PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieder
06-17-14/11:00 am CT
Confirmation # 6340523
Page 1
PSC-ED-OS
Moderator: Greg Darnieder
June 17, 2014
11:00 am CT
Coordinator: Welcome and thank you all for standing by. At this time all participants are in listen-only mode. After the presentation we'll open up a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star and then 1.
Today's conference is being recorded. If you have any objection, you may disconnect at this point.
Now I'll turn over the conference to our host, Mr. Greg Darnieder. Sir, you may begin.
Greg Darnieder: Thanks, (Wena). Appreciate it. Good morning, good afternoon everyone, appreciate your dialing in this morning.
As - for those of you who were on the call last week, this is a mini-series on school counselors, and last week we heard from folks around school counsel training. And every time we do something, from a research standpoint or from this larger universe, I always get comments like, "Can we hear from people on the ground?" And so that's what we're doing today. And I'll introduce our presenters in just a minute.
But I want to make a few announcements and just welcome anyone who's new to the College Access Affinity Group calls. We've had quite a few new people over the last month or so join these calls, and just welcome you to this.
As hopefully everyone knows, though I still get emails about this, all of these presentations going back for a year and a half now, almost two years, can be found on the . Or you can just Google College Access Affinity Group, and the very first listing there is this - is our group. And you just click on that and all of the calls can be seen there along with the presentations and the transcripts and the audio recordings.
So next week is actually going to be our last call for this school year I guess, given that many of you are either finished with school or ending school this week. But on June 25th, researchers from the University of Chicago and the Chicago Consortium on School Research and their work particularly around non-cognitive, which is of huge interest around the country these days, they will be presenting.
The time is slightly different. As you know, we've been kind of moving these times around to see if that helps in terms of people being able to dial in. But next week it'll start at 1 o'clock Eastern Daylight Savings time.
So then we'll take a break for the summer and start again in mid-September, which gives us about 12 or 13 weeks before the holiday Christmas break. If you have suggestions for what those 12 or 13 calls topics, presenters and such might focus in on, please send them to me so that I can work on that over the next month and get that all in place. Many of you have sent me suggestions and I appreciate that very much.
I do want to announce an event that's happening here at the department this Friday in that in the First Lady's interest in college access and such, she will actually be here at the Department of Ed where we are hosting a summer learning event with the First Lady's Office and with the National Summer Learning Association, and we have a number of student groups coming in to demonstrate for the First Lady what projects they're working on this summer, and her message will center in on promoting the use of the summer months and for young people to get involved in their local museums, park districts, volunteering and different situations, if they don't have a job, can't find an internship, turn the summer into a learning experience and such.
And so that's going to be a closed event and everyone who's going to be most - it's going to be mostly young people from these different projects as well as from D.C. - the D.C. area who'll be in that event. Lots of press anticipated, so hopefully you'll be seeing that blasted out over on Friday as well as over the weekend.
Hopefully you saw, if you got Ed Week, the write-up around the First Lady's initiative Reach Higher, that was there I believe last week. And if you're interested, I've started tweeting, and you can follow me on Twitter, if that's of interest to you.
So let's move in to today's presentation. Again we're going to hear from three folks who are on the ground. I met all of these women and have visited their school districts and met in their offices and had been in their schools and the such, so you're in for some deep perspective on what's happening with school counselors across the country.
Let me just introduce Judy Petersen who's the District Director in Granite School District in Salt Lake City. Granite is one of two school districts in Salt Lake City, actually the larger school district of the two. And Judy has been at the forefront of the school counselor work for a while and had a pleasure being out there a couple of years ago and spending a couple of days in Salt Lake City.
Takesha Briggins is from Alamance-Burlington School District in Burlington, North Carolina. Also had a chance to go to Burlington and hang out with what's happening on the college access arena and meet with her and many of her colleagues also a couple of years ago.
And then the third person you'll be hearing from is Dr. Venisa Beasley-Green who I actually had the opportunity to work with when I was in Chicago. And she is still in the trenches - a very interesting and incredibly challenging school in the south side of Chicago Percy Julian.
So with all of that, I'm going to hand this off to Judy, and then they will hand it off to each other. At the end we would love to hear from you, both questions and comments, but also we'd love to hear what's happening in the school counseling world in your school, your school district, at the end of this presentation and such.
So with that, Judy, it's all yours.
Judy Petersen: Thank you, Greg, and thank you very much for the opportunity.
For you listeners, if you have the slides, let's go ahead and focus on Slide Number 3. Slide 3 just gives you an overview of Granite School District, Salt Lake City, Utah, and what we're all about. You can view our demographics.
We are the largest school district in the state. You can see our percentage of students who identify with minority background, our free and reduced meal percentage, our graduation rate, percent enrolled in college, and so on.
As far as our counseling staff goes in our district, we have 91 schools. We staff our elementary schools, unfortunately, at 1 to 1000, so most of our elementary folks are assigned to two schools and spend half-time in each school. Our secondary allocation is 1 to 389, which seems a little bit odd, but that's the way it is. And we, with some additional funds and partnerships with other departments in our district, we've got that ratio down to 352 now at the secondary school level.
Since 2011, I have been the Director for College and Career Readiness Department. And in that department I oversee our K-12 counseling program, all counselors and social workers, the AVID program, some of you may be familiar with that. We have a new initiative out west here called Latinos in Action, which is an amazing program. We were the recipients of a Department of Ed elementary counseling grant. We're in our third year of that. And then we are - I also oversee the implementation of positive behavior and intervention support.
In the fall of 2010, our school district, counseling leadership as well as an assistant superintendent, we were invited to participate in the College Board National Office of School Counselor Advocacy, NOSCA, Urban School Counseling Initiative. And at that time we were asked to bring our district organizational chart with us to the initial meeting to show where counseling is located on the district org chart.
Well, sad to report, at that time we were several layers behind the district org chart, but our participation in that particular initiative, the Urban School Counseling Initiative, launched counseling to the forefront in Granite School District. I have a copy of our org chart that you probably can't see, but in the second column, second section down, you'll see College and Career Readiness Department, where counseling now lies and has done so since approved by the board in January of 2011.
In addition, our district goals have now become aligned with college and career readiness, and rather than a district vision, we now have a charge and responsibility that you can also read on that slide, that says, "Students will leave Granite School District prepared for college, career and life in the 21st century world."
Now let's move on to Slide 4. I was asked to share best practice, and I want to show you a graphic of what that best practice to support post-secondary outcomes might look like. If you can imagine in your mind a punch card that leads to college readiness, college and career readiness, we're fortunate in Utah where we have state law that defines individual planning meetings for students in all grade levels K-12. When we get to the secondary level, we are calling that individual planning process CCR planning, college and career readiness planning.
As part of that process, we focus on grade-level developmental steps and we anchor our work in the ed components of college and career readiness outlined by NOSCA. And we involve parents in the process, we hold meetings once each year in grades 7 through 12 for students and their parents. And then we develop plans for course-taking and get the kids to actually write down their goals for college and career.
Now as we move forward, we've identified things that we want our kids to be thinking about, in terms of a rigorous high school program of study. That's kind of the given. We want our kids to take a college-level course, a college entrance exam, a college application, and you can see on down the line that we want to punch their card, if you will, to support their planning for high school graduation and college and career readiness. We're excited about that as a best practice.
If you'll move to Slide 5, you can see another best practice that we've developed in Granite School District. We saw early on that there were huge barriers in our secondary schools for students to overcome in getting into our honors and advanced courses. So we decided to zap that gap and eliminate all criteria that had been previously established by teachers and others to kind of screen out kids in honors and advanced courses. So now we allow students to self-select.
And students in grades 7 through 12 may self-select to honors advanced AP courses, and the outcome has been an increase in the number of enrollments in those courses as well as increasing the number of exams.
So to support our - a couple of our best practices, I want you to focus now on Slide 6. On Slide 6 you can see our results data. In 2011 our graduation rate was a bleak 66%. We are anticipating this year class of 2014 that we are 75%, with some of our lowest schools making huge progress. As we zapped that equity gap, the zapping the barrier that kept our students from self-selecting into AP courses, we began to track our data.
And as you can see on line two of the table on Slide 6, AP exams taken over the last three years, we saw a 502 exam taken jump from 2011 to 2012. That's when we really hit the zapping the gap, breaking down the barrier that was keeping kids from taking those courses.
A lot of our naysayers told us, oh we're going to water down our scores. We're - the kids aren't going to pass. They're not capable of being successful in AP.
Well, if you look at the third line down, you can see that that same year we increased by 502 AP exams, we also increased and improved our pass rate. In 2013 we didn't see the huge increase, but what we did see as we disaggregated our data, that more Hispanic Latino kids were taking AP exams than ever before.
The final data piece that I wanted to share is our FAFSA completion. We have been involved in the FAFSA Completion project the last couple of years and we had hoped to see a 50% participate in FAFSA completion. I put a little asterisk outside of that 36%, and I need to tell you that Utah is largely a Mormon state and we send Mormon missionaries out to your neck of the woods as well as worldwide. And the age changed for Mormon missionaries from 19 to 18, it was lowered, in that particular year. And we saw hundreds of kids opting to pursue the LDS mission after high school graduation rather than going on to post-secondary.
We've since remedied that, we hope, and are moving kids to making application and deferring, completing FAFSA so they've got that practicing part done and then moving on.
The bottom of that slide I've included some of our college and career readiness initiatives. And due to time, I won't elaborate on any of those. But I want you to see the wide variety of things that we're doing to help to operationalize college and career readiness in all of our secondary schools and even in our elementary schools.
If you go to Slide 7, I think the keys to our success in Granite School District have been the programmatic framework that we have implemented in all of our schools, a comprehensive counseling and guidance program model, and then key messaging that we have been focusing on as we are trying to improve our graduation rate and helping our kids be ready for college, career and life.
We have materials and resources, postcards that we have a full implementation plan in place to make sure that our kids, every one of our students are getting the messages that they need -- personal, up close and personal. In fact we've used the approach of drag them along and hold their hands to make sure that they're applying for college and completing their FAFSA form.
The last slide is information that we have on our Web site. You can find me at GraniteSchools.org.