 Thank you for attending our webinar. My name is Shelton Dahl and I'm a program associate with the Southern Education Labor at New America. I've had the pleasure of working on this webinar with our colleagues on the Grow Your Own Network team at New America. And in this webinar, we plan on exploring the growing momentum of educator apprenticeships and highlighting promising practices. We have some great speakers lined up. Next slide, please. So in terms of our speakers, we have Sean and Piatris, the chief academic officer from Clarksville-Montgomery County School System in Tennessee, Megan Sullivan, the executive director from Crerys, Colorado, Amaya Garcia, the deputy director of the Pre-K-12 team at New America, and Taylor White, the director of the partnership to advance youth apprenticeship in New America. I'm gonna pass it over to Taylor, who's gonna take us through some framing remarks and then act as a moderator for our panel session. Thank you. All right, thank you, Shelton. I just wanna quickly echo Shelton's thanks to our attendees and the panelists who are joining us for today's exciting discussion. My name is Taylor White and I have the job of moderating today's conversation. But before we get started, I wanna take just a second to orient you a bit and help set the context for our time together today. First, who is hosting this webinar and why? Next slide, please. The easiest answer to this question is New America. Some of you know us well from past work, most likely, but for those of you who may be joining us here for the first time, New America is a nonprofit, nonpartisan research and policy organization based in Washington, DC. As an organization, we're dedicated to renewing the promise of our country's highest ideals by confronting the challenges that have been caused by rapid technological and social change and seizing opportunities that those changes to create to improve our systems to expand opportunity for our fellow Americans. We work across a wide range of issue areas and one of the best parts about working at New America are the opportunities we have for cooperation and a collaboration across different bodies of work. Today's webinar is gonna be a perfect example of that and so we are very excited to have you here today. Over the next hour, you're going to hear from and about work being led by two teams here at New America, the Education Policy Program and New America's Center for Education and Labor. These programs share a commitment to strengthening and improving public systems so that all students and all workers have equitable access to high quality learning opportunities that prepare them to succeed in college, in their careers and in civic life. At New America, we believe firmly that place-based innovators in our schools, in our colleges, in our workforce systems and in other realms of society have deep, untapped, disconnected expertise that is worth cultivating and better understanding to solve the problems that face us all. We spend a lot of our time at New America thinking about how to better connect expert practitioners to surface and share their good ideas and to find ways to bring those ideas to greater scale. Today's webinar is the direct result of two such efforts, the Grow Your Own Educator National Network, which is a learning community of practitioners leading Grow Your Own Educator strategies in multiple states across the US and the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, which is a multi-year, multi-partner initiative that supports place-based efforts to expand youth apprenticeship as a high-quality post-secondary option for young adults. In the interest of time, I'm not gonna go into too much detail about these two initiatives, but I would encourage you to explore the links that have been shared in the event page to see who participates in these networks, what we're learning from the practitioners who do participate, and how your communities might benefit from that learning and opportunities like this one to join us via webinar to hear some of the work that's going on in corners across the country. Over the past few years, the GYO and PIA teams have watched with interest as apprenticeship as a strategy for preparing future educators has grown from a small trickle to a surge driven by a combination of factors related to worsening teacher shortages, a desire to diversify the educator workforce so it better reflects our student populations, and on the apprenticeship side, a deliberate and sustained effort to expand and modernize the American apprenticeship system to make it more accessible for new jobs and industries like education to take advantage of apprenticeships' many benefits. Our panelists are going to be digging into these factors in much greater detail in just a moment, but before we dig in, I do wanna acknowledge that this webinar is an exciting chance for us to bring together two distinct communities of experts. Some of you listeners possess deep knowledge of educator preparation, but you might be newer to apprenticeship. Others on the line are apprenticeship veterans who may not be familiar with the ins and outs of teacher preparation landscape. If we've learned anything in our work on educator apprenticeship to date, it's that these two groups of people have a lot of expertise, you have a lot of good ideas, and you have a lot, a lot of acronyms. So to ensure that we are all using the same terminology in our hour together, I'm gonna spend just a second before we start our discussion, grounding us in some shared language about apprenticeship. And once our conversation begins, I'm going to top my colleague, Maya Garcia, to share some of the same context and information of grow your own educator preparation programs. So if we can advance to the next slide, please, I am just gonna spend a second talking about what we mean when we use the term apprenticeship. At its most basic, apprenticeship is a structured earn and learn model that provides a combination of on-the-job learning and classroom-based instruction to prepare people for a specific occupation. Apprenticeship programs are distinguished from other types of work-based learning models by several factors. First, apprenticeships are job, apprentices are paid by their employers during their training period. Apprenticeship programs provide on-the-job learning in a work-based setting under the supervision of skilled employee mentors. Apprentices complete job-related classroom training. It's designed to be closely linked to the skills and competencies that apprentices are learning on the job. And it's typically offered at no to low cost for apprentices to ensure the training programs are accessible. Training through apprenticeships result in a portable national recognized credential that qualifies an apprentice to continue working in their occupation and field of choice. The length of apprenticeship programs can vary depending on the employer, the complexity of the occupation, the industry, and the program type. When they're designed intentionally, apprenticeship models can address inequitable access to post-secondary education and training and smooth entry to employment opportunities that can be difficult to mint for some workers to access. Apprenticeships can also be an efficient, powerful strategy for bringing cross-sector partners together to co-develop training opportunities that better connect the learning needs of workers with the talent needs of today's employers. Next slide, please. Throughout our call together today, you are going to hear us using a range of apprenticeship-related terms, including registered apprenticeship, youth apprenticeship, and possibly also pre-apprenticeship. The term registered apprenticeship refers to an apprenticeship program that has been vetted by the U.S. Department of Labor or a state apprenticeship agency and has been determined to meet high standards, rather, for quality and rigor. Registered apprenticeship programs, by definition, must include the elements I just shared on the prior slide, so you can see those five checkmarks there. A registered apprenticeship program, by virtue of having been registered, will provide those five elements. The U.S. registered apprenticeship system imposes some additional requirements to ensure the programs provide adequate training and education. For example, registered apprenticeship programs typically require a minimum of 2,000 hours of on-the-job training, or, increasingly, evidence that an apprentice can demonstrate competencies equivalent to a similar duration or intensity of work experience. So competency-based apprenticeships are on the rise. You will also hear us today using the term youth apprenticeship. It's important to note that high-quality youth apprenticeship programs provide all the same benefits and features of a registered apprenticeship that are often designed to be a bit more flexible to accommodate the academic and developmental needs of high-school age youth. Federal legislation allows registered apprenticeship programs to enroll students as young as 16, rather. So apprenticeship programs, sometimes registered apprenticeship programs, are youth apprenticeship programs. Youth apprenticeship programs can also be registered, even if they enroll exclusively students who would be considered youth, so ages 16 to 24. Youth apprenticeship, as a term, is not yet a federally defined concept, and there are many youth apprenticeship programs that have not pursued registration that do, in fact, contain and offer all five of these elements. Today, when we use the term youth apprenticeship, just for the sake of clarity, we will be using the definition of youth apprenticeship developed by New America and the PIA national partners, which asserts that high-quality youth apprenticeships must provide all five of these elements, as well as some amount of college credit. We believe that that's important for ensuring that youth apprenticeship programs multiply students' options rather than cutting them off. We wanna make sure that youth apprenticeship allows young people to have a wide range of opportunities to continue their education and advancing their career over time. If you would like to see this definition or more information about the PIA principles for high-quality youth apprenticeship, please just check out the link that we have added in the resources page of the event site. So finally, just a quick word about pre-apprenticeship. Many of you hail from states where the difference between youth apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship is not especially clear. We often hear people using these terms interchangeably and that can be really confusing. Please understand that pre-apprenticeship and youth apprenticeship are not meant to be the same program model. Pre-apprenticeships are designed to help people prepare to qualify for apprenticeship programs, some of which can be extremely competitive. Pre-apprenticeships are not required to provide all of the same components of an apprenticeship, though they typically combine some classroom instruction or prep work of some sort with some type of on-the-job learning or job shadowing to expose learners to the realities of a given occupation and industry. Significantly, pre-apprenticeship programs are not always paid experiences. They can be designed for adult or youth learners and there's a lot of flexibility in the model by definition and intentionally. Some states have adopted standards and recognition processes for pre-apprenticeships but there's still significant variation and confusion in the field about what constitutes a pre-apprenticeship. Don't get me wrong, pre-apprenticeships can be a hugely valuable strategy to prepare people to succeed in apprenticeship programs and they can be a really powerful way to ensure that populations of people who are underrepresented in the current apprenticeship system have an opportunity to prepare for success in apprenticeship roles. But it's important to understand that pre-apprenticeships do differ significantly from registered apprenticeship and from high quality youth apprenticeship which are longer-term paid opportunities that provide training and credentials and are designed to qualify apprentices for full-time work at the conclusion of their programs. All of these three models can be powerful strategies for preparing and supporting future educators and I am delighted that we are gathered here today to learn more about their potential for doing exactly that. So without further delay, I would love to ditch my slides here and welcome to the screen our panelists for today's discussion who will help us learn a bit more about these different program models, share challenges that they have faced in designing them and discuss opportunities that may lie ahead for this emerging field. So welcome panelists. All right, so Shelton told us a little bit about who is on the line with us today but I wanna give our panelists a chance to introduce themselves to you before we dive into the full conversation. So I am going to ask the folks on the line with me today to tell us who you are, what organization you're representing and where it's based. Tell us a little bit about what your connection is to either grow your own educator preparation models or apprenticeship. And then what's one thing you're excited to hear from a fellow panelists today or learn from a fellow panelists today, I should say. So I am going to kick it to Sean to get us started. Okay, thank you, Taylor. My name's Sean Imperatris and I'm the chief academic officer for Clarksville Montgomery County Schools in Clarksville, Tennessee. My connection to grow your own in apprenticeship is four years ago we started this work with grow your own. And so we have three different pipelines to grow your own. We have a pipeline for candidates that are seeking a credential and certification, a pipeline for those that are just seeking certification and then a pipeline for those that are seeking certification and a master's. And in November, with the state of Tennessee as our sponsor, we became the first teacher occupational registered apprenticeship for grow your own by the Department of Labor. And I'm very interested in hearing Megan speak today because we have a teaching and learning academy that we are developing a pre-apprenticeship for this year and we're in the strategic planning process of that right now with workforce. So I know I'll be able to pick up some nuggets of wisdom for Megan and her work. Great, thank you for being here, Sean. And you've teed up Megan perfectly. So I'm gonna kick it to Megan Sullivan from CareerWise Colorado to tell us a little bit about herself. Thanks, hi everyone. Megan Sullivan, CareerWise Colorado. We are a youth apprenticeship organization that our role in Colorado is working to build a youth apprenticeship system across the state. So I come from the apprenticeship side of the house here and my connection to grow your own apprenticeship beyond that is it was over three years ago that we launched our future educator pathway and have built out a future educator apprenticeship program that I will be chatting with you about today. And I think the thing I'm excited about hearing from my fellow panelists is we have been pretty heads down on the Colorado team and implementing this. And so kind of getting a sense of the broader movement across the country toward leveraging apprenticeship and what's happening and how other folks are approaching it is what I'm interested in, thanks. Awesome, thank you for being here with us, Megan. And last but by no means least, I'm gonna ask my colleague, Amaya Garcia to introduce herself. Hi, I'm Amaya Garcia. I work at New America in Washington, D.C. And my connection to GYO is that for the past six years or so I've been researching and writing about GYO programs and policies across the country and I also help lead New America's Grow Your Own Educator National Network. And one thing that I'm excited to hear about today is really just to hear from Megan and Sean about how they're really leading the way on educator apprenticeship and their respective roles. So thanks to both of them for being with us today. Great, thank you, Amaya, for being here. And I am gonna go rewind a second back to my opening remarks where I mentioned that there are a lot of acronyms in this space and I'm gonna kick it to you first, Amaya, for our discussion to help us understand a little bit more about what we mean when we say GYO. I'm sure there are people on the line scratching their heads about that. So could you help us understand a little bit more about GYO? Why GYO strategies exist? Is it a single model? Is it something multiple models? What does GYO look like in different places where it's gained popularity? And how common are they as formal program models? Thanks, Taylor. So first I'm gonna start with defining what we mean by grow your own because grow your own is a highly localized strategy. And so unlike registered apprenticeship, there is no national definition five principles. We have ones that we've come up with using research but that's not widely embraced by the field, right? And so when we talk about grow your own at New America, we define the strategy as partnerships between school districts, educator preparation programs and our community-based organizations to recruit and prepare community members such as high school students, fair educators, even parents to become teachers in their local schools. So for us, the really central part of that definition is the partnership part, but also the community part, right? We're leveraging the assets of the people who are already in the community to teach in schools and to stay there, right? So one of the big assumptions and promises of grow your own is this idea that if you're training people who are already familiar with the context and needs of where they're working, they're gonna stay in the classroom that much longer, right? And we know that's a huge issue right now as teacher turn over, especially now in the aftermath of the pandemic. So one of the primary reasons, I guess two of the primary reasons that people use GYO is one to address localized teacher subject area shortages. So things like special education and there's just a second language but also geographic shortages. We know that our rural school districts really need teachers. And so GYO has been seen as a really promising approach to cultivating that talent within the community since a lot of people don't necessarily wanna move to a rural location. The other, I think increasingly is the need to diversify the teacher workforce both racially and linguistically to better match student demographics. And we know there's a growing body of research that shows actually teacher-student matching racially, linguistically really does matter for long-term outcomes. And so I think a lot of states and districts are really invested in any kind of approach that can kind of help boost those numbers and make sure that our teacher refers as representative of the student population. I will say, so I did a 50 state scan in 2020 and I just updated it in 2022. And we've actually seen a big growth in the number of states that are funding some type of GYO program. And when I say some type, I mean anything from like a CTE program to a scholarship program to one of these kinds of partnerships that I used when I was defining the term. So when I first did the scan and I collected the data in 2019, it was about 19 states provided some funding. And now it's actually 31 states plus the district of Columbia. So you see that there's been a lot of growth and upward momentum and which is really exciting for us. GYO in and of itself is not a single model because as I keep saying, it's a very localized approach. There are a lot of different models that are used to meet the long-term goal of GYO which is to build a robust pipeline of well-prepared community-based teachers. So some programs target high school students. So we see that in almost every state across the country, there is some kind of program that's trying to cultivate high school students into becoming teachers. So some do that via education and training courses through career and technical education. Some sort of extend that to also provide dual enrollment opportunities. Others help prepare students for their transition to college actually. So it's like they take coursework but instead of giving a dual enrollment, they actually try to help them understand the application process, financial aid, all those kinds of things that they need, those bridges that they need to make that leap between secondary and post-secondary. Others even function as clubs. It might be kids who are just interested in pursuing a career as a teacher and they just kind of want to get together and hang out. And as Megan will describe, a very small number of programs are utilizing apprenticeship to help youth gain training and hands-on experience working in schools. And those are just the high school focus programs, right? So on the other side, there are also multiple models used to increase access to educator preparation for adults who already work in school but lack of credential and face some significant barriers and obstacles to pursuing higher education. So a lot of the work that we've done is focused on paraeducators specifically. Paraeducators are a very logical pool of people to tap into these roles because they have significant experience working with kids. They understand what it means to work in schools and lots of times they're from the community. And I would be remiss not to say they're also highly underpaid, right? And so if a paraeducator becomes a teacher, they have opportunity to almost lots of times double their salary, get better benefits, all those kinds of things. So we ought to think of it as not just about you developing, it's also about economic ability, it's about community development, it's about all these kinds of things that come together with GYO. So these programs for adults can be structured as just simple scholarship programs of financial assistance to help people really overcome that financial barrier. And summer structure does more formal partnerships that they talked about that offer comprehensive wraparound supports at each stage of the process. So you'll see some programs, they really do one-on-one counseling with each candidate in their program, they help them with the application process, they help them figure out what testing to take, what kinds of fees they need to pay, they do extensive academic advising, they do tutoring, they do mentoring, they have cohort structure so that they kind of all work and learn together. And I know Sean will talk about this when he talks about some of the work they've done in Clarksville, Montgomery. And others, the ones that we really like include a residency component where teacher candidates work under the guidance of a mentor teacher for one to two years while being employed as paraprofessional. So I like to apprenticeship, they're getting paid to work in schools and kind of earn as they learn, right? And many GYO programs for adults are offered via alternative certification. So for people who already have a bachelor's degree and designed to be completed kind of within 15 months to two years. So all cert programs kind of have a bad rap because I think we tend to think about them in one kind of way, but there is a lot of different ways that you can do alternative certification. And I think your own kind of proves that there are ways to have high quality rigorous non-traditional pathways into the profession. And then there are some programs for individuals who have some college credits, but need to earn a BA. I'd say that those are a few and far between, but I mean, they do exist. So basically what I'm trying to say is we see great variability between states and districts in terms of the models being used, but lots of them implementing them for the same kinds of reasons to address similar kinds of problems. And then I think even though I talked about how a lot of states offer funding, really only about 10 states have like a formal competitive grant program for GYO that specifies program requirements, guidelines, and goals. So I'll go back to Tennessee again, Tennessee has like a very specific, they want like a two-year residency, they want you to get a dual endorsement in either a special ed or ESL. So the state kind of mandates all these components that they want the educator preparation programs to adhere to. And so I think that those are interesting to kind of see how those differences emerging between states and how much states like kind of are really dictating what these programs should look like. And I will say lastly is that, ESL funds are being widely used to develop and expand GYO programs right now. And we will be keeping our eye on how many of those efforts are sustained once those funds are no longer available. All right, so thank you for that Amaya. That's super helpful. So GYO is a pretty flexible term. It defines a wide range of program types that are really driven by similar objectives, which is to grow educators out of the people in the community to provide an expand opportunity, both from the perspective of good and better jobs than some folks may be accessing currently. Paraeducators is one example. High school students, another example, probably no jobs or fast food type jobs. And some of them are very structured while some of them may not be. I think an important thing that you noted though is that the funding for the more formal structured programs has been somewhat limited over the last few years, which might be yet another reason that we see the growing interest in apprenticeship amongst the GYO community, where there has been kind of a surge in funding and funding availability that's been forecast. Certainly for the future, but from the federal government at any rate from several of the last past administrations, just consistent support for apprenticeship as a model. So that's a, I know one reason that we've heard that the GYO folks have been interested in just better understanding the potential of apprenticeship. So I think I don't mean to get ahead of our storyline here. So I'm gonna kick it to Sean to help us move it along a little bit. Sean, Clarksville Montgomery has had a GYO program. You gave us a little bit of information about that in your intro just a second ago. It had a residency component. It was in partnership with a university in the area. Can you tell us a little bit more about the GYO program and the district's impetus for launching that even before you encountered apprenticeship? Yeah, so Amaya really hit our impetus. It was the diversity matching of our teachers. Statewide, if we match the state, traditional educator prep has yielded about 16% ethnically diverse teachers in the state of Tennessee. Our student body is 50%. So we had done a lot of work with our recruiting with very little results. And so in 2017-18, we received a seed grant from the state of Tennessee focusing on increasing diversity of teachers. So with that money, we sought out promising practices throughout the United States. And we looked at three promising practices that I'll just focus on the one that established the teacher residency pathways, which was Fresno Unified School District. So Fresno Unified School District had received a $23 million grant to develop teacher residency pathways. And they partnered with Fresno State and Fresno Pacific. They had three types of pathways, which I talked about in my intro that we modeled ours after. Those candidates that were seeking degrees, those that had a degree but wanted a certification and it had those that did have a degree but wanted a master's in addition to the certification. So the degree seeking candidates are graduating high school seniors, classified employees, not just paraphras and bus drivers, custodians from an office. We've gotten them from all areas of the organization and then community members. We've got nurses, preachers, people wanting to change careers. And then those that already have a degree, we focus on the classified in the community. So one of the things we noticed about Fresno while we were doing the research, which was unique to Fresno's program was that they employed in those three pathways an educator pipeline facilitator over each pathway and really kind of to be brief, what that role was was to take the learning that the candidate was learning on the job, the application-based learning from a master teacher and bridge it with the certification learning that they were learning from the college competencies and providing all those wraparound supports that Amaya talked about. So whether it was work with professionalism, mental health, goal-setting, tutoring and just building that into the program. So that was very impressive to us and it really impacted Fresno's retention rates. So when you look at that research, those that have some type of wraparound support have higher retention rates than those that do not. So at the same time I'm doing this work and kicking it off in 2019, 2020, I'm also the chief academic officer looking at youth apprenticeship across the United States. Clarksville has a lot of industry. And so we very much wanted to be more of a factor to help solve those issues of placement into industry, high quality jobs that our industry was seeking from us as a school district. And when I traveled across the nation with our economic development council and our workforce essentials president, I saw quality apprenticeships, used apprenticeships. And what I saw was that same link between the on-the-job competency and the certification competency, especially when you're attempting to be a journeyman, a lot of those industry, people that are attracted to those industry love to work with their hands, right? But sometimes certification, completion and passing of the tests is a challenge for them. So when I saw that model in 2019, 2020, I went up to our workforce president, I said, we have an apprenticeship model, okay? So what would be the benefits of us getting registered by the department of labor? So Sean, that's really helpful background. And it does sound like as you're describing the program in Fresno and the GEO programs that you all built in the district, it does, the programs do contain many of those five items that I had up on the slide. They might be pieced together slightly differently or they might be different durations, but the sort of core components of the models that we know are good, combining that on-the-job and classroom learning, the importance of a mentorship, the benefits of paying people for their time and their labor, which is not a tradition that exists in sort of student teaching historically in this country. So it sounds like all of those things are kind of in the mix. So last year, you worked with the state of Tennessee to create a registered apprenticeship model to train educators, building on the existing GEO model. So why? You have to give us a little bit of the why, but what was it about the formal apprenticeship model that appealed to you that made you think we actually should move ahead and register this? And what had to change about your model or evolve, I guess, to better fit within the definition of apprenticeship so that you could achieve registration? Yeah, I'm gonna start with the change and then I'm gonna go to the why. And what I talked about that bridge of learning between the educator pipeline facilitator and the university, I used the word learning when I talked about what we were doing on the job and I used the word competency when I talked about the university. And what had to change is we had to formalize what those on the job competencies would be and how the master teacher would ensure that they gradually release those competencies so that as the apprentices finish the apprenticeship, they've mastered what they need to master. And so what we used to do that was the team model, our evaluation model. So we used backward plans, our planning domains, our professionalism domains, our intervention domains, our pedagogy domains and that's how we created and formalized those competencies. So that's, if you're looking at and going from a residency model, some have competencies that are very explicit, some do not, the Department of Labor is gonna want those very explicit competencies and backward plan them to their job evaluation and expectation. So that's what had to change. Now, why? So I asked Marla Ryder, President of Workforce Essential, why would this be a good idea? So I wanna go back to how we help scale this in Tennessee. So four years ago, there was one traditional EPP, Austin P and one district, Clarksville, Montgomery County involved in his grow your own teacher residency work. David Donaldson, who I think is on the call was the human resources director for the state, chief for the state. And what I really liked about his leadership style is he tried to recognize effective practice and scale it up and support it through the state. So he recognized our work and he put us as partners with the state and with Austin P and we did a couple grow your own summits. And what I've learned as we've presented about this in these fields is higher ed has their conferences, right? And districts have their conferences, but they never get together, right? So they're very silent. So the wisdom of the summit from the state was to bring both those parties together and strategically plan how you can develop or grow your own program using the tenants of our model, but it didn't have to be our model. And so there were some non-negotiables because the incentive in that those summits was that over two years the state provided $6.5 million of $100,000 grants to districts and EPPs that partnered with three non-negotiables. There could be no cost of the candidate. You had to provide a full-time job and you had to provide dual certification. So that was wonderful. You know, in four years we went from one and one to 14 EPPs and 65 districts in the work. So great scaling of the work, but the one non-negotiable that wasn't in the grant application was at wraparound support that educator pipeline facilitator. So one of the reasons I wanted to go for the apprenticeship is because the apprenticeship model supports that coaching and that support in that bridge. And so I was watching a lot of our colleagues who hadn't done the research that just hopped onto the grants, not provide the support that they needed to provide to the residents. The residents need to be at the heart of this work. So when we talk about this partnership work, we're talking about districts, we're talking about workforce, we're talking about higher ed, they should not continue to exist the way they started this work. They should be existing around what's in the best interest of the apprentice. And so they continue to need the morph and it continues to need to meet and a partner. This is the evolving work, it's not silent work. So I wanted to protect our model. Then of course you guys talked about the finding, Amaya. So in our state, first year, Viola local apprenticeship money, 2,000 per registered apprentice, 1,000 for the second year. So for a semester, we've gotten about $133,000 from workforce. But more it also, and you can use that for tuition, books, salary. But I wanna tell you a story. Once the apprentice is registered, there are opportunities that the apprentice can get funding, okay? So this is best representing the story. So we registered in December, we had a candidate that was a single mother of three children, whose card broken down two months earlier, she had maxed out her credit card to pay for that car repair and now it was broken down again. She was in good standing at her school, which she couldn't get to. She was in great standing at her college, which she couldn't get to. We handed that over to workforce. Within a week, they had paid off her car now. They had given her monthly gas money and they had given her monthly child support money. So that those barriers that come with the economics of first generation, potentially ethnically diverse candidates can be supported through this apprenticeship dollars. So you support them emotionally, you support them tutoring through the coaching and you support them financially through the apprenticeship model. Sean, I really appreciate your emphasis on the partnership piece here and that one of the things that apprenticeship does that's somewhat unique, especially in the sphere of education is it brings together formal post-secondary education, K-12 education acting as an employer in this case and the workforce system and that it is in some ways like, we use the term it takes a village when you're talking about raising a child, but we often ignore the fact that it does actually take a community of people to rally around some of our community members to make sure that they are on a path to economic stability and success and apprenticeship is sort of uniquely designed to bring folks together for that purpose because of the way it requires that interaction across systems. So there's someone on the line who knows a whole lot about interaction across systems. So I wanna make sure she gets a chance to weigh in here. Thank you, Sean. And before I turn it to Megan, I will say really quickly to folks on the line, I'm sure you have a lot of questions about the program models that Sean and Megan are gonna describe. You should have received an email earlier today with some attachments that show some basics of the apprenticeship models in Clarksville, Montgomery and in Denver, which we will hear about or I'm gonna start in Colorado, which we'll hear about in one second from Megan. So Megan, to you. CareerWise Colorado is recognized as one of the nation's most innovative work-based learning intermediary organizations with its apprenticeship programming. Your objective is to create modern youth apprenticeship system in the state of Colorado that you shared with us early on. Can you briefly tell us just a little bit about how you all think about modern youth apprenticeship and the types and jobs and industries where CareerWise has focused its energy to date? I know Educator Pathways was a pilot. Now it's a full pathway, but it's not your only pathway. So can you tell us a little bit more about the whole span of work that you all do? Sure, yeah. Thanks, Taylor. So we are six years into this adventure of trying to scale youth apprenticeship. And when we started, it was really about two goals. So the average profile of an apprentice in the US is a 29-year-old white male. And so one of the things that we really wanted to do is get to folks earlier and really diversify who has access to apprenticeship. So our vision was about starting students in high school and helping them make that transition into career through apprenticeship. Sort of before the way a lot of our district partners talk about it is before they might fall off that college graduation or high school graduation cliff. So get them situated and get them on that path while still in high school. So that high school engagement component is one half of what we were trying to do. The other half of what we were trying to do was sort of change the way that apprenticeship is thought of in the US and how it's used as a tool, as a training tool. I think most of us who grew up here think of electricians and other kinds of skilled trade occupations when we think of apprenticeship. And that's not the case outside the US. Outside the US, it is leveraged as a really cost efficient, really high value, high efficacy training model for all kinds of occupations. So our vision was starting students in high school and leveraging apprenticeship to help students access knowledge economy roles. So we started really focused on information technology and business operations positions, things like a project coordinator or a marketing coordinator and actually in the finance sector in banking and helping students develop into that pathway. Had a lot of success working in those and since then we have been adding occupations into our portfolio that are again, still for those kinds of roles that we often think might require a bachelor's degree but increasingly folks are seeing that skills-based hiring and skills-based focus can also train folks into those positions. Neat. So in your description just now though about bachelor's degrees, skills-based hiring, I would say education is like a little bit of a challenge to that trend, right? Because certainly, well, with some very recent exceptions over the last few days of at least one state who just passed legislation or advanced legislation saying that educators might not actually need bachelor's degrees anymore but that's a whole totally different conversation for another day, maybe another webinar. Megan, tell us a little bit about the arrival of this future educator pathway and what sort of the impetus was for adding it and how it's grown and what you've seen is that might be a little bit different with the educator pathway than some of your other pathways, if anything. Yeah, I think educator fits into a category of occupations and it's not the only one like this where a very prescriptive educational outcome is required in order to be licensed. So that's true in clinical healthcare roles, it's true for teachers and so that's something that we had to figure out. Like how do you really pair that full education cyber apprenticeship might normally just have a series of classes and really rely on the job training component more robustly, occupation like teacher really requires a true marriage of those together. So how did it get started? We had not been thinking about going into teacher apprenticeship until one of our school districts, it's a Denver Metro School District, Cherry Creek School District and one of their leaders, Sarah Grobel, came to us as an employer. She had been working with us in their district, had been working with us for a couple of years. Similarly, Sean, to what you were talking about where they had been sending students out into these high quality apprenticeships in these other industry sectors and we're saying, we need this as an employer too and think the same model could work really well here in Cherry Creek schools. So partnered up with them in a whole new way. So we were now working with them as an education partner for other apprenticeships and as an employer partner to really design an apprenticeship model that made sense for their goals because that's what apprenticeship is really about. It's about an employer led effort designing a training program that's gonna meet that employer need and is also incredibly advantageous to the student participants. And so we built a model that was true to the career-wise vision of starting students in high school. We did not dive all the way to the teacher degree in this scope. What we said was, let's get students, let's open the door, let's hold their hand, walk them through it and get them on the path. So the vision in that early stage for our future educator apprenticeship was to and they are registered with USDOL just like Sean's but they're registered to the para educator occupation, not to the teacher occupation. Some districts register or some don't, but they registered a para. They are in the apprenticeship depending on the school district. It's kind of up to them two to three years. They complete those 2,000 hours of training and functionally we call it para plus because they're really trained as a para much quicker than the entire apprenticeship takes. And the competency set that they train to goes far beyond what a typical para would be expected to learn in master. So they're working under that master teacher really starting to build up the competency that they're going to need to be a classroom teacher. When the program ends, they typically transition that the hope is that they will transition into just a para role and continue to work for the district as they pursue their bachelor's degree because we know they need that in order to move into that teacher role. How it's continuing to evolve is part of what we're seeing is that some districts can really maintain that strong relationship with their para as they continue that journey. It depends really on like how close and how symbiotic that teacher preparation higher ed program is. And as we've expanded, we now we're partnering currently with seven school districts and are getting ready to launch with even more. A lot of our school districts don't have a local program. So they can continue this model why that student works through the general education requirements of that bachelor's degree. But as soon as they're ready to dive fully into the teacher preparation program, they have to up and move, right? So geographically relocate in order to access that program. And so we've been working with a variety of partners on trying to design a program that really counts that on-the-job training toward the degree and fast tracks that but also allows students to access the course content remotely and really lean into the on-the-job training for the in-person components and are making a ton of progress and think we're gonna be ready to launch that quite soon actually. But that's kind of how it's evolved Taylor is that we can see that we need the stage two for us is really gonna be figuring out that degree apprenticeship but because our role as an intermediary is to support any school district across the state regardless of where they're geographically positioned, we really have to figure out how do you make this accessible for folks no matter where they are. And the other thing that'll add into that is we sort of dove in into this, you know, we've talked a lot about that incumbent para and what we're trying to do is figure this design out in such a way that it's going to work for the youth but it's gonna work equally well for those incumbent paras because there's no reason it shouldn't. It should be the same program design, the same methodology, the same apprenticeship model that can really serve both of those groups. Me, I think that's a really important point and it's like a nice full circle to the slide that I had where I was really trying to emphasize that good models are good models and they can be adapted and tweaked if they have different types of participants with different needs, different timelines but the idea that we need to create multiple different, very different program types under the banner of apprenticeship to serve these different populations sometimes gets a little bit overblown I think and complicates things for people. A good program is a good program. It might take an extra year if you're a high school student it might require more flexibility or a different work schedule but ultimately at the end of the day the standards and competencies and credentials really should all be a high level both to protect the interests of the apprentices but also the young people that we hope to put them in front of as classroom leaders someday. So really appreciate that. Guys, we have taken a very long time for our panel and I have done a poor job moderating so we are almost past our point of Q and A but I'm going to use moderator's privilege to ask you one more question because our Q and A doc where folks have been entering them is not full yet. So if folks on the line do have questions for Amaya or Megan or Sean or me please do feel free to submit them we are collecting them and we'll pose them to these folks in just a second once they have a chance to answer my last question at least my last official question I can fill up any time that's needed with many, many more I'm sure but this is really a question for all of you and so I'll open it up for whoever as quick as with the off mute. So Sean you all are in the early days of implementation Megan career-wise isn't a few years in but still tweaking and developing its model. Amaya you've had a chance to watch from afar as programs have made this transition and as states have put their hands up to learn more about GAO and more about apprenticeship and this debate about what's the difference how can they kind of combine forces for good has evolved over the last several months and really gained a lot of momentum. I'm wondering what some of the biggest learnings have been for you all working in this space and trying to bring these models together. Do you think apprenticeship is a viable pathway for changing the way educators are trained and supported or does it feel a little bit like it's just a different or a different box that you're putting these pieces into and do you think that it has potential to address the teacher shortages and the diversification challenges that you all mentioned at the top of the hour. So I'm curious like how's it going? What have you learned? What have been some of the big challenges? This is our sort of finale question before we go to the audience questions. We have some initial results with some of our placements. We onboarded 52 teachers this March from our three-year model our first 30 graduating in August. They actually graduated and have open house on the same day. But we are about 90% on our one-year programs, retention rate and our first-year retention rate in the district is 82%. And I told you about 16% ethnically diverse across the state. Our last cohort was 41% ethnically diverse. So we are seeing initial results. It makes sense to me. We are going to track level of effectiveness between traditionally trained teachers and residents and apprentice. But it makes sense to me if you're day in and day out with a master teacher and you have competencies that are aligned that you're going to be more prepared than a 15-week student teaching assignment that's yielded us about 50% leaving the field in three to five years. That's great. Sean, just to clarify that, do you think that those numbers represent a significant improvement on what you would have seen in a different type of program model? And like what is it do you think that's helped with those, achieve those high retention numbers? I think it's the investment in the community to be honest with you. I think Amaya talked about that. So we have the model that we studied. So anything less than full-time job with the best of the best teachers, the level five teachers as far as the on the job and the competencies related to their degree in certification and partnerships with the higher ed institutes and community colleges. I'm not aware of what that would yield but I don't want to be aware of what that would yield. I like the fidelity of our program. I think again, what I can stress is this is not a siloed environment. We meet on a monthly basis with our partners including workforce and including the State Department. That's great. Yeah, no, it does. I mean, it takes its own kind of village and I appreciate the emphasis on the community partnership, the community focus and then the cross-sector collaboration too. Megan or Amaya? Taylor, I'll try to be brief. The thing I would say is I talked to our future educator, Francis, all the time. And I think there are still plenty of people out there that want to be teachers. We're hearing about all these declines and folks exiting the field but there are a lot of people out there that want to be teachers. But at least in our state, in order to become a teacher there's a very prescribed path you have to follow. And it is a traditional college student path and so many of the folks that want to be teachers cannot follow that traditional path. So I think if we can design apprenticeships that truly change how the higher ed component functions then yes, I do think that this is scalable and could be like literally the answer of how we help convert folks into teaching. And Megan, if you had to name what you think those like want maybe I'll go for two or three of those changes, like when you said how we change the higher education, the pathway what are those things that need to change to make it possible that you see apprenticeship having the potential to address? Yeah, they need to be able to work the whole way through that means they need to be able to be at school Monday through Thursday from nine to two which is when the school wants them in class. So they gotta be able to work. So don't force them to choose between school and work. Right, yeah, they gotta be able to work as parents. They gotta have meaningful credit for on the job training. So all that they're doing has to count it has to count toward the degree it has to count for the requirements it has to count towards student teaching and not be redundant. And then the last one is what we hear from our people is the college commute is dead. They have to be able to access it virtually because they're going to school every day they've got their life. They have to be able to access that college virtually so that they can make all of these competing things work. Those are kind of the things Taylor that we think need to change. Okay, cool, that's helpful. Amaya, do you want the last word here before we go to some audience questions? Any unique patterns that you've observed or surprises, challenges that you've witnessed and are curious about? I mean, I think what's interesting about this strategy is it's really pushing the field to rethink what we mean when we talk about workforce development. Teaching has kind of always been on the side of that. It's not something that we've normally looped in with other kinds of workforce strategies. But if we're actually going to address teacher shortages and we're going to try to solve all these problems that we have in the pipeline, it only makes sense to think about as a workforce development strategy that can embed things like apprenticeship and can embed all those strategies that we know that can incentivize people to actually access and enter the profession, right? People don't want that traditional model anymore. They want the things that Megan was talking about. They want the things that they're doing in Clarksville. And so apprenticeship just kind of opens the door to making sure that teacher preparation is accessible but also like expanded to actually meet people where they are and to kind of deliver what they're looking for in a program, right? And I think that we don't have the luxury to be very selective and prescriptive about these traditional approaches anymore given the challenges that we're facing right now and securing the teacher workforce that we need. Great, thank you for that. I think that's, it's interesting to hear too that apprenticeship is being, there's UC potential in apprenticeship because it offers flexibility away from a traditional model. I think critics of apprenticeship sometimes say that it's too rigid a model. And so to think that some of the efforts to make apprenticeship more flexible, more modern, more accessible to folks are gaining traction and paying, you're showing some results here. I think your comments suggest that it may be. We are really short on time. So I'm gonna take one of the audience questions and do a quick round robin and give every one of you a chance to say one more thing in response to this person's question, whomever you are, thank you. They're folks on the line who heard about your programs. They think they're interesting. They kind of wanna get started. What is one piece of advice that you would give to folks on the line who are thinking, this strategy sounds like it might work in my state or district or school system. What's one piece of advice you would tell them as they're getting started? And I'll go to, we'll go in reverse order. Amaya first, Megan, then Sean. And then Shelton, that'll be over to you. I have kind of a boring answer but I think it's something that people don't always think about is kind of look at what the teacher of operational landscape is in your state and how apprenticeship will sort of fit in and what holds or gaps the program will be filling, right? Because there's a lot of different ways that we're preparing teachers now and we don't want all these different models to get mixed up and for quality to be undermined. So you really wanna think about it in a comprehensive way that actually aligns with what's already happening in the state. Okay, so know the landscape you're adding onto and understand how it's adding value. A good one, Megan. Taylor, my incredible colleague, Whitney Allen is on the call here today and she actually made a toolkit for anyone out there who is looking to do this. It is a comprehensive, detailed, robust toolkit. So my advice would be to check that out. We are happy to share it. All right, Megan, we'll get that from you and make sure it goes out with some of the follow up from this. And Whitney is amazing. So shout out to Whitney. Thanks for doing that. I'm excited to share your work. Sean, last but by no means least. Yeah, so Tennessee does have a playbook too. So we'll get that out too. But what I would say what benefited us is that we had a primary partnership and this wasn't the first work we did and we shared data with each other. So we shared our strategic work of wanting to increase the diversity of our teachers. Austin P scored the lowest on their report card for their education department on the diversity of their candidates. So we started with a common goal and said, how can we help each other? You three gave three pieces of excellent advice. Know your landscape. Figure out how you're adding to it. Learn from those who have come before. And so we'll share those toolkits. And finally, partner with folks with whom you share common aims because there's power in those partnerships. If we've learned nothing else today, all of these strong programs rely on it. So I will very, very briefly thank all of you for the work that you do to enhance our educator pipelines to build really interesting programs and to share your work. Thank you for being with us today. For attendees who are on the line, thank you. And then I am going to pass things over to Shelton to share just a couple of brief announcements and send us on our way this afternoon. We look forward to staying in touch with all of you through the GYO network, through the PIA network and through New America's work on educator pipelines and apprenticeship more generally. So thanks for being here. Shelton over to you. Thanks, Taylor. And another thank you to our panelists for bringing your expertise to this webinar and for everyone for attending. I'm not going to run through all of these resources and links and they will all be included in a follow-up. But on this first slide is some upcoming PIA events and resources. So one of our learning hubs is putting on an event in August and we've had some products come out from our national partners. Included will also be a link to our monthly newsletter so you can hear about more events like this. Next slide, please. And then also wanted to highlight the great work that our colleagues on the GYO team have been doing and Maya mentioned their 50 state scan as well as an explainer's video and a website that just has all the great work that they continuously do and they'll also have a GYO toolkit coming out soon. So that won't be in the follow-up email but know that more toolkits are coming so you all can do this great work. So again, thank you for attending this webinar and we hope to see you soon. Thank you.