[audio logo]

Speaker: OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network.

Carolyn Zachry: Hi. I'm Dr. Carolyn Zachry. I am the education administrator for the Adult Education Office and the state director for the WIOA Title II AEFLA grant. And with me today is Angela Steele from OTAN. And she will be sharing, once I'm done, the nuts and bolts of the online application.

Now, because this is an RFA, and it's a competitive RFA, I am going to be following very closely a script that is written to go along with these slides as this is being recorded. As soon as it is remediated, it will be posted on the OTAN website. And information will be sent out about that posting.

You will notice that next to the chart there is a section for Q&A. And that is where you need to put all of your questions. And we will do our very best to answer those during this webinar. We will also be taking those questions and putting them into our FAQs that will be posted on our website in the middle of September.

So with all of that housekeeping finished, I'm going to go ahead and get started. So welcome to the California Department of Education's Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Grant Title II Adult Education and Family Literacy Act Request for Applications, known as an RFA, webinar.

This is a recorded webinar, which will not include-- which actually does include the ability to ask questions. At the end of the webinar, information will be provided related to an additional mechanism for sending questions to the Adult Education Office.

Notice of applicants-- so applicants are going to be notified by the CDE that you have passed the eligibility screening process. And then you will be available to do the full online AEFLA funding application. Eligible individual providers and consortia must submit all relevant forms, responses to considerations 1 through 12, and the projected enrollment table online on or before 5:00 PM on December 15, 2022.

So just stick with me. I know you're wondering more about the eligibility screening or demonstrated effectiveness. If agencies elect to apply as a consortia or a coalition, one agency must be identified as the lead agency for the group. However, all consortia and coalition members are subject to the terms and conditions of the grant award and federal requirements and state policies.

All agencies applying as a consortium or coalition must reside within one of the 71 regional community college district service areas that were established under the California Adult Education Program known as CAEP. Only one consortium or coalition within CAEP boundaries is allowed. All other applicants must come in as individual agencies.

Again, no more than one consortia or coalition of agencies within a single consortium is allowed. However-- that's probably not a however-- it's an and you must first do demonstrated effectiveness as individual agencies. Once we have determined eligibility, then those agencies who are eligible to complete the full application can join together within their consortia to do a single application.

The lead agency has several responsibilities-- submitting a single application on behalf of the group, outlining a plan via the considerations 1 through 12 to provide adult education and literacy activities detailing the roles and responsibilities of each member agency, a listing of all of the participating agencies that passed the eligible screening process.

Individual agencies that did not pass the eligibility screening cannot be part of the consortium or Coalition Application. And the lead agency will serve as the applicant agency of record, the legally-recognized fiscal agent for the grant, and the single point of contact for the CDE.

The local education agency superintendent, appropriate college administrator for the provider's Chief Executive Officer must enter an authorized electronic signature and date upon submission. This certifies that all eligibility requirements set forth in this RFA, including the assurances and certifications, will be met.

Public or private nonprofit organizations have additional assurances, which are outlined in Appendix A. Agencies that are not federal, state, or local governmental agencies must comply and submit the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act Sub-Award reporting form with the application to the CDE.

This form is accessible on the CDE Request for Applications Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act Title II web page. Failure to submit may delay the grant distribution or cancel the grant award.

Additionally, agencies that are not federal, state, or local governmental agencies and have not done business with the CDE must also complete and submit their application to the state of California, the Payee Data Record available on the funding forms web page. Complete sections two through six, information on sections two, four, and six must be consistent with the information identified in the application.

Each application will be reviewed by the Local Workforce Development Board using the Local Workforce Development Board dropdown. You're going to select the appropriate board for your area. And this will populate all of the other necessary information.

The next section of the online application requires that program areas address in the application-- requires that program areas to be addressed in the application be selected. One or more areas may be selected.

WIOA section 225 is funding to support Institutionalized Adults and Corrections Education in English language acquisition, adult basic and secondary education, high school diploma and/or equivalency. That's 225 funding.

Section 231, which is our largest set of funding for adult education for programs offering adult education in English Language Acquisition, English literacy and Civics education, citizenship preparation, adult basic and secondary education, high school diploma and/or equivalency.

WIOA section 243 is for Integrated English Literacy and Civics Education in combination with integrated education and training activities. When you apply, you may select one or more of these sections to submit your application in.

Each application, will be evaluated based on the 12 considerations. Applicants must answer all questions in the online application. This includes a needs assessment, how you will be serving individuals with disabilities, past effectiveness, alignment with your AJCC, the intensity, duration, and flexibility of your scheduling, evidence-based instructional practices and reading instruction, effective use of technology and distance learning, facilitation of learning and context, how you will have and ensure qualified instructors and staff, how you are going to have partnerships and support services for development of career pathways, that you will have a high-quality information and data collection system, and how you will do integrated English literacy and civics if you are applying for that section.

The Adult Education and Family Literacy Act is a pay-for-performance reimbursement grant. In an effort to determine appropriate funding levels, all applicants must complete the projected enrollment tables. It is critically important to be as accurate as possible regarding the projected enrollment to determine total projected funding. CDE reserves the right to adjust agency projections in determining grant awards.

Grant awards for previously-funded agencies will be based on the number of payment points earned from program year 2021. Projected enrollment tables may be used in instances when an agency is projected dramatic increases in enrollment.

Grant awards for newly-awarded agencies or previously-funded agencies applying for new program areas-- for example, if the only area that you were funded in the past was 231 and now you're going to be adding correctional education or IELCE, then that new program area will be based on projected enrollments multiplied by our state aggregate average of students achieving payment points.

Under each applicable program enter the projected student enrollment for the program year 2023. Just a reminder that students must be enrolled in the ELA program to participate in ELCE or IELCE.

For programs serving institutionalized adults and adults in corrections, enter the projected student enrollments for the program year 2023 under each applicable program. Remember that students must be enrolled in the ELA program to participate in English language and civics education and integrated English language civics education.

Under each applicable program, enter the projected enrollment for program year 2023. Again, students must be enrolled in the ELA program to participate in ELCE and IELCE. Remember that integrated English literacy and civics education in combination with integrated education and training activities is required for section 243 funding.

Now, what we're going to be sharing with you when Angela begins is the information about your demonstrated effectiveness. And we are providing you the option-- and she will show you this-- to select your best years out of the last four years of data in each section that you are applying in.

We know COVID has had an impact. And in past years, we've only had put in your last two years of data, no matter what. So this time, we're allowing for this choice on an agency's part as to what data to put in your demonstrated effectiveness.

Now, if you have questions, please send them to the adult education email box. And our frequently asked questions will be posted on the link similar to this. This link is not live right now we will have a live link when our FAQs are posted. And now I'm going to turn it over to Angela.

Angela Steele: OK. Thank you. Let me just get up to share here, get set up. OK. Can you see my screen now? Yes.

Carolyn Zachry: Yes.

Angela Steele: OK. I'm going to demonstrate part one of the RFA on the online application reporting site, which is the applicant eligibility screening. So you'll come to the reporting site. And one important note is this section is not accessible through your existing login information. This part is available to anyone.

So you will not log into it with your existing login details. So whether you want to start or continue, you'll select this Start or Continue Applicant Eligibility Screening button. And it will take you to the landing page for the eligibility information. This is a copy of data from the RFA Word document, which is accessible from this link here at the top that goes to the CDE website and has the actual RFA full Word document.

But here is information from it that's relevant to filling out this online part of the application. So it describes who can apply and what the demonstrated effectiveness is. So you'll read all of this information. And then if this is your first time going through the process, you'll select the I Have Read the Instructions checkbox. And then select the Begin Application button.

So once we start the application, let me just point out a few pieces about how it will work. On the left side, you'll see a navigation panel with links to go to different sections. At the very beginning, only the first link is accessible, the agency information page. So you'll enter your agency information.

Sacramento Adult School-- just going to enter some data here. Enter a mailing address for the agency. And then you have to enter the street address. You can type it in separately if it's different. Or you can select the same as mailing address checkbox here to automatically populate this with the details from the mailing address section.

And then you'll need to fill out the contact prepared by section. So this is the name of the person actually entering the data. So right now this is me, Angela Steele. And all of these fields are required or the majority of them. And that's indicated by the red asterisk next to each label.

And then you'll need to fill out information for the superintendent, president, or executive officer of the agency. And enter the superintendent, president, or chief executive officer's email address.

This is important to get right. Because in future stages, your eligibility screening application will be identified by the superintendent's email address. And I'll get to that more in just one second. Then you'll select the type of organization, which is LEA community-based organization, et cetera.

The one option that cannot be selected in this first step is consortium coalition since every agency needs to apply individually for this demonstrated effectiveness part. And then there is a funding history section where you can identify whether your agency has been previously-funded under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act previously.

So I'll say no. And then I'll hit the Save and Continue button. And then I notice that I forgot to enter a value for the type of organization. And it just shows me a red message here. And won't let me proceed until that's been fixed.

So any field that needs to be filled out, if you haven't entered data, you'll see a helpful label describing what you need to fill in. So I'm just going to select LEA here and Save and Continue. And now make a note of the email address of the superintendent and a PIN number that's been generated. And this is how you can come back to the application and access it later if you want to come back and enter numbers or edit numbers or review before you do the final submission.

So you'll take the superintendent's email address and the PIN number you've been assigned. And on the landing page, instead of beginning a new application, you can log in as an existing application with that information. But I'm just going to continue now to the demonstrated effectiveness year one.

And like Dr. Zachry noted, you can enter demonstrated effectiveness for one of four different program years. And so in the navigation panel, it's just represented as year one and year two here. But what you'll need to do is in this first program in your dropdown list, you'll select the fiscal year that you want to enter data for.

So I'm going to select 2019-20 as the first year that I want to enter data for. More details about this are in the actual RFA document. So I'm just going to quickly go through this form and enter some numbers then I can proceed.

It'll automatically calculate percentages. And so you'll enter data for each row and column that's required. And then the percentage of students will be automatically calculated for you.

Again, I'm just going to enter some number in these tables. So we can proceed. And then I'm going to save this table and continue on to year two. So now for demonstrated effectiveness year one, I chose fiscal year 2019-20. And now it doesn't show up in the list anymore. And for a year two, I'm going to decide I want to use fiscal year '21-'22. So I'll select that. Again, I'm just going to enter some data in here so we can proceed.

And there are a lot of rows. So I'm just scrolling a little quickly here. So now I'm going to choose the button to save table two and continue. And it's going to take me to the last step in the navigation menu, the review.

So you can review all of the information that you've entered-- your agency information, mailing address, email address and information, and type of agency. And then you can review all of the numbers you entered for the demonstrated effectiveness tables for whichever fiscal years you chose.

And let's say you want to make an update in the mailing address, you can just select the agency information link. Go back, save any data. Scroll to the bottom. And select the Save button in order to save any changes you make. And now I'll jump right back to the review.

And we can see the data that I changed has been updated. And I'm going to scroll through and decide that everything looks correct and accurate. And I will select the I Accept check button. And that will enable the Submit Application button.

So once you submit, you'll get a message that your applicant eligibility information has been submitted to CDE. And you will also receive an email confirmation of that with your superintendent email address and PIN number for use in the next step of the application.

And, Carolyn, I think that's it for what I have to demo right now.

Carolyn Zachry: Great. Thank you so much, Angela. So we will be doing another webinar after the demonstrated effectiveness pieces have been completed and eligible agencies have been notified. We will do a webinar, which will include Angela doing something similar to what she just did, but walking through the other parts of the application, which are not open at the present time.

If you are a first-time applicant, then you're going to use whatever data that you have from any of those program years to show us that you have effectively been able to provide instruction in literacy for adults in English language acquisition, reading, or mathematics and that you're helping adults to progress on their journey. And so that will be-- that's why we have these four years instead of just providing you a limited number of years.

So again, you're going to want to select those years that are best to have your best numbers for demonstrated effectiveness. And again, we are going to be taking all of your questions. And we will be putting together the FAQs. That link will go out in an email and will be posted on multiple places, including-- it will go out in an email to our-- we have our federal applications website on the listserv so that anyone can go in and grab that.

Again, did I answer all the questions right now. Yes?

Angela Steele: I'm sorry I just wanted to make one note. The applicant eligibility screening is not live on the website yet. I was just doing a demo.

Carolyn Zachry: Sorry, September 1. Yes. It'll be available September 1. So it gives you some time to get your data pulled together, you're looking at your data, determining which years you're going to use for which sections if you are going to apply in multiple sections. And then you can go ahead, and on September 1, get started on it.

So again, don't procrastinate as I keep saying. You have the information. You can be ready to enter data on September 1.

And then, Angela, what's our closing date on that? I don't remember off the top of my head.

Angela Steele: September 30.

Carolyn Zachry: September 30. So you will have the month of September. And our goal is to notify agencies sometime mid to late October for those agencies that are eligible based on their demonstrated effectiveness to move forward.

So we thank you very much for joining us today for this very brief and quick webinar. It will be-- it is being recorded. As soon as it is remediated, it will be posted. And we will be able to share with you the answers to your questions in our FAQs. Thank you.