(DESCRIPTION) Debi Pezzuto (SPEECH) DEBI PEZZUTO: All right, good morning. Thank you all for joining us. And welcome, and thank you for joining us for the virtual adaptation of Bridging the Gaps, Using Data and Personas for Three-Year Planning. So over the past three months, we visited all seven regions in California. And today's webinar is actually going to be a condensed version of the training that we've already offered. So if you haven't been able to attend in-person, this is perfect. We won't be doing-- good morning, Meghan McBride. We won't be doing our full six-hour training, obviously, but we are going to be doing a data walk and looking at some of the key features, and then still have an opportunity to do some of the persona work that we did out in the field. And we would also be happy to meet with you one-on-one anytime if you're interested in a more in-depth customized data analysis or a strategic planning at any time. So we can work with you if you really want to dig into what you have going on at your agency level or your consortium level. So before we start, we would like to thank the Chancellor's Office, CAEP team, Gary Adams, Mayra Diaz, and Cora Rainey, and the folks from CDE, Carolyn Zachry, Diana Batista, and Neil Kelly who support this type of work for us to ensure quality adult education across the state. We'd also like to thank SCOE TAP for the support they provide to us and in the field. And before we dive in, I'd like to introduce our team. Our team of presenters is just Meghan and I today. We are from WestEd where we provide professional development and technical assistance to California Adult Education programs. I am Debi Pezzuto, the senior program associate for adult education, and I'm joined by Meghan McBride, Senior Program Manager for Adult Education. Throughout today's presentation, I'll be monitoring the chat feature, so if you have questions, put your questions there. And if you'd like to speak, just also say and we can unmute you and go for it because it looks like it's going to be a small group today. Please feel free to ask anything you need. Meghan will also be pausing periodically to address any questions and keep the discussion interactive, too. Now I'd like to introduce Meghan. Meghan McBride will be facilitating our webinar. She's joined WestEd in 2024 as the senior program manager for adult education. In this role, she leads efforts to support adult education consortia in using data-driven strategies to strengthen educational services. Meghan's areas of expertise include adult literacy, English as a second language, high school equivalency preparation, integrated education and training, and WIOA Title II. She's got all the acronyms. Previously, Meghan served as a Vice President at a local community college in Metro Atlanta, managing a large adult literacy program. And so now I'll turn it over to Meghan herself, and we can dig into our data. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Thank you. Good morning. Where I'm from, it's afternoon, but good morning to all of you. I'm so glad that you are here to do our data walks today, and our strategies and gaps and three-year planning conversation. If you want to turn your camera on, I would love to see your faces. You're all very disembodied to me right now, which is fine. But I can't see all of your screens, so it would be nice to look at you if you want to turn it on. I see some of you who were in our trainings. Carla, I'm looking at you. I'm glad to see you here. I believe you are with us in Northern Alameda. I'm sorry, North Far North. I just finished a meeting with Northern Alameda. So I'm glad to see you here, Carla, because we've really perfected this over the last couple of months as we've been traveling around the nation of California doing this training, so good to have you back. So, yeah, Debi, was just sharing with you all that we do offer one-on-one conversations, where we look at this data for your consortium. And we can also look at more stuff and really dig into your labor market along with your community needs. And I just finished doing that with Northern Alameda. She took me up on that offer for the fourth time now, so I've done a lot of one-on-one facilitated three-year planning conversations with her, with even more to come. So please feel free to reach out to me or Debi after this if you want to look into any of this for your consortium for the three-year planning process. So as the title shows, we will be talking about using data for three-year planning. Debi, what's the next slide? DEBI PEZZUTO: Pulling it up just now. Would you like to share the slide deck or? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: No, you can do it and I'll just take over when it's time to do the tools. Sorry. DEBI PEZZUTO: Found the play. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: So the three-year planning process, the irreducible core of it, what we focus on are three phases. The first is identifying or describing the educational needs of adults in the region, which is the first thing we're going to do today, looking at the CAEP Fact Sheets. So scanning our region and seeing what adults need, the target population for us, then we will look at our own data sources and determine what services we are providing to see if they match what the adults in the region need. And then the final part of that process is to develop strategies to address the gaps that we discovered in that data dig. Now, you would look at multiple sources of data to do this. But today we'll be showing you two data sources that we curate here at WestEd. And those are the top two on this list, the CAEP Fact Sheets and DataVista. But you also have other sources of data at your fingertips, like your COMIS data or your TOPSpro data. You can also look at census data to see what your educational needs are for the adults in the region, and then what services you provide, what your enrollment metrics are, what your outcome metrics are, transitions, to really determine what you might need to work to solve if there is a problem at all. Before we get started, I want to point you to a particular tool that Mayra and the Chancellor's Office, I guess, have been sharing with you all. I don't know if you all heard of the Promising Practices report. I've been trying to highlight this around the state. It's a report that contains practices and interventions that several of the highest performing sites implemented, high performing in terms of their metrics already or exceeded the state average for certain populations. And as I was reading through it, I noticed that what we're doing today is promising practice number 4. So we'll be looking at in-demand jobs in our regions. And we won't have time today, but we could do this in a one-on-one, look at the neighborhoods in your regions to see if you are offering programs that are accessible to the students, or the potential students in your region. So we can look at high density areas where people don't have a diploma and see if you are accessible to those folks. We can see if they have transportation to get to your program, or if maybe you need to think about offering your programs in their neighborhoods, maybe in an apartment complex or in a church basement. We'll also be looking at student performance data, transition metrics. And so we're engaging in this promising practice. And I just wanted to point that out to you all. And in the last phase of this where we use this data to engage in strategic decision making, that is all in CAEP promising practice number 4. So please take a moment to read that when you get a chance, and look at all of the 7 Promising Practices. So as we look at our data today, if you're feeling intrepid, please follow along. If you're a monitor diva like myself, and you have multiple monitors in front of you, and you can put me on one monitor and your browser on another monitor, please open up the CAEP Fact Sheets or DataVista and follow along. Otherwise, you can just kick back, relax and watch me do it. But I won't be able to look at all of your consortia. So if you want to look at your own data, you should probably follow along. And I'll go slowly enough that you can do that. But while we're looking at the data, again, in honor of three-year planning, look at what the educational needs are for adults in your region. Do they need English as a second language? Do they need high school diploma or equivalency programs? Do they need non-credit training in a certain high demand occupation? Look at that, and then think about what you know about your program and whether you are offering those services to meet that need. And then later on, we will strategize on how to meet those gaps, through a personas activity. So we're going to start with the CAEP Fact Sheets. And it looks like someone has kindly dropped the link to that. Thank you, Mandilee. And I'm going to take over now, Debi. (DESCRIPTION) CAEP Fact Sheets (SPEECH) Thank you. And I'm going to share my screen. So I'll give you all a moment to open up your CAEP Fact Sheets, if you so choose. (DESCRIPTION) Consortium Demographic Data shows bar graphs and pie graphs (SPEECH) So if you haven't looked at the CAEP Fact Sheets recently, like in the last couple of weeks, we have updated the data. We refreshed it. So it now has the '22-'23, which still needs to be refreshed again because we just got our DataVista data few days ago. But when you go to the CAEP Fact Sheets page, you land on statewide data. (DESCRIPTION) Scrolls (SPEECH) But I'm going to drill down to a consortium. And you can drill down to your own consortium so that you can look at data specific to [AUDIO OUT]. And because I was just on with Northern Alameda, I'll just pick on them. And I know they're not here. So when you drill down to your data, and you do that up here at the top you click Select Consortium and you can find your consortium there. Again, it's statewide. You know you're on statewide when you see 30 million people over the age of 18. When you drill down to your consortium, it will drop down to the population in your area. So this is going to show us key demographic data that would be of interest to adult education programs. So first of all, the data are only for people over the age of 18. Debi, keep me honest on time here too, by the way. DEBI PEZZUTO: Well, I'll do. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. Yeah, so it's adults over the age of 18. And in Northern Alameda, that's about 558,000 people. About 70,000, and all of these you can click on to isolate them, are adults with disabilities. You might want to look at how many have no high school diploma about 60,000, 61,000. But of the overall population, as you can see, most of the folks in Northern Alameda are 65 and older. It gives you the breakdown of all the age demographics. There's a large group of folks of working age, maybe 25 to 44 or 49. Roughly half and half, female to male, a little bit more females, which is not uncommon in populations. Their largest ethnic group is white, followed by Asian at about a fifth of the population, and then Hispanic, not far behind, Black. And then it declines significantly from there. In the Northern Alameda consortium, and you can see this in your consortium data, you can see the breakdown of the population who speaks English only, which is almost 60% speaks English very well, 23%, and then these are your potential ESL students. I'm sorry. Oh, this is well, this is the potential less than well. So not a huge chunk of the population, about 9% of the total population. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is a highly educated area because it's very expensive to live there, so you need some training to be able to afford the cost of living. We would be most interested probably in the folks who have no diploma, which is almost 11% of the population. And then we can also see the labor force. As we can see, a solid third of folks who are 18 and older in Northern Alameda are not in the labor force. That is probably because many of them are 65 and older, and have probably retired, and they have unemployment of about 4%. Any questions so far? Are we good on the front page here? DEBI PEZZUTO: No, we're doing great. And we have plenty of time, Meghan, so. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, good. Oh. ELENA: Sorry. I think there was one question in the chat. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Good, I can take a sip of water. DEBI PEZZUTO: So the question was from Carla. Oh, there's two questions, actually. Carla says, "English ability. I wish those data points were aligned to grade levels. It would be more helpful." Agreed, Carla. Kim has a question. "Where does the data for English language ability come from?" MEGHAN MCBRIDE: This comes from the census. So this is self-reported data. Now, when we look at your DataVista data, or if you're looking at TOPSpro, of course, that's coming from your pretest. But this is self-reported data on the census. (DESCRIPTION) Includes employment status, education (SPEECH) DEBI PEZZUTO: And-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] DEBI PEZZUTO: We actually have a tool in our shared Google Drive. And I put the link in the chat. So you can go in and find all of the tools that we're sharing today, but there is one specifically to walk you through using census data, and so that might also help you figure out where those folks are that have the lower level of English. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Yeah. In fact, that's what I was just doing with Northern Alameda. We looked at the census data. We were trying to find where we should market. They don't really need to market for ESL. Their enrollment is very, very strong in ESL, as we'll see if I choose to use their data in DataVista. But for high school equivalency, we can look at the density where English language learners reside or where people who don't speak English reside, where if you want to market your program, we can find specific areas of your region where it would be the biggest return on your marketing investment to advertise using that census data. Or, again, if you're a more intrepid user of the internet, you can follow along with those directions and do it on your own, but we're happy to do that with you. As I've mentioned, the CAEP Fact Sheets break down the overall population into subgroups that are of interest to us in adult education. These all align with the barriers that we see among our population. So we can look into limited English, for example, if you click on that. And you can see how the demo or how the data change when you're only looking at the limited English population. Now, remember, that wasn't a terribly large group of their overall population, but of these folks who have limited English, 43,000 people, still a significant number because it is almost 600,000 people in that area, you can see the ethnicity changed. So they have primarily Asian members of their community who are limited English. Over half of the folks in Northern Alameda who have limited English are Asian, followed by Hispanic. Now, if I wanted to look for an equity gap here, I would look at my DataVista data, and we'll do this. We can look at the folks who are enrolled, our participants in ESL. We can disaggregate that by ethnicity. And what we would hope to see is something similar here, where maybe the highest enrollment is Asian and Hispanic, followed by white and Black. And of course, white can be folks who are from European countries that don't speak English. It's not necessarily that they're American. Same with Black, they can be from African countries, for example. But you would want to see a similar breakdown of the population enrolled in our ESL programs. Another interesting data point is that of the population who have limited English, over half of them have no diploma. So these are students we could also perhaps enroll in our high school equivalency or high school diploma programs if and when they acquire the English language fluency for them to be successful in those programs. And here is the breakdown of languages among our population who speak English less than well. Of course, it looks like our Asian population is very diverse. And then the Hispanic students speak Spanish, unsurprisingly. And here's the labor force statistics for our population who speaks English less than well. (DESCRIPTION) Popup data appears when she hovers over a graph. (SPEECH) And then we'll look at another one here, the no high school diploma. Our CAEP programs offer adult basic Ed and adult secondary Ed, so this is a potential group for us to look into. About 61% of their population have no high school diploma. Again, if you look at the overall population, this is about 11% of their population. So we're digging into this data here when we look at this subgroup. And again, I'm drawn to the ethnic breakdown here as I'm looking for equity gaps and who we're serving. So the nearly half of the population in Northern Alameda who do not have a high school diploma are Hispanic. So I would want to see in my enrollment data, people who are enrolled in adult basic Ed or adult secondary Ed. I would like to see that most of them are Hispanic to match the proportion of the overall population. If most of my students are white, then maybe we have an equity gap, and we need to focus on recruiting and retaining Hispanic students because we want our programs to match the need in the community. DEBI PEZZUTO: Question for you. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. DEBI PEZZUTO: Kim has another follow up question that goes along with this. She said, "With this census data, is it a county-wide report? For example, for our consortia, if it is for all of LA County, the data does not really reflect the reality of Santa Clarita as a whole." MEGHAN MCBRIDE: That's a great question, Kim. And I will try not to belabor this too much. So for the census data-- or are you asking for census or for the CAEP Fact Sheets? Because I can talk about both. DEBI PEZZUTO: You can unmute yourself, Kim, if you'd like. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: And, Kim, did I meet you? I feel like I met you also. Can't see-- KIM: I'm not sure, actually. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. So the CAEP Fact Sheets are just for your consortium. So if you're in Los Angeles and you're at Larrick or North Orange or any number of consortia there, it is only looking at the population in your consortium. So there's no blending of areas. It's just who would be in your consortium. Now, the census, you can cut the data any number of ways. When we look at it, if we were to look at it together, we would look at it by census tract, which is a roughly equivalent population density. But because it's hard to break down LA County, so that's why we look at it by census tract. And we would just focus in on the census tracts that are in your consortium, which requires you to look at it with me because I don't really know the boundaries of your consortium, but we can underlay it with roads and streets and highways and cities so you kind of know what you're looking at. I hope that answers the question. Let me know if it did not. DEBI PEZZUTO: She said it did. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, good. So again, the CAEP Fact Sheets, we're looking in the boundaries of your consortium only, not the county as a whole, as long as you have your consortium selected, of course. So, yeah, that's that. Now, I'm going to move to the next tab. I think we've looked at enough here for you to be able to-- well, I want to look at one more thing on a high school diploma. I want to point out, 50% of the population here without a high school diploma are male. I would venture a guess that if you look at your enrollment, you are predominantly serving females in this program. That's typically what we see, and it's not unusual for women to be more likely to enroll in school than men these days. But it might be something to think about because that might be an equity gap. I'm going to move along to the next tab here. I'll look at a couple more tabs before we jump into DataVista. So up here you have several tabs where you can look at different data. We're going to look next at population and consortium. And it kept us in Northern Alameda. And what we're looking at now is a side by side comparison of what we were just looking at. These are the potential students in your area. You should remember this number, 558. That was the overall number of adults over 18 in Northern Alameda. And this is who you're serving. So this is DataVista data. This comes to us from TOPSpro and COMIS and becomes DataVista. So we're not going to dig into this too much because we are going to do that in a minute on DataVista, but I just want to show you how you can compare and look for gaps, potentially here. Now, there's a dropdown here on the right, where you can look at participants in various programs and then you can compare that. And we'll do that real quickly over here. And a very easy comparison is ESL to limited English. So I'm going to use that as an example. And here is where you can look for equity gaps right in front of you. So we can start with gender. If you look at gender, over half of the people in this consortium, or in this region are female who are limited English. And you see that 65%, as I mentioned a moment ago, that was probably the case, are female students. So you're serving 65% females in your ESL program in Northern Alameda, and about 35% male. When you look at the age breakdown, most of the students enrolled are of working age, which is probably appropriate. Even though most of the population is 60 and older, I would not be too concerned about this because we do work in workforce development. Here is where you've got a little bit of a difference in ethnic breakdown. So in the population, 52% of the limited English population is Asian. They are only 28% of enrollment, whereas Hispanic students are overrepresented. It's over half of the enrollment in this consortium, but only 40% of the population of limited English, so it might be worth working on recruiting students who are from Asian countries into the program. So you can break that down any way you'd like, and so we'll move on for now to labor market information. So this is where we can look at high demand occupations in your region as we're thinking about the non-credit programs that we offer in our consortium. Any questions? I'm sorry about the last thing. DEBI PEZZUTO: No, no questions to this. Anybody want to jump in, though? You can unmute yourself. We have a small enough group. (DESCRIPTION) Regional Labor Market Data Information shows while they wait. (SPEECH) MEGHAN MCBRIDE: So we can filter this by region over here. Well, I might actually go down to Alameda County. (DESCRIPTION) Region is on the left. (SPEECH) I'll look at Alameda County. Now, here, Kim, we're not looking at the boundaries of your community, of your consortium, I'm sorry. So in Alameda County, for example, there are three consortia in Alameda County. There's northern, mid and Southern Alameda. Of course, people can travel up and down the county using rapid transit, drive their cars to go to work. So this is not going to look at just the occupations in your consortium. It's going to be based on what either region you pick or county you select here. So it is probably also helpful to filter this by the education level. We probably are not interested in the demand for neurologists for example. So we will not look at certain entry-level education requirements. We would not be interested in doctoral degrees because we do not train for that in adult education, nor do we train for master's degrees, bachelor's, or associate's. I probably would also take off some college. Well, maybe not because we might want to think about dual enrollment for our students. I'll leave that there. But this would capture our certificates and non-credit credentials. We maybe want a high school diploma in there. And we'll take off that one as well. No formal credential. But you can look at this any way that suits your fancy to see what the highest demand occupations are. So this is, again, pulling up Alameda County where the living wage is $28 an hour. So we would prefer to employ our students, or train them for jobs where they can earn at least $28 an hour. Now, if you recall, when we looked at their demographic data, most of the population is over the age of 65. So perhaps unsurprisingly, the largest industries are health care and social assistance, probably to support an aging population. Then government manufacturing, and it goes on and on. But the 10 fastest growing occupations are listed here. And it's important to actually look at the hard numbers. Here's a very good example of why. The fastest growing occupation is in shoe machine operators and tenders, but when you look down here at the actual numbers, that's because they went from having 15 jobs, and they're expected to grow by 10 jobs, which is 64%. This does not a high demand occupation make. So we would probably not be really interested in that occupation. I don't think we want to create a non-credit certificate for shoe machine operators when there's only potentially going to be 25 jobs. By contrast, here we have 99 jobs opening up in multiple machine tool centers. So, I don't know, that could be a construction trades job or a manufacturing job, but this might be something you might want to look into if you have large numbers of jobs potentially opening up in an area to create non-credit programs that match these high demand occupations. (DESCRIPTION) Fastest Growing Occupations (SPEECH) Any questions on that? DEBI PEZZUTO: No questions, but I'm going to give you the two-minute warning. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Well, I'm ready to move on to DataVista now anyway. So, thanks, Debi. So if there are no questions on the CAEP Fact Sheets, let's dig into your data. Does that sound good? Does anybody want me to look at their consortium as an example? If you do, drop it in the chat and I'll use you. If not, I will continue along with Northern Alameda. So just let me know. I'll give y'all a moment to open DataVista. I really want y'all to follow along. As I've toured around California, I've found that having you follow along and click through it yourself has been the most effective way to get people to learn it, rather than watching me do it. I wish I could watch what you were doing because I like to see what your data look like while you're looking at it, and ask you questions about it and make it very interactive, but alas, here I am, 2,500 miles away and I can't see your computer. DEBI PEZZUTO: Well, Marilyn called dibs first for Sonoma County. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: What consortium is that? DEBI PEZZUTO: Sonoma County, what consortium is that? Consortia. 61. Does it have a-- what's the full name for it, Marilyn? We're out of state. Have I mentioned I live in Reno, Nevada? MARILYN: It should be Sonoma? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Oh, is it called Sonoma? DEBI PEZZUTO: Yeah. ELENA: It's called Sonoma County. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, thank you. When we were in LA, yeah, saddle bag kept saying saddle bag, and I was like yeah. But it was actually South Orange or whatever it was. So, anyway. And I don't know if y'all know this, but there's three South Bay consortias, so you can't just say South Bay either. So let me start by just showing you what we land on. So everybody if you can please go to DataVista. And actually let me start where you would start. (DESCRIPTION) Opens the Home page. (SPEECH) All right, here we go. So this is the landing page. I was already in it. DataVista offers three different views of the data. And we're going to look at two of them. And I'm going to shamelessly plug. We have a DataVista webinar later today for the whole DataVista release, but there's also one next week that is just for CAEP. And they will walk you through the whole thing here. I'm going to show you how to use DataVista for planning, but we're not going to look at everything that's under the hood here. But if you are interested in that, please sign up for the CAEP DataVista webinar. And we'll drop that link later if you haven't already signed up. But today we're going to start with the CAEP scorecard. And if you are a long termer here, you probably remember the LaunchBoard, which was how this data was previously displayed. But now it has moved into DataVista as of last year. We can either go through it by clicking on this or dropping down and choosing the CAEP scorecard. So follow along. Now, although this toolkit is very helpful and sometimes I look at it, and you may have a question that requires us to look at it. I like to scoot it out of the-- am I sharing still? Yeah. OK, I like to scoot it out-- I don't see my green line. I like to scoot it out of the way and collapse it so that I have a nice full screen of what I'm looking at. Now, if you haven't been in DataVista in the last six days, you would not have seen this new look here. So there's a couple of things that have changed. First of all, we refreshed DataVista with the most recent data that we have, which is '23-'24. But they also changed the visualization here of the scorecard. And they put placeholders for lagging data. Previously, this just wasn't even on here. But what you have here are all of the metrics that get reported to the legislature every year. The legislature who pays the bill, gives us the money to operate this program, these are the metrics that go to them. The ones that are not populated are lagging, meaning not enough time has passed for us to have that data set. Now, if we look back in time, let's say we go to the prior year data, '22-'23, (DESCRIPTION) Searches top left. (SPEECH) some of those metrics will populate because enough time has passed. Maybe it's a two-quarter metric, two quarters after exit metric, such as transition to post-secondary, median annual earnings, employment two quarters after exit. If we look back two years to '21-'22, all of our metrics will populate. So if there's something you're interested in looking at that is not there, you just have to go back a couple years. So I'm going to go back to '23-'24 because it's brand new and it's fun. Also we land on the statewide data by default. So we always have to be careful to make sure we're looking at what we want to look at. And today we're going to look at Sonoma by request. So to do that, we're going to-- and I like to keep these collapsed as well by the way. I'm going to open up my Locale menu. (DESCRIPTION) At top left. (SPEECH) And I get this question a lot, so I'm going to answer it before you ask. If you want to look at your college or your adult school, that is none of my business. By all means, you can do that. We are going to look at the consortium level because that is what the three-year planning is done on. And I will give you a warning. If you choose to look at just your school, your institution, your college, sometimes the data disappears if there's not a large enough data set. Looking at you North Far North and desert inland counties and some of you in the Central Valley, if there are fewer than 10 students in any given data point, that will disappear. It's suppressed for FERPA reasons. So look at it at your own risk. If something doesn't show up, I warned you. Cool. So to look at the consortia, obviously we're going to click on Consortia. And this will give us a list of all of the 71 consortia in California. Now, if you want to be like Debi, fine by me. You can do that. And you can scroll and then you click. But because this starts with an S, I am going to just search. (DESCRIPTION) Search is at middle left. (SPEECH) And I just typed in the first four letters, and boom, there it is. Sonoma County Adult Education Consortium. Now, I am doing this without ever looking at their data before, so this will be fun. I'm going to click on it. And what pops up? The data for the Sonoma County consortium. All right, hopefully you're following along with your consortium. Now, what we see, again, are the metrics that get reported to the legislature. And you can get an idea of how things went year over year just by looking at the little symbols that are by each metric. So as you can see, most of the metrics increased as indicated by the green triangle, which means they increased by more than 5% from the previous year, which would have been '22-'23. And then they had one area that did not grow, or it remained the same, or within 5% of the previous year, which would have been 0, as you can see there. So I like to look at just a couple of metrics here to show you what DataVista does here if you're not aware. So reportable individuals are students with at least one hour of enrollment or enrollment in some program, depending on whose definition you use. Participants, however, are the more important enrollment metric. Hopefully, you know that participants come from reportable after they reach a certain threshold. Do you all know what threshold that is? I see some nodding there. That would be when students cross the 12-hour threshold. So anything that happens before 12 hours, never happened. If you get a student walk in the door and they spend two hours with you and then they go test on their GED, did you get credit for a GED? No, it never happened. It only happens after they get to 12 hours. So it looks like in Sonoma County, you guys had strong enrollment increases in both reportable and participants, 13%. But that doesn't tell us much. One year of data does not a pattern or a trend make. So if we want to look at what has happened over the last, say, eight years, we can simply click anywhere on this metric. So do that, click on your Participants. And let's see what has happened since 2016-2017. Now, you were all probably around five years ago when the pandemic hit. And most of you, if you're looking at your data, are probably seeing a dip in enrollment going into 2020-'21 when we all went remote. I've seen some increase there, but Sonoma, this is pretty typical. I wish y'all could talk to me so you could-- and if you want, you can open up your mic and tell me what we're seeing here with Sonoma's participants. (DESCRIPTION) Shows a line graph. (SPEECH) I'll give you a few seconds if anybody wants to do it. You can whisper it to yourself if you want. (DESCRIPTION) The graph shows participation increasing steadily since 2020. (SPEECH) We're being shy, OK. So Sonoma County has surpassed its pre-pandemic enrollment. That's the first thing I look for. They have had really strong growth coming out of the pandemic. What I would caution you in doing is if this were me also, I would look at what my percent increase was year after year. If you're thinking about your three-year plan and you're thinking about your metrics and your targets, I'm just throwing this out there, if they've had 13% or 14% in increases in enrollment every year, I would probably shoot a little lower for my target metrics coming up because it's going to start to level out. You can't continue to grow 10% and 15% every year. It's just not a sustainable growth. And as you can see, Sonoma is already 800 students higher than they ever have been before. So I'm curious what's growing. And we can look at that in just a second. But I'd also be curious about how many students you are transitioning from reportable into participants by getting them past that 12-hour threshold. And you can do that just by hovering here. 87%, that is very commendable. 87%. If we don't want to hover, we can also click Options, Show Table, and we can get a glance. Oh, wow, what a great example to look at here? Sonoma. This is what you've done. I'm very impressed. In '23-'24, you converted 87% of your students from reportable, which is your denominator to participants, which is your numerator. That's about the extent of my math, so please don't ask for anything more than that. If you look way back in the 2016's, you were only converting 57%. So it has been just a steady increase of retention since then. So if I were thinking about my three-year plan and I were Sonoma County, I probably would not need to work on my retention. If you're looking at this and you are in the 50s or 60s, maybe you should think about retention as a strategy because, again, nothing happens until they hit 12 hours. Now, the student probably is perfectly fine with moving on with their life, and there is something to be said for that. But if we want to keep getting money to do what we're doing, we probably need to try and at least retain them to 12 hours so that their outcomes show up in our data. DEBI PEZZUTO: Can you-- MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Any questions about retention? DEBI PEZZUTO: Real quick, can you show how you got to that table again? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Absolutely. Options, Show Table, Hide Table. So I'm going to hide it, and it goes away. I like to hide it because it makes the chart expand. And I can really see the trends but the Options and Show Table. And, again, if you're struggling we could do this one-on-one too. What, Debi? DEBI PEZZUTO: I was going to say you can also click the PDF button there on the right-hand side of Options. And that will break it out into its own window where you can print it and look at it, so lots of options. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Yes. And you can't break this, so please click around, and it's easy to get back to where you were. OK, there's that. (DESCRIPTION) Shows a new graph. (SPEECH) Now, just for curiosity's sake, I like to look at Earned an Award. We all know what this means, I got a diploma or an equivalency. And this is a metric that has done different things across the state. First of all, I do not want this table there. But I like to look at how we're doing there. A high school diploma is, of course, a huge barrier to economic mobility, so it's very important that we help students get those. I don't really know anything about Sonoma County's educational needs. 613 out of 10,000 learners is not a whole lot of diplomas. I don't know where all your enrollment is, but I'm going to look in just a second. But as you can see, they've had a nice steady growth in high school diplomas, which is impressive, from 91, eight years ago to now 600 in 2023. And a really big jump from '21 to '22. Now, I want to see what our students are enrolling in, in Sonoma County. So we're going to move to a different view. How much time do I have, Debi? You can tell me in a minute if you need to do some math. DEBI PEZZUTO: Honestly, you've got 25 minutes left. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, perfect. That's great. So follow along. We're going to jump to a new view up here under Data Views. (DESCRIPTION) At top menu. (SPEECH) So there's a dropdown arrow. And we're going to go to Single Metric. (DESCRIPTION) Third option on dropdown. (SPEECH) Data Views, Single Metric, CAEP Adult Learners. (DESCRIPTION) Clicks bottom left. (SPEECH) And, again, I'm going to collapse this toolkit because it's in the way, and I can go back and find it if I need to. Now, this is pulling-- again, statewide data is where we're going to default. And much like the name suggests, it is going to look at a single metric at a time. (DESCRIPTION) Shows a line graph. (SPEECH) We don't want to look at statewide data. We want to look at Sonoma County. So hopefully you recall that to look at any given locale, you would simply click the dropdown on Locale and find your area. By the way, you can look at regions where all of them-- if you want to look at the Los Angeles region, for Marilyn up we met her, too. All the consortia in Los Angeles will roll up into that region, that macro region. But, again, we're doing three-year planning, so it's important to look at the consortium level. And again, I'm going to do it my way because I'm driving. You want to do it Debi's way, you scroll. (DESCRIPTION) Scrolls on left to Consortia (SPEECH) DEBI PEZZUTO: This might be a good time to mention, too, that because Marilyn had the same question about, if we have step by step instructions. And the way that I think about DataVista is it's like Google, you can go in it any way to find the same information in the end. So Meghan goes about it one way and I go about it the other way, but we end up finding the same results. So I'm a scroller. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: There are so many different ways to look at this. And it really just requires a tacit understanding of what you want to look for and, and just playing around to get to it. Again, happy to do this one-on-one, where I do create a data walk as it were, where I look at it ahead of time and I walk through what I think is interesting and I can send you how I filtered the data, if that is of interest to you. Now, I am sometimes a maximalist. And I like to see a lot of stuff at once. What we don't have here are the values, but I like to see the values. If you are a more of a minimalist and you don't want to crowd your screen, you don't have to do what I'm about to do, but I'm going to show you because I like it. So I'm going to click Options, and I'm going to show the labels because I want to see our data, the numbers. So as you can see, all that did was pop the numbers onto the graph here. Again, you do how you want to do it, all up to you. Now, remember we're looking at reportable by default, but reportable doesn't necessarily matter when it comes to our outcomes, or our enrollment. If we were trying to cut this by program, it wouldn't show us anything because nothing matters until they hit 12 hours. For that reason, we need to isolate the metric participants. So to do that, we're going to go back to our menu over here, and we're going to look at the metric menu. (DESCRIPTION) Scrolls left. (SPEECH) And there are a ton of metrics here that you can look at at your leisure. But today, we want to look at participants, which the cheat code will be to type in the number 202 Enter. (DESCRIPTION) In Search. (SPEECH) Or you can do it Debi's way and scroll all day until you find participants. I like to type in 202. Debi, would probably also type 202 here. DEBI PEZZUTO: No, I'm a scroller. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: You're a scroller. All right, so if you're a scroller, I'll wait five minutes for you, if not, you're with me already. So we type 202 and we click Participants. (DESCRIPTION) Clicks on the dropdown. (SPEECH) Now, again, what I want you to see here is who is enrolling in Sonoma's programs. Where are they? I want to look at where they're enrolling first and then maybe I'll look at who. So Sonoma, again, I don't know anything about you, but knowing what I know about California, they're probably enrolling in the big four programs. So I'm going to collapse this metric. And I'm going to expand this menu, AE Program. And you all, as experts in CAEP, know and recognize the six programs. These are the CAEP program areas. (DESCRIPTION) She scrolls. (SPEECH) But the four that we tend to see most people enroll in, of course, are ABE, ASE, CTE, and ESL. I tend to always start with the one that always has the most enrollment. Not always, I hate to be so absolute, but most commonly has the most enrollment is ESL. So I'm going to look at only your ESL enrollment to see. (DESCRIPTION) The graph changes. (SPEECH) OK, 4,000 students in your consortium are enrolled in ESL. That's actually not the majority. Well, it could be the most, though. We'll see. So again, we can hover and look at the percentage of students who are participants, who are enrolled in ESL. And as we can see, in '23-'24, it was 39.5. About 40% of your enrollment is in ESL. (DESCRIPTION) She hovers on graph points. (SPEECH) Now, here is where I would quiz you if you were in front of me. And I would ask you, how to look at all of those percentages at once. And this is where one brave student would say, you would click Options and you would click Show Table. And then below our graph, would magically appear our data. (DESCRIPTION) A table appears. (SPEECH) Now, what this is telling me now, the denominator has changed. Math folks. The denominator is now participants. Because remember, after they convert to a participant, we don't care anymore about reportable individuals. We only care about participants. So it becomes the denominator for everything. It may not be all participants as the denominator. It may just be some participants, but participants is the denominator. So the numerator is your enrollment in ESL. The denominator again is participants. So 40% of your enrollment is in ESL. That is pretty standard at least going back to 2018, where it used to be a little higher. Now, Sonoma, I don't know, is that good to y'all? Is that a problem? That's for you to decide by looking at your regional needs in the CAEP Fact Sheets, or in the census, which we can do together on our own if you'd like. But you would want to see if there is more need for ESL by looking at the regional need for ESL, by looking at who in your region speaks English less than well to see if you might need to work on your enrollment. Next, I would probably take a peek at CTE. So let's do that. Let's see if you guys have folks enrolled in CTE. So we click on that and that'll isolate just our participants in CTE. (DESCRIPTION) New graph. (SPEECH) Now, again, I don't know anything about Sonoma County. This is my first time looking at their data. I would venture a guess that they created a lot of programs over the years because they went from having 800 people enrolled to 3,500 people enrolled in CTE programs. Is that true out there in Sonoma County to create programs? MARILYN: It is. So we didn't have noncredit CTE at the community college until we started in late 2017, but still the number seems too high for me. So where is this data coming from? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: That's a great question. And if I didn't say this, I apologize. This data is coming from TOPSpro and COMIS. So both of those data sets, we just get the raw data given to us out of TOPSpro and COMIS and we put it in here. So if this is high, we should look into it and try and figure that out. Not now, but at some point. And, again, this is your participants enrolled in CTE. So it looks like it's about a third of your enrollment. It has been higher in the past. It's dwindling a little, which means someone else is taking over. Or the enrollment because the enrollment is obviously not dropping. So another program area is taking up more of a share of your enrollment. MARILYN: Yeah, because looking at the needs, we have a higher need for high school diploma, high school equivalency, but the classes are very low enrolled. But for ESL, even though the current classes are full, we still have a huge waiting list. And I heard-- MEGHAN MCBRIDE: I know. MARILYN: --consortia. Maybe it's because we're not promoting high school diploma, high school equivalency in the right way. It's like, how do you attract those people that don't have a high school diploma? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Yeah. That is exactly the conversation I just finished having with Northern Alameda. And it is a story I have seen across California, so you are not alone. If you're interested in talking about it any of you one-on-one, I have had the benefit of talking with a number of consortia about it. It might even be worth getting us together to brainstorm ideas. It's something that, in general, nearly every consortium that I've looked at needs to work on. And it's probably not even something you're doing. It just is the nature of the context of our times. It's a sign of the times where people who need to learn to speak English still need to learn to speak English, irrespective of anything else. But you can still get a job without a diploma. And folks need jobs, so I don't know if that's where they're going. I've heard lots of theories of where these students are, but the fact of the matter is we need to capture them so that we can help them improve their economic mobility by getting a high school diploma. So let's look on that note at your ABE and ASE enrollment. ABE, of course, by definition, would be people who test in at eighth grade or below on a pretest, so CASAS, in the case of California. It looks like your ABE enrollment is very, very small, as you said, although it's growing. And you would know more about this data trend than I do, if this is something related to testing or how you place students. Do you test in both math and English for ABE, for example? Have you always been pre-testing? I don't know, but this is what the trend shows. And it is just about 3.5% of your enrollment. So I suspect ASE is going to be a little higher. (DESCRIPTION) The graph changes for A S E. (SPEECH) Yeah. Oh. Oh, my. (DESCRIPTION) Shows a large increase. (SPEECH) So ASE is much, much higher. And it had-- this is cutting into that CTE. Remember we saw your share of CTE was lowering. Even though the total number of enrollment was growing, ASE is taking over more of your program. They're at about a 1/3 of enrollment. And as you can see, back in 2020 and '21, they really fell off. They were only about 16% of your enrollment. You can see that, both in terms of enrollment and in terms of the share that they were taking up in your total program. So they've doubled their share of your program over the course of the pandemic. So you seem to be doing a great job at recruiting ASE students. Any thoughts on what we're seeing here at Sonoma? MARILYN: I'm surprised. So maybe it's that I work at the community college. So our numbers are not that good, but I imagine it's the adult school that is doing a really good job. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. Yeah, and you can look at that. I won't do that today, but again, you can look at the institution level to see as long as there's enough students enrolled. This is not to say that they're finishing. We're not looking at an outcome metric. There still may be some work. I don't know. I've not looked at your data, but yeah, it must be your adult schools, although it probably would be beneficial to have some adult programs, adult education or ASE or ABE programs at the community college because then they are more likely or highly likely to stay in transition to post-secondary because they're already comfortable there. So let's quickly look at some ethnicity here and then we'll look at, maybe completions of high school diploma. Go ahead, Debi. DEBI PEZZUTO: OK, two quick questions. Sorry, three quick questions. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. DEBI PEZZUTO: "What's the lowest number that will appear before it's suppressed. Is it 10?" MEGHAN MCBRIDE: 10. DEBI PEZZUTO: OK. So that was a question from Kim. And then I have another question from Mandilee that's just confirming or asking, "Why the COMIS data doesn't include students or learners under 18?" So I know TOPSpro includes 16 and up. Does COMIS also include? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: I don't know. I wouldn't think so unless they're WIOA-funded, which is not often the case at community colleges. But WIOA allows for service to 16 and 17-year-olds, but CAEP does not. So I actually haven't seen many 16 and 17-year-olds across California for that reason. DEBI PEZZUTO: That's what I was thinking too. MANDILEE GONZALES: Me too. DEBI PEZZUTO: And then another question that is a great question, "From the consortium-wide data metric, can it be drilled down to see each consortium member's number?" So if you look at Locale, the dropdown under student type where it says Locale, you can change it from consortium, which is what Meghan is looking at now to college or institution. So you can actually see your individual agency. If you want to compare that agency then to the consortium, I'd suggest looking at the PDF for your agency and saving it separately, and then going back to look at the consortium and putting them side by side, maybe on two screens so you do a little compare and contrast. But you wouldn't be able to look at both data sets at the same time. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Correct. MARILYN: I have a quick question. I wrote the question. I'm sorry to interrupt. So for example, current view regarding the total 3,323 students, there's no way we can find out which member contribute to that part of data, correct? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: You would have to open up a-- what I would do is open up two DataVistas. I have three monitors here. And I would compare it that way. You can't cut it here. MARILYN: I see. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: You can cut other things, but not institutions. You can look and see who's Hispanic and who's Asian, but you can't look at who's at school A and school B, unless you open up multiple screens. MARILYN: I know. I will be suggesting under the option maybe in the future there's a tab, can break it down by the consortium member number. That will be really saving us time to drill down another one. That's my suggestion. That's all. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, thank you for that. And Debi will write that down and we'll take-- we meet with our DataVista team weekly. Debi and I are more like the professional development arm. And we take things back to the team that builds the car, so to speak. And so we welcome any thoughts on how to make DataVista better, more useful because it is a user-centered design. We're here to make it better for you all, so knowing what would work for y'all is very helpful. So thank you for that. And you were not interrupting. That was wonderful feedback. So while we're here, I want you to go back to All Programs. And we're just going to take a peek at the ethnic groups, more so just you can see what you can do here and less looking for things. So to do that, I went back to All Programs, again. So now we're back to just our participants. And we can drill down according to a variety of things here. You can look at according to barriers only when you're in reportable. We're in participants, which is when we can drill down according to age, ethnicity, or gender. (DESCRIPTION) Scrolls at left. (SPEECH) I don't like to drill down by age because it's got these wonky age groups that match with WIOA. And as you can see, there's like a three-year age group here of 16 to 18-year-olds, a five-year age group of 19 to 24-year-olds, and then a huge 20-year age group. That wasn't our idea. That's WIOA's, take that up with them. But I just don't find it entirely helpful. You might. And if you do, go for it. But I'll do ethnicity. Marilyn, what is your primary ethnicity there in your region, if you don't mind? MARILYN: Hispanic. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Hispanic, OK. So we'll start with that and then we'll look at maybe a couple others. So we can compare Hispanic to overall, we can compare Hispanic to other groups, we can look at it all by itself. I'm going to start by looking at it all by itself because that will change our axes here, maybe. (DESCRIPTION) Shows a new graph. (SPEECH) Yeah. So you see our axes lower down to 6,000. So she knows her students. They are predominantly Hispanic. We had about 10,000 participants overall. About 6,400 are his other 7,000 we're looking at. Oh, my bad. 10,000 was the other number. 7,500 students are participants. 85% are Hispanic. Does that match your regional data? MARILYN: No. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Are you mostly. What is regionally? White? MARILYN: White. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. Well, it's probably good if you're offering ESL that Hispanic students would be disproportionately represented because they're the ones who need to learn English. I didn't look also-- MARILYN: We also offer a lot of programs in Spanish. So we have CTE classes and HSC classes in Spanish. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: That's wonderful. So that explains why you have a large Hispanic enrollment. You're meeting them where they are in their fluency levels. We can compare that. Who might be your second largest group there? Asian, white, Black? MARILYN: It's probably white. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Probably white. OK, let's see. So to look at two groups at a time, we press Control, and the instructions are there, Control and click. If you just click, you're going to lose Hispanic, but it's OK because you can control and click them back. So I controlled and I clicked for white. And, yeah, she's right. The next group probably is white. Oh, that's participants in overall there. OK. (DESCRIPTION) A graph has two lines. (SPEECH) My bad, that denominator, that's not the right. That's converting. OK. There right there is what we're converting from reportable. So what we're looking at here is a trend in enrollment. And we can-- again, this is just illustrative of what you can do. I'm not really making meaning out of this right now. But you can see that in this consortium, they have really increased their Hispanic enrollment. And as Marilyn just contextualized for us, they have a lot of Spanish language programs, which explains this large increase, or can help explain this large increase in enrollment, whereas white students have not quite recovered to their pre-pandemic numbers, whereas Hispanic students have really shot past their pre-pandemic high of 5,100 students. If we want to compare that to all, again, we can just Control Click All. And it'll show us all participants compared to our ethnic groups. And as you can see, the Hispanic students are really driving the overall trend, which is unsurprising when there's that many of them. Oh, I was right. The denominator was 10,000. If you're interested in looking at all ethnic groups, you can click on this Ethnicity button. And you'll see why I don't like to do that. It makes a big mess because there are multiple ethnic groups. So I try to just look at the largest groups because then what we get at the bottom is all of the very small groups at the table. And this is not a good example of suppressed data, but some of you might see suppressed data if you show all ethnic groups because there might be just that few learners. But it looks like even their lowest has. Well, there's a 10. But as you can see, it's not helpful to jumble it up with all the ethnic groups there. So you might just want to look at your highest. How much more time do I have, Debi? I could do one more thing. DEBI PEZZUTO: You have four minutes. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Are there any questions? DEBI PEZZUTO: No. No, we're good. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK, so just for Marilyn and Sonoma County's edification, I want to look at one more metric, and that is GED. And I encourage all of you to look at this one because it is a metric we've seen that is concerning across multiple consortia in California. So I just want to see what's going on. If you have a great story to tell or some great strategies that would help people complete this metric, it would help a lot of your colleagues across the state, so please let us know. So what we want to do now is, first of all, clean up our data here. Let's click Overall. So we're just looking at our big overall number. And, again, if we were in-person, I would say, someone tell me how to isolate one metric. And a few people would say, click the Metric dropdown button, and then we would look for it. And if they were me, they would just type it in because I've memorized it. So we're going to type in 633 and hit Enter under Metric Search. (DESCRIPTION) Metric Search is on the left. (SPEECH) And magically, appears. The metric I want to look at earned an award, diploma, GED, or HSE. And I would click it. And now we're going to be looking at the participants in our consortium who earned an award, who graduated from high school, as it were. And we've seen this before because I clicked on this time trend when we were in the scorecard. So this should look familiar. But what we can do here is break it down to see who is completing this diploma. And this is just like we were looking at in participants. But I want to look at something in particular, and I want y'all to do this too. I want to see the rate at which students are completing. Now, I am going to venture a guess that most of our completers are in Sonoma County. This isn't the case everywhere, but most of our completers are coming from the ASE program, which by definition, would be someone who is scoring ninth grade or higher on a pre-test. So that isolated the participants who are enrolled in ASE and who earned an award. And we can see a trend that matches our enrollment, which is makes sense. Completions should follow enrollment, which is why-- follow along here-- I don't like to look at the total number of completions as much as I like to look at the rate at which students are completing. And here again is where I would say, how do I look at the percentages? And there's two ways to do it. I can hover, or I can click Options, Show Table. (DESCRIPTION) Options is top right. (SPEECH) And that will populate all of the fun math problems at the bottom here. So I'm going to hide that. And now, Marilyn, you're doing better than you used to do, at completions here. So what we have here, the value, the numerator are the people who have completed. And as you can see, that number has increased and it is correlated positively with your enrollment. The denominator is your enrollment, your participants. So as you can see, that number has increased and it fell off and then it increased. But what is interesting to me is the rate at which students are completing. And I'm going to tell you why. (DESCRIPTION) She references the table. (SPEECH) About 12% of your ASE students are finishing their diploma, which is the highest you've ever had. You used to have only 3% of your students completing. Now, these students, keep in mind they're ASE. If you define ASE the way I do, these students are coming into the program reading and doing math at a ninth grade level. So you've come a long way at getting students past that point of earning their diploma. But if you flip that metric, what percent are not completing? Would be 88%. So this is up to you, Marilyn. Do you think you have room to grow here? Could this be an area you need to work on? Do you need to work on getting students past that completion? You seem to be enrolling them, but maybe not getting them out. It depends on what your goal is there. I will say, if you're talking to a legislator, for example, or anyone who is not one of us, in my program, I would have been very, very happy with 12% or 13% completing. In past years, I was like you, Marilyn. I only had 5% completing, and then we got it up to 12%, and I was very, very proud. And you should be proud because this is transforming lives. The question would be, though, what does someone who doesn't know our population in the work we do think about this? This is your success, 12%. What about the 88? What is it? Is it 88? Yeah, 88 who didn't finish? That looks like we're not doing what we need to be doing because unfortunately, WIOA does not capture a lot of the very important work that we do in our outcome metrics. So we have a big gap in understanding when we share our story of what we're doing. Because it doesn't account for that our students can now read books to their kindergartner, or they can help their fourth grader do math. That's not in our metrics. It only shows that 12% of our students are successful. So this might be an area you want to work on. You know your consortium better than I do. But it's possible. Any questions? MARILYN: Thank you. This is very helpful. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Good. That concludes our data walk through DataVista. We're not done here yet. We're going to move on to something where y'all are going to work in groups on some stuff. And Debi, I'm sorry, I don't have the PowerPoint pulled up. I need you to take it from here. DEBI PEZZUTO: We're fine. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: While Debi is pulling that up, I want to again plug that our contract with the Chancellor's Office provides time for us to look at this with you. So please, please reach out and we'll look at your consortium-level data with you and talk about it and make meaning out of it and help you think about it. So now we're going to-- oh sorry. Go ahead. MANDILEE GONZALES: I was going to-- you invited people to come off, so I was going to ask a question, Meghan, while Debi pulls that up. What's the best way to connect with you all to schedule that kind of one-on-one assistance? And what's your lead time in scheduling people, roughly? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Well, email. And we'll display our emails. Or if you want to drop it in the chat, you can email me, Debi, me and Debi, me or Debi, and Debi will schedule it. MANDILEE GONZALES: OK. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Honestly, I can meet the next day. I don't need a whole lot of time to prepare. I've gotten so automatic at doing this. That would also help me to see if I need to do a deeper dive, and we can meet maybe a week later, after the first conversation. If it's just looking at DataVista, I don't need any lead time. If I need to look at census data, labor market information, that would be a conversation we could have at the time and then meet again later to see what else would be helpful. If you ask Shamila in Northern Alameda, we've talked four times, maybe five. So it's just a continuous conversation as we help refine the three-year plan. (DESCRIPTION) Text: Creating Community Personas (SPEECH) So, Debi has our slide up. And we're going to move into-- we're going to do a little bit of a cheat here. In our regional trainings, we took some time to do personas, but because we didn't want to have you here for six hours, we're going to just show you the personas that people created around the state. And a persona is a way to bring the data to life. So we just looked at all of this data, all these numbers, yet we didn't talk about a single student, or put a face to any of those numbers. And it's very depersonalized. So we use personas to humanize the data and to put a face to the numbers that we're talking about, and to help develop our empathy and to focus our conversations so that as we think about ways to improve the high school graduation completion rate of Marilyn's consortium, down there in Sonoma County, we can think about it through the lens of the students in our programs. And think about who they are and what these numbers represent in terms of real lives. So personas, if you've ever been in marketing, they're really marketing 101. You're thinking about your target audience and how to better serve them or bring them in, or whatever the case may be for your three-year plan. But your colleagues around the state have created these personas, and we've adapted what we've done in-person to this. So you're going to borrow the personas of some of your colleagues. And these are grounded in real demographic data. So we looked at the CAEP Fact Sheets, we looked at their enrollment, but then we added in their expertise, the qualitative data of them being in the classrooms or in the communities. And they brought life to the students we were seeing, or to the potential students. And we challenge them to create personas for hard-to-serve students. We don't want to hear about the students who come every day and finish their diploma in six weeks, or who learn ESL so fast because they're there and they're cheerful and they don't have anything difficult going on, they don't have any barriers. We want to talk about the hard-to-serve students, because what we're trying to surface are where we could do better at serving our students and helping them improve their economic mobility and impact their families and their communities. So that is where we develop these personas. So, Debi, let me see one of those examples. Do you have one on here? (DESCRIPTION) Shows Tina, 34 (SPEECH) DEBI PEZZUTO: There you go. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: OK. So here is an example of a persona. And we pick some of our favorites from around the nation of California. And Tina is our example. Now, all of you are going to go into a breakout room, and you're going to get a persona just like this. And you're going to talk about this person. And it's probably someone you've seen in your consortium, in your programs that you've served. And we're going to look at what's going on. And we name the persona. And they should have been name something that is culturally appropriate. Tina is a white woman, 34 years old. She's widowed with three children. She's unemployed. She has disabilities. As we can see, she's reading at a third grade level. She made it to the ninth grade. And her goal, which is at the bottom there, I moved goals up as I adapted this particular activity. Her goal is to finish high school. But she has a lot of barriers to achieving that goal. Transportation, this should all probably sound familiar. Transportation, child care, those are the big two. Financial barriers are often the case with our students. With her disability, she has a hard time retaining information. So she's a hard-to-serve student. I think we could all agree on that. As a mother, a single mother, a widowed mother of three children, she needs housing, secure and reliable housing, and a job, and reliable transportation. And the one big thing that's getting in her way is probably not having her high school diploma, perhaps also some training. It doesn't really tell us much about that. But what you're going to do in your small groups is you're going to talk about-- actually, Debi, this is your turn. You can explain what we're going to do here. DEBI PEZZUTO: Well, let me stop sharing my screen for a second, and I'll pop over to the padlet that we're going to use. Once you get into your breakout rooms, I'm going to share the link with you for your breakout room. And it's going to have an example persona. Where do you go? Here we go. And it's going to look something like this. So this is based off of our student, Tina. It has all of her information typed in here because some of these are hard to read. And then it has our service gaps. So after looking at this-- I think this was a North Far North student-- one of the service gaps that we found was maybe curriculum for students with disabilities to help the student, in particular connection to social services or community resources, work readiness courses for ABE students, that this is a complicated student schedule, and maybe they need some accommodations. And the strategies off of that were possibly to work with WestEd to assess the consortium's curriculum and services for students with disabilities, maybe designing some curriculum for students with disabilities that incorporate accommodations for multi-level classrooms. We don't know who our students are when they arrive. And sometimes we have multi-level groups with various different learning needs, and so maybe that's something that we could look at. Networking with local social services or community agencies and establishing an actual referral process. We might know what the agencies are to connect with, but our goal could be establishing one direct person that we work with, or two direct people or so. Provide contextualized work readiness classes for ABE students with support from career counselors. So making a larger connection how to get these students at all levels into the workplace. And a student survey to evaluate current program schedules, adjusting class schedules as needed to see, are the class schedules working for us, but maybe not working for our students? That's something that is very low cost that we could do with the resources we already have. So once we get into our breakout rooms, the lovely Mandilee is going to do our breakout rooms for us. I will give you a link to one of the already created personas, and then you will have a space for service gaps and strategies. You can just click on Comment and add your ideas with your group there. MANDILEE GONZALES: I just opened the rooms for you. Perfect. And Meghan's in a room? But I can pull her out unless she likes to go back and forth. DEBI PEZZUTO: Maybe pull her out for a second in case she wants to. And then I just joined and I can jump out if I need to. Thank you. MANDILEE GONZALES: I tried. DEBI PEZZUTO: It's been a minute since I've done breakout rooms, I realize. OK, I'm going to jump into the rooms. MANDILEE GONZALES: Hey, Meghan, you're on mute. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Oh, yeah. MANDILEE GONZALES: Welcome back, everyone. (DESCRIPTION) Mandilee faces us as she studies her screen. (SPEECH) DEBI PEZZUTO: All right, is everybody back in? Can y'all hear me? I know we lost a few along the way, but I appreciate you all for participating. I saw you guys adding things to the padlet. I heard you. I saw that you were talking. Thank you. I know you probably weren't expecting group work, but we appreciate you. This is the fun part, anyway. Not that data isn't. We love you, Meghan. OK, now I'm going to share my screen so that we can take a look at what you all added for the lovely student, Rosa. (DESCRIPTION) Service Gaps and Strategies for Rosa appear. (SPEECH) This is like one of the coolest features. I can look at just one person. All right, so we've got the student, Rosa. He is 42 years old. She's a Latina from Mexico, recently immigrated single mother. Her education level is high school diploma in Mexico. I apologize, I left that out. That's on the sticky. And her employment status is she's employed as a hotel housekeeper. Her goal is to return to the medical profession. She was a dentist originally. And she wants to support her family and serve as a role model for her high school-aged daughters. Her barriers are language, housing, transportation, and she's underemployed. Her needs are English, transition to a two-year CTE program, affordable housing, maybe some consistent housing there, reliable housing, and also to meet with an academic counselor, possibly translate her degree and get some financial stability, overall financial stability. So for service gaps, does anyone want to share what you wrote for service gaps? Or are you like participation done? I will respect either answer. It's fine. OK, I'll go. Service gaps. So you all said that one of the gaps is to connect to job center to evaluate transcripts. So maybe there is a gap in overall agency services where students are having an issue connecting to the Career Center or some kind of Career Center. Is that what you were saying? I'm getting some nods from Carla. Cool. One of the other service gaps could be ESL class enrollment. What did you mean by that? (DESCRIPTION) Carla (SPEECH) CARLA: Can you all hear me? DEBI PEZZUTO: Yes. CARLA: I've been having my trouble. So going back to the first item. So we were thinking to connect to the job center to an AJCC because they've got job coaches that can help them with the evaluation of her high school diploma. So we thought that was an MD. We thought, oh, my gosh, she's a doctor. And it came with her. MD, but is that a HD? DEBI PEZZUTO: You know what? It probably is MD because when we talked about the student-- and this is the thing about when we do personas on these large presentation stickies. A lot of times the groups will write some things down on the stickies, but we have a discussion about it afterward and some other things come up. So it probably was. MD and I misread it as HD. So let's go with you. CARLA: Let's go. So we thought, OK, she's going to go back into medical career, eventually. Those transcripts need to be credentialed, need to be evaluated because she needs English. Of course, one of the service gaps would be to put her into an ESL class and then to address some of those other barriers, such as housing and transportation. Again, the job center could help with those services, or a transition navigator at a school. And then the group decided or concluded that one of the strategies for her is she wants to follow back into the medical profession or dentistry would be an IET to get her started on a pathway. Of course, meet with a counselor to develop an Ed plan so that it doesn't just end at an entry level pathway, that it continues on and has a ladder, a educational ladder. Given that she's working, so we can't tell if she's working full time, but we're going to assume that a blended hybrid learning model for her in the evenings, perhaps. She's got two high school daughters. And we agreed that she needs to keep a sharp eye on them because they are teenagers. But childcare may not be necessarily a huge barrier, right? And then we also thought of connecting with the employer. And perhaps the employer would be open to having workplace literacy program once Ed code passes, of course, if there were WIOA school. And then language support at the children's or her daughter's high school, is there some support there for the daughters as well? DEBI PEZZUTO: I love that. These are great strategies, and some of these that we didn't actually talk about when the group did this out in the field. So that just goes to show that there's similar and some different takes on things. Thank you guys. Really appreciate that. And I wanted to share with you too. Can you all see this Google Drive folder? Beautiful. So this link I added to the chat, but I'll make sure I add it again on the way out. This is all of the resources that we've talked about today, including the promising practices, but it also has-- let me minimize. I've got too many things going on on the screen. Our three-year planning tool that we put together for you. And this has the personas activity. So if you like the idea of putting the personas together and you want to take it back to your agency or your consortium to do, you can use this packet at any time to guide you along that path. And then we also have sections that talk about the census data, using DataVista and CAEP Fact Sheets for it, labor market data, and most importantly, the strategy development. So figuring out what strategies are going to work, but then really digging down to see what's feasible and what's going to have the highest impact. Maybe you have a budget to do some fun things, maybe you don't have a budget to do fun things, and you need to try and figure out what you have for free or low cost, so you can use these resources anytime to help build out your three-year planning and use those strategies. (DESCRIPTION) Returns to Google drive folder. (SPEECH) I'm going to stop sharing. And Meghan, did you want to add anything before we wrap it up? MEGHAN MCBRIDE: No, I just want to reiterate, we just mimicked a little bit of what the three-year planning process would look like, which would be to really consider our students, even our potential students, identifying ways that we could probably improve our services to better serve our students and to better serve potential students, and then strategizing on how to do that, how to accomplish that in ways that are both feasible, and reasonable, and impactful. So that was the purpose of that activity. I thank you all for participating in it. Monique, I see you out there. I'm glad to see you made it for the second half here. I noticed you earlier. Thanks for joining, everybody. It was good to see you again. Carla, nice to meet you. Elena. Marilyn, thanks for paying attention. And thank you all for your engagement. And reach out if you need anything, and I'll kick it back over to Mandilee. MANDILEE GONZALES: All right. Well, thank you, Meghan and thank you, Debi. That two hours really flew by. I have to be honest, especially talking about data. So I do appreciate that. I said it in the chat. You do bring life to data. And Debi, you guys are a great team. We always appreciate hosting you. Holly, my colleague has dropped into the chat. We have a lot of opportunities to engage in various online webinars. Earlier, I also dropped in the chat, the registration for the community College Chancellor's Office, DataVista 2.0 release. We will also be doing the similar webinar next week, as well as an open office hours. For all of you who really want to dive into DataVista, there are a lot of opportunities in the next couple of weeks. And with that, my gentle reminder, please fill out the evaluation. It really is supportive. I will also send that out to everybody via direct email. So thank you all for joining us for these last few hours. We greatly appreciate your time and your engagement, and we will all see you soon. DEBI PEZZUTO: And, did anybody want to ask any questions or do any questions for the last couple of minutes? MANDILEE GONZALES: Sorry. DEBI PEZZUTO: We're OK, Mandilee. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: I forgot to say that to. Thanks, Debi. DEBI PEZZUTO: Maybe we'll hang out if you have any questions you want to ask, and if not, you did your time. [LAUGHTER] ELENA: Thank you. MARILYN: Thank you. MANDILEE GONZALES: All right. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: We made it. Thanks, y'all. I gotta eat something. Now it's 3 o'clock here. DEBI PEZZUTO: It's time. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: I haven't eaten lunch, so. MANDILEE GONZALES: Go eat more than chocolate eggs. MEGHAN MCBRIDE: Yeah, I want to make a meal out of those. Thank you all so much. We'll be in the-- are you all doing the DataVista webinar today? Is that y'all? MANDILEE GONZALES: No--