Transcript: Delaware Goes to College June 16, 2015 (MS Word)

PSC-ED-OS

Moderator: Greg Darnieder

06-16-15/10:00 am CT

Confirmation #4183580

Page 1

PSC-ED-OS

Moderator:Greg Darnieder

June 16, 2015

10:00 amCT

Coordinator:Welcome and thank you for standing by. At this time, all participants will be in listen only mode until the question and answer session of today’s conference.

At that time, to ask a question, just press star 1 on your touchtone phone and record your name at the prompt. Your name is required to ask a question. This call is being recorded. If you have any objections, you may disconnect at this time. I will now turn the call over to Mr. Greg Darnieder. You may begin.

Greg Darnieder:Thank you very much on good morning everyone. I really appreciate you dialing in to today’s call which is going to be a fabulous overview of a state strategy around college and career readiness and from our friends in Delaware.

So before we jump into that, a couple of things - one is, a number of you participated in one of the White House (retiree meetings) that were held last year, one at Harvard, another convening at San Diego State University in November.

I just wanted to announce that there will be a follow up (conference) this November, the 2nd, 3rd and 4th at the University of Northern Florida and Jacksonville. That’s really a follow-up to both of those events.

And if you were the lead person from your state, you’ll be contacted in the very near future from one of us who’s helping to organize that (convening). We had represent - over 400 people representing 32 states.

We’re going to reach out to every state in the country to try to get representatives from them to the November (convening). If you have an interest in knowing a little bit more about this, feel free to reach out to me and I will fill you in as best I can.

One of the groups that emerged from the First Lady’s (retire) challenge over the 2014 year is a group that’s going to be announced this Thursday. It’s a new national counseling group that’s going to focus in on underrepresented students and around college and career opportunities.

It’s - the name of the new organization is the National Consortium for School Counseling and Post-Secondary Success. And so be hearing about them in the coming days and weeks, a very exciting enterprise and we’re thrilled that this new organization is launching to work across the country.

I want to apologize - the last Affinity call, where we had a fabulous conversation and presentation from folks at uApsire in Boston around a financial aid award letter. Unfortunately the wrong phone number was sent out by our communications folks.

That conversation has been captured as all these presentations are. It is posted at the College Access Affinity Group site, so I would strongly urge you to go to that presentation. There’s lots of really rich material that they presented and we will have them re-present this fall their financial aid work and particularly the (power) of the financial aid award letter and the such.

So let’s jump into today’s call. You should have the presentation - Delaware goes to college. We have a number of presenters, not only from the state of Delaware, the Department of Education, but also from Delaware Technical Community College as well as Sussex Technical School District.

And I’m going to just turn this over to Shana Payne, who’s the director of the Delaware Department of Education. And then as we go through the presentation, she will introduce each of the folks that are joining her for today’s call. So Shana, it’s all yours.

Shana Payne:Hello everyone. Good morning. So we’re going to jump right into Slide 2. Generally, this presentation is an opportunity for you to really understand what we’ve been able to do across the state in a really short period of time, coming together with a number of partners that you’ll hear presenting over the course of today’s call.

But we thought it was important, before we dive in and share our strategy and the work that’s happening, to give you a sense of what Delaware is like and the size and scale.

So many of the opportunities we’ve had are unique because of our size. So if you look at Slide 2, you’ll see that, you know, our (total) population is less than 1 million people.

We have a total of 19 school districts, three of which are vocational-technical school districts, one of which you’ll hear presenting today. So that gives you a sense that it’s a very small state but mighty.

And so many of the opportunities, again, that we’ve been able to do at the state level are because of that size and because we can bring everyone together around the same table and have very powerful and rich conversations.

So if you move to Slide 3, all of this work started as a result of research that we were able to do in partnership with the Harvard Strategic Data Project. And as a result of that research, they did a college (going) diagnostic that showed us where some of our gaps were as a state.

This slide that you’re looking at here speaks to the census data that shows where we need to be as a state that many of us are using as our guiding post across the country. And so we know that we need 60% of our adult population to have a post-secondary degree here in the state by 2025.

And so the move to Slide 4, what you’ll see from the research that we saw is that really only 37% of our students get from ninth grade into some form of post-secondary education. And so what we found is that there is really a gap there.

You know, our students are not progressing all the way through high school and then not subsequently enrolling in college, and even further, if you look at that redline in the middle, when you look at second your persistence of those students that make it college, we have a group of students were not persisting into their second year.

So as a state, we have really identified a strategy that helps to start to put the building blocks in place to guide students along the way and ensure that more of our students are not only graduating ready to be successful in college, but are successfully enrolling.

You can move to Slide 5. This slide really breaks it out when you look at by race and income status. And what struck us in particular, these are looking at students who have done the hard work of getting ready to be - the academic readiness to be successful in college.

All of our juniors take the SAT in the spring of their junior year as part of our Race to the Top initiative. And what we were able to see with that data, if students were meeting that 1550 SAT benchmark, whether or not those students were enrolling in college.

So if you look at those bottom orange blocks, you’ll see that you know, that’s the gap that really kicked off this work and started is what we call internally our Getting to Zero effort.

In our goal with Getting to Zero, if you look at the total column, that 18% of students were college ready but not going to college, we really wanted to close that gap and ensure that every student was ready is going on to post- secondary education.

You can move to Slide 6. I don’t spend a lot of time on this because I really want to get into the meat of the presentation and the work that’s happening but this gives you a general sense of what our goals are as the state in terms of college readiness.

Ultimately, we want to hit that 60% college enrollment rate by 2018, and we’re starting with the baseline of 55% of students who are - of all our graduating seniors who are enrolling in college, so our goal is to increase that to 60% and then to maintain that and ensure that those students are also completing their college degrees.

So we have the four key areas of work that we really are focusing in on and you’ll see elements of that in today’s presentation - college access and success, college affordability, partnerships with our higher ed institutions as well as communications.

And then to the right, I will go through each one of them, but these are the indicators that we use to really measure if we are on track to getting to that 60% college enrollment and then success once they’re in college.

You can move to Slide 7. This is a summary of all of the key initiatives that fall under those four buckets, some of which will highlight today so I won’t go through in depth but I think some of the key ones that are important, but we won’t touch on as much today, are around utilizing a variety of assessments and opportunities for students to be able to demonstrate college readiness so that we can expand that definition beyond the SAT.

Also utilizing funds from Race to the Top, College Access Challenge Grant and our state College Access fund to incentivize the work that’s happening at the district level, some of which you will hear from today.

And then looking at our state scholarship programs to ensure that our students are able to afford college and not graduate with significant debt load. You can move to Slide 8. Actually, we can move into Slide 9, and I’m going to turn it over to Karen Keegan who is our college access and success program coordinator and she leads our Getting to Zero campaign with our schools.

Karen Keegan:Hi everyone. This is Karen Keegan, and as Shana said, I work in that Department of Education in the higher education office. So on Slide 10, we wanted to just share some data points with you on our Getting to Zero campaign and just to remind you that Getting to Zero the first to the 18% of our students were meeting that 1550 college readiness benchmark were not applying to college back in 2013.

So after number of program efforts, which we’ll go over in the coming slides, for the class of 2014, we were able to achieve 100% of these 1550 students - that apply to post-secondary education which would include college, trade school, military, et cetera.

And then in addition to tracking where they applied and that they did apply, we know that 90% did choose to enroll in college and 1% chose to enlist in the military.

And so again, for this year, the class of 2015 just graduating, we also had 100% of that college ready group of students applied to post-secondary programs and, while when we did this presentation we didn’t have the decision data, but we do have a now, and we know again, this year, 90% of those college ready students are intending to enroll.

One percent are choosing the military and 1% have indicated that they will be going directly to work. So if you look at Slide 11, this is just a very brief overview of the Getting to Zero campaign. So just to break it out in a timeline format, in September, we had what we call the Access to Opportunity tours.

This was something that our governor started last year in 2014 where, in partnership with the governor’s office, the Department of Education went and spoke to every single senior class in the state of Delaware in the fall to sort of give them an overview of resources available, scholarships, different programs, with the whole process looked like in terms of the college application decision process.

And that was a really amazing thing to be part of. In October, we do a fall counselor training for all of our counselors. And in October and November, we hold College Application Month, which many of you probably hold as well in your states. I think every state in the nation participates in that.

Our College Application Month this year will be from mid-October to mid-November. We choose the month, and here in Delaware, we allow our schools to pick the week that makes the most sense for them.

And then in December, we offer statewide FAFSA training for school counselors and community organizations, for people who are helping families and students with their FAFSA.

We bring in experts from the US Department of Education we do training across our state which is - has really been well received. We’ve done that for two years now.

And then in January through March, we focus heavily on FAFSA completion and tracking, where we keep track of the students, the college ready students, and whether they’ve completed their FAFSA or not so that we can really push those students, in addition to all of the students, to complete their FAFSA in a timely manner, I should add.

And then in May, we encourage our schools to hold celebrations of their student’s successes in terms of their acceptances to post-secondary programs. And then June through August, we focus on summer.

Now, we’ll talk a little bit about this later in the presentation, but we did some packets for seniors giving them information on things that they still needed to do over the summer in order to be ready to enroll in college in the fall. And we have a texting program going on, which we’ll get to in a few minutes.

So on Slide 12, this is just a quick overview of our College Application Month. We do provide school counselor training for the site coordinators who will be the main point of contact in their schools.

We’re actually doing a principal Webinar next week for the first time in Delaware so the principles are fully aware of all that’s involved in College Application Month.

We work with a University of Delaware’s Institute for Public Administration. We partner with them and they help us run College Application Month in our state, as well as a number of other projects, including our big texting project that’s going on right now.

We also monitor our student’s progress. We - for our college ready students, we monitor where they’ve applied to college, where they’ve been accepted and with a plan to enroll.

And we’ve created data systems where school counselors can answer that information into our school-wide database system so that we can easily hold the reports. That’s sort of been an evolving process over the last year.

And at the bottom, a local throw these numbers, but this is a snapshot of our College Application Month with a number of schools that participate in last year. All of our district and charter schools participated in College Application Month.

Again, they will this year. And we had students fill out surveys at the end of their computer lab sessions. And these are some of the results. And when you see numbers, you know, that 255 students would not have otherwise applied had it not been for College Application Month, it - and I’m sure that there are more than that but those are the students who completed the survey - we feel that this is a very, very important effort in our state.

We also had over 70 organizations helping volunteer in our schools during College Application Weeks in the schools - volunteers like college admissions reps, Department of Education staff, University of Delaware staff and other of our colleges and universities sent reps as well.

Someone the next - and many corporations sense participants as - like, Bank of America sent people, so that was a really good effort. On Slide 13, the FAFSA completion - again we do statewide training so that the people are helping families and students with FAFSA completion are up-to-date on the latest initiatives and changes from year to year with FAFSA.

We have a statewide partnership with an organization called Stand by Me. We partnered with them and they worked with all of our schools in terms of financial aid presentations and scheduling time students and families to help complete FAFSA.

So that was a really great partnership this year. We also have a data sharing MOU with districts and high schools where we send them the names of students who have not yet completed their FAFSA so that they can specifically know to track down and encourage them to get their FAFSA completed in a timely manner.

So for this year, class of 2015, for our 1550 and above students, the college-ready students, we had an 82% completion rate of FAFSA. And you can see the previous years there, as well, and 49% for the entire senior class.

So on Slide 14, you know, one of our challenges - is we’ve built these initiatives over the past two years, we are trying to now connect the dots so that it’s not just college application month and now it’s just time for FAFSA, that we’re trying to make it a whole year long initiative so that people see the continuing, you know, process that’s involved.

And we are developing - we have a good partner access. We have a group called the College Access Partners. We meet every other month and these are organizations like the Boys and Girls Clubs, the YWCA, different groups around the state who work with our students in addition to our schools.

Given the common share what they’re doing in the world of college access. They learn with the state initiatives are. Our colleges and universities come to these meetings and our counselors - school counselors, as well.

This year, will be having some counseling interns as part of their retire initiative, will be working in some of our elementary and middle schools to develop college going culture materials that we can then expand to a statewide level, so that’s a new initiative for this year.