about a minute or two to enter into a little Padlet.

I'm dropping into the chat, a link to a Padlet, and I'd love for you just to real quick, this doesn't have to be a long answer. It could just be like whatever pops into your head. One strategy, thought, idea that has helped you or that you know helps to either recruit to onboard or retain your students, even if it's working, not working, or even if something you've struggled with. I think we can take a minute to just mull that over and drop it in the Padlet.

I'm going to stop sharing this and share the Padlet. If you don't know how to use Padlet, you'll see a little yellow plus sign in the bottom right of the screen down here on the right. If you can see where my cursor is, click that. Type anywhere in here and down here and then hit Submit, and that will pop up.

You can see people are already-- Brave Jellyfish is already added. And sometimes your name shows up. And that just means you've used Padlet before and you have an account, sometimes not. Yes, and you can comment on other folks, or you can add your own. And I'm just going to sit with it for a moment and see what happens.

Great. This little activity is just meant to get our heads in the mindset of all these ideas as we launch into hearing from all of the programs that are going to share with us today.

Just give it another 30 seconds or so. But this isn't going away. So this link isn't going away and this Padlet will be here. So if you think of something you want to add it just for posterity, we're going to hold on to this and have it as a resource to share.

Debi Pezzuto: These are great, Joy.

Joy Lewis: Yeah. Yes, I see the word of mouth is mentioned and we definitely saw a lot of that with the needs assessment. And I've heard that from the folks I've been talking to as well. Great. Keep it up.

OK, I'm going to stop, even though I'm sure we could sit and talk about a lot of these posts for a little while. We'll get going on the rest of what we're going to do here today. So just to orient you, you have a bunch of colleagues to hear from. We're going to start with Elaine Weber from Allan Hancock.

I'm going to let them all introduce themselves. But you can see who we're going to hear from. And we're going to go in this order. We're going to spend about 10 minutes or so, give or take, from each grantee, and we're going to allow a few minutes after each one for some questions follow-ups.

So feel free while they're talking. If you have a comment or a question, feel free to drop it in the chat, and our team will be watching to make sure that gets addressed in the Q&A section after each, or just hold on to it and unmute yourself. This is meant to be an informal space to share and talk, so we'll save a few minutes afterwards.

So we're really excited that all of these wonderful folks have agreed to share, from their perspectives and their own contexts, from various locations around the state. And so I will let them give a little bit more information about their context. I'm going to stop my screen and turn it over to Elaine to kick us off. Elaine, welcome. If you want to unmute yourself.

Elaine Webber: Hi, I'm trying to get the share. Let me see. OK, I see it now.

Joy Lewis: Great.

Elaine Webber: OK. Let's go ahead and go to the slideshow, and from the beginning. OK, everybody see the slide? Are we good? OK. I'm Elaine Webber. I'm Principal of Lompoc Adult School and Career Center, and we are in the consortium with one partner, Allan Hancock Community College. And we are the entire North County of Santa Barbara.

I have 25 years of time at this school, and for eight of those years, I have been the principal. Eight years ago, I started cultivating the medical programming all by myself. I did not have any help. I really was trying to-- I'm a very big-picture person, so I was trying to put it together, figure out what I need, and then as time went on, build the team. So a lot of what you're seeing comes from a lot of learning and troubleshooting of trying to grow this over these years.

We're a big region, and I'm the only adult school. And I offer unique programming that my college counterpart does not. So I have people who might be coming well over an hour away to come here. And I get where the growing region, too. So the north part of Santa Barbara County is big.

I try to focus on distance learning. That's why I put it up there in big letters. Again, we're big region and I'm serving adults. So a lot of what we do, I try to build on distance learning as much, as much as I can. And there's a lot of it. I'm going to share today about the onboarding practices for the programs that you see on here, and how to get into my medical programs.

So I designed this inverted funnel. Everyone's coming through the funnel. It's a choke point. You can't come into my programs unless you come into my first step. Everybody's got to come through there. And then from then, it lets me do what you're seeing on the screen. We can kind of feather it out and take care of everybody's needs. But I need everybody to come in at the same point. It's probably the best advice I could give for somebody trying to do this.

Orientation is first, it is done by Zoom, but there's a kind of a twist to it. After orientation, everybody fills out this, we call it a personal interview form. And I'll go over a little bit of both of these things. And then we have a great deep dive into a personal conversation on a one on one with folks.

So here's what the orientation kind of looks like. This is what we're focusing on. This is where I found we need to stay focused. And this is what really supports the students the best, helps us match them up like a Harry Potter sorting hat figures out what they really need, what they don't know about medical, helps us address that.

Everyone's called before orientation, and they can do the orientation and the personal phone call. They can do a lot of it before and lets them accelerate past the other steps if they're able to, if they want to. Some students really want to just come to the orientation. They want to hear other people's questions. So again, we're trying to meet everybody's needs in doing this. And there's a three-person team behind the scenes running this. Just so you know, it's not just me. And I'll cover that in a minute.

Here's an example of one of our needs. We know a lot of students register for things and they need a job right away. And they don't understand the medical is not going to yield them a job in six months or less, maybe even nine months. So we really want to segue these people to our career technicians and get them a job right away, and let them know, sure, you can still come to the medical. We can still help you, but your family needs money right now, and that's what we want to help you do. So we do I think, a great needs assessment with our candidates.

Some people don't know the difference between what a medical assistant and a CNA does. And we want to clear that up right away. You're going to be bathing people, changing diapers. CNAs do a lot of that. And sometimes people read both of these and they're like, whoa, that's not for me. And we have something for them too that's not necessarily medical.

This is our big push. And this is for all of our programming at the school. We are not focusing on $20 an hour jobs. If we're not trying to build these people on a pathway to a six-figure salary, they can't survive well in Santa Barbara County or in many other counties. So we are constantly going through this. We get them mapped. We get them figured out. We help the transition for the college part, and we focus on things we can do locally.

We can do online with them. If they need to relocate out of the area for their dream job, well, we let them know, hey, you have to relocate for that. You can't do that in Santa Barbara County, and nor can you do it in adjacent counties.

So the Google Form is what comes next. So I've just taken you on a real brisk ride through the interview, the orientation process. The Google Form is collecting information that's going to help us really place these people and understand, and they might not be able to tell us what their 5 to 10-year goals are.

But you know what, some of them can. Some of them are already in entry-level medical. Some of them don't know. And we just want to know where they're at. That's all. It really helps us to track these people and we do track them. This all feeds into a Google Sheet and we are putting our intake notes on there where these people are. We are managing everybody from this Google Form when they first start and fill it out.

Here's an example of some of the questions the Google Form might have. And it's OK if they can't answer them entirely if they're not sure. But hey, if they can answer them, this is good. It's a little snippet of what we're trying to do. Just get them thinking and help us understand.

Here's the personal interview. So now we're going to talk to them. This is on phone, in person or by Zoom as best we can. And we really want to make sure now that we understand that we're able to talk about, hey, I heard about you saying if I didn't want medical, you could help me with something.

And we can go ahead and dive into that and say, yeah, we can actually put you on a great pathway to a job in education, get you in as a paraeducator, get you trained, and then map you out toward a teaching credential. Because a lot of times people who go into medical want to help people. And helping people is a very broad category. And it does apply. And they do sometimes want to go into education, but they didn't think they could. So it's all good that we're doing this. It's really great learning that we get out of it.

We have a three-person team. This is some of the little top of our spreadsheet of what's going on with the candidates. I have a medical director with over 50 years of experience. She's taught nursing. She's an MSN. And then I have a career technician. I have bilingual tech. And I have trained both of them on how to do what I call true career guidance. And everybody else comes to me if they really feel that there's more expertise needed. I'm the one who takes care of that because I have the most time doing it.

So here's some learnings. There are a lot of lessons learned, but I think maybe after me going through this, you'll kind of see that these are big things we've learned over time. When did the future focus come into it? It came in at a point where I realized, hey, we need to be building these people up to six-figure salaries and always continuous improvement. I'm that kind of a person anyway.

And I think that's it. I'm going to go ahead and stop my share. And if anybody has questions, I'll be glad to let you know if there's anything I can answer.

Joy Lewis: Thanks so much.

Elaine Webber: You're welcome.

Meghan McBride: We had a question in the chat from Alisa. She wonders, Elaine, how far in advance prior to the start of the course is the orientation happening?

Elaine Webber: Orientations are monthly. And we take in students ongoing, especially like in our prerequisites like medical terminology, medical ethics. We have medical literacy for medical professionals to really help if they've got a lower literacy level. We have medical careers. So we're always taking people into those programs. And our medical assistant program, that's been running about every 12 weeks. We have a cohort.

Meghan McBride: Wow.

Elaine Webber: Yeah. No advertising. Like everyone said I saw it in the Padlet, word of mouth. If I advertise, I think we'd be inundated. I don't think we could handle it. We're such a small school. 30 people register for orientation every month, with me doing nothing but promoting with agencies, with students and hospitals. I bring fliers around, I talk to people.

And out of the 30, by the time we conduct it, we've done the orientation one on one with so many that about nine will actually show up. It's really good, and the others are already on their way to doing other things.

Meghan McBride: That's what we call the field of dreams approach. If you build it, they will come.

Joy Lewis: Go ahead, Meghan.

Meghan McBride: Natalie Robles, I hope I said that right, has a question for you, Elaine. How long are the orientations and personal interviews?

Elaine Webber: So an orientation might take-- with questions from the candidates-- could take up to an hour and a half. But after we finish the actual orientation slides, we tell people we're done. We're not presenting any more information. We are only answering questions. And so some of them will leave at about 45 minutes to an hour.

We could have people in there. We've been there up to an hour and a half. We've been out of there after an hour and five minutes. It just depends on the questions-- and we get better-- every time we do orientation, we get better at perceiving and preempting what people are going to ask us. So it's funny. I don't think anyone asks us anything we haven't covered in the slides.

And that to me that's like a good measure. The personal interview, it depends on the person we're talking to because we're really trying to find out, are they a good match for this? Are their plans viable? Can we really help them with their programming?

Is it not a good match? Do we need to-- because it'll be a short conversation. If somebody really wants to go into education, it's going to come to me eventually. If they want a different career pathway, like they want to go in accounting, bookkeeping, something like that, that will all come to me. And that'll be as long a conversation as it needs. Just so I take care of the person's needs.

But they're not that long. They could take me about, I'd say, an average of 20 minutes for a personal interview. It could be a little longer, give or take.

Joy Lewis: Thank you.

Elaine Webber: You're welcome.

Joy Lewis: Any last questions? Are any of your courses in Spanish or other languages?

Elaine Webber: So all of our classes for the prerequisites, we use a curriculum where they're self-paced. They're distance learning. They do have instructor support but the students can translate them into other languages, so yes. And then we have our ESL classes. We have ESL leader. As far as the medical certifications, once they're in there, though, that's all English because it has to be taught in English. And they're going to be taking their certification exams in English.

Joy Lewis: Great.

Meghan McBride: Someone had their hand up a moment ago. I wondered if they still wanted to ask a question. Anel, I think it was you.

Anel Martinez: Yes, it was me. Thank you, Elaine. This is great information. And my question to you was, when it comes to the recruitment for the ELL health grant, what assessments do you have in place for those students to be able to go into the ELL health grant courses?

Elaine Webber: Well, excuse me. So we have courses. We also have some great-- when they go take their prerequisites, that's all done through Edgenuity. And we have our own assessment vehicles in Edgenuity to make sure that they're all able to do.

But what's interesting is when we go through this whole process, we're going to find out what their concern is. If they're dyslexic, if you know their language skills are an issue. And then we can-- during the interview, we can actually talk to them about what their needs might be as far as literacy goes.

And we know and they know they need, they'll say, gee, I really need more English and we can get them into our ELL class where they can build up their English so that we can move them into these classes so that we can find the right point for them. We don't want to put them in something too hard or too easy.

Anel Martinez: Thank you.

Elaine Webber: Yeah, you're welcome.

Joy Lewis: Wonderful Thank you. We're right on time. I really appreciate everyone's questions. And I think with that, we'll move on to our next presentation with our friends at Northern Alameda Adult Education Collective. So I am going to share my screen and turn it over to Abi and Shemila

Shemila Johnson: Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much, Joy. Elaine, great information. I'm sure we'll talk a little bit overlap of what you shared. My name is Shemila Johnson. I'm the executive director of Northern Alameda Adult Education Collective. Abi?

Abigail Salazar: Hi, everybody. Thank you so much for having us. My name is Abi, and I'm the student personnel services specialist for the ELL Healthcare Pathways.

Shemila Johnson: Awesome. Next slide. So we are one of three consortia in Alameda County and our service area includes Oakland, Berkeley, Alameda, Piedmont, Albany, and Emeryville. But for the ELL Healthcare Pathways program, we're currently hosting our programs in Berkeley and in Oakland.

The students that we primarily serve or that we're seeing come to the program are native speakers of Spanish, Mandarin, Tigrinya, Arabic, and Farsi. Of course, other languages are represented. However, these are the top five of origin that we're seeing our students come from those.

For rounds 1 and 2, we offer a bridge to health care course at one of our colleges. We have four colleges and five adult schools within our consortium, but that are actually participating in the ELL Healthcare Pathways program. There's two colleges for round one and round two, and then there's one adult school.

So we're offering a bridge to health care course at one of our colleges. And that's where the students are learning just about the American health care system and then the different pathways that are available, which are pharmacy, tech, phlebotomy, medical assisting, medical billing, and coding, as well as a community health worker.

What we've seen in round one and round two is that amongst our ELL population, the community health worker is probably the least attended or a pathway that students want to go in. And so we're looking at maybe transitioning if we are granted round three of how we can better support our ELL population within the community health worker program.

And so for the next few moments, Abi is going to dive into our outreach and recruitment strategies, as well as the onboarding process, which you'll hear again, some of what Elaine already shared. But also you're going to hear a lot about the way in which Abi's position directly impacts and supports our students to persist. So I'll pass it on to Abi. Next slide.

Abigail Salazar: Thank you so much, Shemila. Thank you all so much for having us. So like I said, I am the-- my title is very long, but basically I'm a suiting specialist/counselor, and I basically support students along the pathway. So on this slide I'm going to focus a little bit on outreach and recruitment.

One of the things, of course, that we've been hearing is that word of mouth is the best way that we've been getting students. Once a cohort of students goes through the pathway, they start to tell their friends. They start to tell their family, their community members. And that really has been like the best way.

The other ways that we've done outreach and recruitment is, of course, within the consortium. We already have those relationships built with our partners, with other adult schools, with our other colleges in the district.

Another thing that I also really recommend is doing presentations at other nonprofit organizations in your area. Sometimes throughout the year, for example, this year, in the beginning in January, we did see a bit of a dip in our enrollment. But as the year goes, we start to see enrollment go up more and more. And basically, I kind of do outreach and recruitment just to based on how enrollment is looking.

So if I feel like enrollment took a dip, then I have to go out there and do some outreach and recruitment. Another thing that has been useful has been scheduling presentations at ESL classes. Tabling events.

Another thing that I didn't get to mention here was that I actually hold office hours every day, every day of the week except Friday, so Monday through Thursday. And so basically that's just an opportunity for students to come and see me and then also help them with whether it's enrollment, giving them advice on where they should enter the pathway, and just orient them in general.

And then just similar to what Elaine was sharing, we also use a Google Form interest list. And then the flyer, specifically, I also wanted to mention is that the flyer, we make sure that the English that is reflected, or the language that is reflected on the flyer is-- basically coincides with the level.

So if we're asking students that they need to be high intermediate English level, then the language of the flyer needs to reflect that. And then also just keeping it very simple and concise because it is a lot of information. So if you have any graphic designers in your teams, that also is very helpful. But I've gone through many iterations of flyers just continuing to improve and seeing what-- yeah, basically just continuing to improve our flyers so that students are able to get that information a lot easier.

And then, yeah, again, word of mouth has been one of the best ways. It has been honestly-- yeah, it has helped. It's been the majority. It has been the major part of our outreach and recruitment, has been word of mouth from other students. And you can go to the next slide for me, please.

Onboarding practices. So just how folks have mentioned in the past, we also hold orientation before they start that bridge class. And basically in the orientation, what we go over is what the pathway looks like for them. And then we also-- what we also go over is specific requirements that students need to have before they go into their technical training.

So basically, for example, some of the requirements that students need to have before they go into their technical training is that they have to have a high school diploma. So in the orientation, we explain, like if you don't have a high school diploma here in the US, we support students. I also support students getting their high school diplomas validated if they received high school in their country of origin.

So I know that that could be a barrier for a lot of people. But in the orientation, we basically go over that and explain that to them. I also explain that to them a lot in our one on ones and in my office hours when they come and see me. Another barrier can be their immigration status.

So let's say they're going through their immigration case, but they still haven't either received like a Social Security number, et cetera. We're very honest and straightforward about, if for technical training, they have to have a work permit to go in to take these classes, they do not have to. But we basically tell them, like if you're in the process, like take the classes and you can wait until you're ready to take the technical training.

So just to give you a couple of snippets of like how we-- because every student is different. Every student's situation is different. So really that one on one-- yeah, that one on one individualized support is super important in determining what exactly a student needs to make it through the pathway and get into the technical training.

And then let me see what else I wanted to highlight. Advise students throughout their pathway. And then also apart from orientation, I still go to our classes. So we have two classes. It's the bridge course.

And we usually call that English for health care I. And then we have another class called, which is a sister class, and we usually recommend students take that after. And that one we refer to as English for health care II. So English for health care I and then English for health care II. So students are required to take both classes in order to qualify for free technical training.

In those classes, I come and do presentations, just to remind them of the requirements. Remind them that these are some things that they need to look out for. I also really, really stress that before they go into technical training, they have to be ready in terms of time and commitment.

The technical trainings that we partner-- we basically partner with a private entity called CALRegional to do these technical trainings. Basically the technical training is asking a lot of the students. So for example, students are not able to miss a day of class. They have to be on time every day to class. So they're very strict about their technical trainings and what they require of students.

So all of these requirements, I try to go over it with students just to make sure that they understand what they're signing up for, and also really encourage them, like, hey, like if you feel like you're not ready to give your full time and commitment to this, you can wait until you go into it because we only cover your tuition one time and we're not able to cover it again. So we just really want you to make sure that you take advantage of this.

And so really, that has been one of the best ways in which I have been seeing students succeed in the pathway is really focusing on the onboarding, which is the orientation and going over the requirements and making sure that students understand clearly all of the requirements that are needed in order to go into technical training so that they are set up for success.

Shemila Johnson: I want to highlight, too, Abi, we don't-- for the tuition, what we're doing is obviously paying for the course through CALRegional. And so because we're paying contract Ed for the course, it's a one-time, essentially. No cost to the student. So it's not that we're covering tuition, but we're contracting Ed with CALRegional. So I want to clarify that.

Abigail Salazar: Thank you for clarifying that, Shemila. And then the next slide, supporting students to persist. Throughout the pathway, English for health care I and English for health care II, as students, when they start, one of the things that I wanted to mention as well is that our amazing instructors for these classes.

So for English for health care I, students, actually the first day of class, teachers actually have them fill out like an assessment. And they have an English rubric to see where they basically place. And so if the instructors are seeing that the students English is still not there, then they will recommend the student to take the next class, upcoming and instead take an English class to continue furthering or improving their level of English.

And in that way, students don't feel like basically discouraged. But one of the biggest things that has been really useful in my practice has been continuing to encourage them to take English classes. So the phrase that I've been using is the more that you vest in your English, the better.

One of the ways that I also, when I'm advising students is you want to feel comfortable. Once you finish your technical training and you're working with patients, like you want to be comfortable speaking with that patient. And so just kind of putting them into-- or giving them a little bit of a perspective of what it will be like when they're actually working after they complete their pathway.

Another thing that I've been noticing is like digital literacy. A lot of them have difficulty with computers, et cetera. And so one of the other things that I've been-- part of the wrap-around support services is referring them to free computer classes in our area. We do have this-- I've been referring students to this program where if they complete eight hours of digital literacy, they get a free laptop.

So if you have any resources like that around your area that you can refer students to, that is also a great, great resource in order to remove that barrier for students that are facing that specific area.

Another thing is that I'm super, super in contact and always collaborating with the course instructors as well as other counselors. So we're always in communication and in contact around like, hey, like is this specific-- how is this specific student doing?

Did you hear if that student is taking ESL 2, or advanced English, or-- just basically checking in and making sure that we're aware of like where the students in the pathway and getting other people's perspective, like the course instructor and other counselors can really help that.

Another thing is building community among students. So almost every cohort has created like a WhatsApp group chat. And they basically talk with one another. They support each other. They help each other out. They're always sharing resources and other things that might be useful to them.

And really, this has created a sense of community where a lot of our students might be, find themselves very isolated. And so once they come into this environment, they feel that sense of like unity and like that they're able to ask questions and they're able to really come into themselves.

I've seen like huge just three 60s of students, like being super shy and timid. And then by the end of the class, they're talking and asking questions. And honestly, that's really what fuels their resilience to continue going for what they want. And honestly, that has been one of the best gifts that I have received doing this work.

And then finally, just emotional supports. Sometimes students just need somebody to listen when things get hard. And so I have found myself many times just being that person to listen to students when they're having a hard time, like navigating everything, because it could be hard when English isn't your first language. And yeah, that's it for me, and I'll pass it to Shemila.

Shemila Johnson: Thank you so much, Abi. So as you can probably tell, Abi is a huge advocate for our students. She is their go-to person, and that is definitely one thing that I would say is a lesson learned internally. When we started, we had to manage some internal college hiring processes to get her or the position through the process.

We desperately needed a role from the beginning. And we have a team of transition liaisons that did an amazing job supporting the ramp-up phase and took on that direct student outreach and support in the interim. But I strongly encourage you, if you don't, to have a dedicated personnel to be the main point of contact for the students.

With having others who have their full-time roles supporting our general population of students, they were overloaded trying to help with this population of students as well. And so the in-person office hours that Abi mentioned and her availability has been key to our students persisting through the navigation of not only the onboarding process, but also persisting through any barriers that have come up.

Secondly, I highly encourage institutionalizing a regular convening of your key players from each program. We have a convening monthly to review our program updates, areas of concern, budgetary, and fiscal reports, and spending, as well as our progress against our goals. And so this allows us to strategize together, addressing student level issues, and to reciprocate best practices for programmatic challenges.

So we meet for one hour via Zoom. Obviously, we know folks have a lot of duties and priorities, and so, but it's been extremely helpful for us to gather on a regular cadence.

And then lastly, I want to highlight the co-location of the Abi's position has been a gem for our students. So we have different programs and different locations. And so we've worked with the program deans and directors to establish a set schedule each semester that includes a dedicated office space for Abi to be able to meet with those students, as well as to support the faculty and manage any issues that arise.

And so it's created a sense of belonging, not only for Abi to ingratiate herself into the program, but it also gives the students access to her multiple times a week. And in a month, she advertises her office hours at each location so that the staff, as well as the faculty and students, know where and how to reach her. And so those have been some best practices for us. Any questions?

Debi Pezzuto: We did have a few questions in the chat. And I don't know if you all noticed that we had a whole conversation going on in the chat off of Abi bringing up validating degrees from foreign countries. And so we will be saving this chat and sharing it with you.

But just to touch on it a bit, one of the resources is World Education Services. That's what I used in the past with students, and at IRC attest to it, as does Megan. And the cost for validating and transferring degrees is not an allowable expense in health care pathways. There are some other resources to pay for it.

I'm from Nevada and we didn't have any money, so I had to have students pay for and it was usually like $300 with $100 for translating. So not the most expensive versus starting all over from the beginning with college. But there have been other folks that sometimes will just have the students go through the high school equivalency program to complete their GED or high school equivalency hiset in the United States, which is totally an option.

And then we have another question from Martha about CALRegional. And this question has come up from other folks before. So for Abi or Shemila, do you contract CALRegional to provide the training and in turn provide the wraparound services, ESL, and management of the program?

Shemila Johnson: Yes. Oakland Adult is our partner that is directly working with CALRegional, and yes, that is what they do.

Debi Pezzuto: Thank you.

Joy Lewis: Is there anything else, Debi, that you had in the chat? I just wanted to address real quick before we move on. And I know we were a little over. So I want to make sure we get to the next thing. But Estella was asking-- Stella mentioned a quick question about the non-US diplomas. So, Estella, do you want to ask it quick and we'll see if we go?

Estella Banks: Yes, thank you for this opportunity. I did some research recently for the five programs that we're doing sponsoring in our consortium. And when I did the deep dive of the research from the certification level at the state, I found that out of our five, only pharmacy tech would accept a foreign diploma, evaluated, translated, and notarized.

All of the other programs required at least a few some college credits in order to validate or to accept the foreign degree or non-US diploma. And that was a phlebotomy, I think is one, and then EMT. So we have phlebotomy, EMT, pharmacy tech, CNA, and medical assistant.

Medical assistant and CNA don't require a high school diploma at the state level. But the other programs do require a high school diploma for the certification process. So I'm curious what programs you offer and how that works for the students in terms of having their diplomas validated when it gets to the certification level?

Abigail Salazar: Yeah, so just to quickly answer that question, because I know that we're out of time. But I use this resource. I know that Debi and Meghan have mentioned Wes, but I have gotten like a 95% success rate with this website that I just shared.

I do, I am very honest with students that we're not able to cover the cost. So it is a rate of $110 to get your high school diploma validated. Once they get it validated, it's acceptable for any of the programs that we offer.

Estella Banks: Good to know. Thank you.

Joy Lewis: Amazing. OK. I'm going to help us move along and turn over the presentation to Omar Romero and Anel Martinez from the South Bay Sweetwater. So I will pass it over to them to share more about their program.

I just want to-- hopefully we can do, like, about 10 minutes and then have more time for questions. And then we have plenty of time for the last one. Just wanted to remind you. Thank you.

Anel Martinez: Great. So we have a team of four individuals here. My name is Anel Martinez. I am the CT medical resource teacher for Sweetwater Union High School District. And we have Mr. Omar Romero, who is our ESL instructor and ELL language support instructor. And Mr. Fernando Chaidez, who's the assistant principal at San Ysidro Adult School in charge of the ELL grant, and Ms. Sara Garcia-Salgado, who is the principal for four adult schools in the South Bay, a Sweetwater Adult Schools.

So one of our models is fast forward with adult education, and we try to support our students in the academics, ESL, and also with our career programs. Sweetwater adult school has four sites National City, which is North of the South Bay, which is 10 miles from the International border. Then we have Chula Vista adult school, a Montgomery adult school, and lastly San Ysidro adult school, which is 2 miles away from the International border. Next slide, please.

These are our medical pathways that we have in place. We have medical programs among three of our sites. Three out of four sites. All of our courses in medical are articulated with college credit to Southwestern College, which is part of our consortium as well. Next slide, please.

And in 2020, we implemented IET support in all of our medical courses. And so we wanted to fast-forward our students that are coming out of our ESL classes into IET support throughout the whole medical pathway. However, as we brought in IET students, there was a gap that we were seeing where a lot of our English language learners were still needing some support, even with IET. And this is where the ELL health grant came in place. Next slide, please.