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Speaker: Otan, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Arij Mousa: Good morning Otan team, DLACers, and RPSA administrators. Beth, Michele, and I are happy to be here today to present our final project to you. And we can't thank the OTAN team enough for their support throughout the past two year journey.

Benny Pearson, congratulations on your retirement. Nadha Anaseri, Destiny Simpson, and Dr. Porter, and our fabulous coach who is extremely patient, supportive, and incredible Blair Roy. Thank you all.

Our final project is on transitioning ESL students into career pathways. During the first year and for the midterm project, we focus on transitioning ESL students into our current career pathways. Which we will discuss in more details in the next few slides, and the challenge as we change which made us change to the final project. Next.

First, I would like to thank our administrators Eric Vereyken, our principal, and Steven Casperite, our assistant principal, for their support throughout the last two years. We couldn't have done this project without their support. Eric, Stephen, if you'd like to pop in and say hello, feel free to do so, if you're there.

And finally and most importantly also our fabulous and patient Coach Blair Roy. She met with us on a weekly basis and guided us through the process. Her inspiration and support are incredible. Thank you, Blair. Next.

Secondly, I'd like to introduce my DLAC team and myself. We started with four members, team members-- Beth, Michele, Chris and I. And we lost one of our team members, Chris Anderson, to the district office halfway through the project. My name is Arij Mousa. I'm the CTE coordinator.

I've been with Placer School for Adults for the past 28 years, and the time has come. Like Benny, I'm retiring at the end of this year. I would like to introduce Beth and Michele, and have them introduce themselves. Beth.

Beth Lanning: Yeah, my name is Beth Lanning. And I'm one of the counselors, we have two counselors here at Placer School for Adults. A lot of my roles consist of our high school diploma program and our GED program, along with our CTE pathways and our career exploration and career assistance with our students.

I do a lot of registering students, working with them in their transcripts, helping them to be successful. And now Michele.

Michele Raymond: My name is Michele Raymond. And I am an administrative assistant here at Placer School for Adults. And about three years ago, I decided to go ahead and get my CTE credentials. So I have a CTE credential in sales and marketing, business and finance, and as well as technology.

Arij Mousa: Thank you, Michele and Beth. Next. To complete our project, we worked closely with Chrissy Agee, our ESL teacher and department chair, and Chris Staver, who is also one of our ESL teachers. Next.

Let me start by giving you a little background about who we are and who we serve, what programs we offer, and how the pandemic affected us in the last couple of years. Placer Schools for Adults is located in the Foothills. And we serve both Placer and Nevada counties.

We offer high school diploma, GED, ESL, and CTE career technical education program. Placer School for Adults is also a member of the Sierra Joint Consortium, which includes Nevada County Adult Education, Placer School for Adults, Roseville Adult School, Tahoe-Truckee, and Sierra College.

As many of you have been experiencing a drop down in enrollment, so did we. If you look at the chart in 2018, '19, our school thrived in attendance. As you can see, we were about 10,000 students duplicated. Which means the student could have taken more than one class. And then unduplicated was half of that, about 4,700 something, I forgot. I don't have the--

Michele Raymond: 4,830.

Arij Mousa: You're right, thank you. And then when the pandemic hit in 2020, our enrollment declined to almost half. Our attendance dropped from 10,000 duplicated to 5,487 unduplicated. And from 4,830 duplicated to 2,876 unduplicated.

The attendance continued to drop in 2021 dramatically to 1,429, to also 798 unduplicated. This semester our enrollment picked up a bit, and we were pleased with enrollment. So the numbers are going up. Next.

So we focused on, IELC integrated English literacy and civic education. We wanted our students to have these three skills, ESL, digital literacy, and career pathways. So we wanted to provide the English language learners, who are professional with degrees and credentials in their native countries, with the language skills and the digital literacy skills needed for career pathways and for obtaining jobs.

So Placer School for Adults collaborated with Lincoln High School and Roseville Adult School to provide both ESL classes, and through Roseville Adult School and digital literacy through Placer School for Adults. And the students would take ESL, and then switch to taking digital literacy. And that worked really well. Next slide.

Examples of career pathways that we offered were welding and manufacturing and product development, construction, pre-apprenticeship, and OSHAPEN certification under building and construction trades. And then Excel, Microsoft Office for the Workplace, accounting, and quickBooks, and our business and finance entry level bookkeeper. And as well as clinical medical assistant under health science and medical technology. Next.

As I mentioned in my previous slide, Placer School for Adults pilots and collaborates to provide services to parents of Lincoln High School students. So we use Lincoln High School classrooms and technology. And then Roosevelt Adult School provided an ESL teacher to teach the ESL language.

And then Placer School for Adults provided a teacher to teach their digital literacy. Next slide. Beth will speak about the challenges that we face transitioning ESL students, English language learners into career pathways. Beth.

Beth Lanning: Yeah, like many of you, we had a lot of challenges, one of them, of course, being a low attendance, which could be in part because of COVID. Thankfully, though, we had invested prior to the pandemic. We had invested a lot of time and energy and money into technology, so we had a pretty robust technology program already in our school.

So we were very familiar with video conferencing, and we did have an online curriculum for our high school diploma class. So that really helped a lot. We had student persistence was another challenge. Just lack of enrollment because students, for whatever reason, just didn't have the motivation, or whatnot, to come to class.

We had limited English proficiency, they had lack of transportation, so they had transportation issues, they had childcare issues, low tech-- or not enough technology at home or not enough skills to access our transportation. So those were a lot of challenges that we faced.

Thankfully too we were able to-- we only were online pretty much for a few months and then we were back in session. So that was really good that we were able to get back in session pretty quickly. Next slide.

So with the challenges we had a new opportunity to partner with a company called Mountain Enterprises. And they're a forestry management company that they contract through PTNI to clean up around high wires and just the forest areas of high fire danger.

So in the spring of 2021, we piloted a class, and it was about a month long. We had 53 students enrolled in the spring. And then in fall we had a decline in enrollment to only 13 students. Next slide.

We were very excited to partner with Mountain Enterprises, but the first year-- but in the first year we faced many challenges. We had low participation due to students long hours of work, and they also worked a lot of overtime. So by the time class started, which was at night, in the evening classes, they just didn't have the energy to come to class.

So students-- and they didn't even an-- they didn't have an incentive also to participate. So that was another reason. Next slide. So we refocused with Mountain Enterprises, and we came to an agreement with them, and decided to make the class a condition of employment. We also developed a blended learning model that was based on cost of scores, and it included homework assignments as well.

So we assessed each student. And based on their scores, we were able to develop instruction according to their scores. We also were able to loan them Chromebooks. So students who did not have access to technology were able to loan one of our Chromebooks that we had available.

And students could also include family members if they were 18 years or older. We offered the class three days a week Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And we used the curriculum Pearson Future ebooks and MyEnglish Lab. Next slide.

This year-- or actually last year, we integrated a program called Go For It, and used it as a goal planning tool to help students be successful. This program allows students to define their goals, short term and long. The process starts as we onboard students and enroll them classes.

A counselor or a teacher introduces the activity, and helps the students work their way through the process. After a goal is defined, students create a plan to achieve the goal. They work through barriers and come up with solutions around the barriers to achieve the ultimate goal. They also decide on a timeline of when they plan to reach this goal. Next slide. Michele is going to now talk about the pathways.

Michele Raymond: So we started to get creative on what we could do to really help our students get into the pathways. And one of the things that we started doing was inviting our ESL students into other classes, for instance like our clinical, medical assisting program.

So that they could kind of see what the students were doing, how they were interacting with the different students to feel successful in possibly participating in these programs.

We wanted to talk a little bit about the Ideal 101 and 102 experience that we had. First of all, we really like to thank Destiny. It really helped us fill some of the gaps that we had, such as meeting the needs of our students. It helped us to learn about other programs and what other schools are doing.

It was so fun to be able to collaborate with Martinez. Thank you so much. You guys are amazing. We really enjoyed getting to know you guys. And we really appreciate it. Other things that we did were we really focused on our technology. Also classroom learning management systems, we're moving towards Canvas. And then we were looking at other models of what other schools in the areas were doing as far as teaching.

Another thing that we did was we focused on rubrics for instruction, such as curriculum, and how we could focus on what curriculum worked best for our students. Our focus was to increase the student involvement, which in essence increases our students' success.

So we had an ex commute-- an execution of implementing persistence, focusing on our students progress, and the flexibility to meet our students' needs. Examples that we used. We put ViewSonics in all of our classrooms to inspire the use of technology. At our teacher academies we actually had somebody from ViewSonic come in and train our teachers on how to use the equipment.

At our teacher academies we also collaborate amongst staff and other schools at times. We focused on our students' needs and the various challenges that they had, so that they could get past those challenges and focus on classroom instruction.

We also focused on our strengths. We love this Dr. Porter. This is one of our favorite things, was looking at our team strengths and really learning to focus on those strengths instead of our weaknesses. Because I think that's what we all do, we focus on our weaknesses so we can be better at it.

And we really learned that to focus and play on our team and our teammates' strengths to get us through the project. So thank you Dr. Porter. We'd also like to thank the OTAN team and Blair. Blair, you are so supportive as our team members.

We encountered a lot of challenges. We had three of our team members have deaths in their family. And having a team leader, one of our team moved to the district. So it was definitely challenging. But Blair all along was there cheering us on and being our biggest cheerleader. And we can't thank you enough. So thank you very much.