 OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. Good morning everyone. We're L.A.U.S.D.'s Adult Education Virtual Academy, Doug Ava. And this is our project update. Our team members are Bernadine Gonzalez, who's on the Zoom right here, who's our principal, myself, who I am, a CTE instructor, and Josh Eich, who's an ESL teacher. Hey Ms. Gonzalez, so we're turning it over to you. Okay, so who are we and why do we exist? So Ava is a part of the Division of Adulting Career Education, L.A.U.S.D., and some people think that the pandemic is the reason for the opening of Ava, but that's not the real inside story. Next slide please. The real inside story is that online options have been a part of these course offerings since before the pandemic, but the spread of COVID-19 definitely drove focus on instructional strategies for online platforms and programs to the forefront. It accelerated the need for opening online classes. Next slide. So in February of 2022, Superintendent Carvalho joined the ranks of L.A.U.S.D. and he introduced his strategic plan, which he called Bread for the World. And in his plan, he introduced the idea that one of his high priorities was eliminating opportunity gaps. And he wanted to highlight the fact that he needed to do better with providing credit recovery options, which is something that Adult Ed does very well, and to increase access to accelerated learning options for K-12 students. So the Adult Ed Virtual Academy was designed to provide access to students with any time, anywhere access for accelerated learning and education. During the pandemic, toward the end of the pandemic, students were surveyed from all across the region as part of our Lyric group. And what we learned was that more than 50% of the students, not only in the region, but in our own division, indicated that they were interested in online programming options. Next slide. And as a result, Ava was born in August. In July, I was hired on as a full-of Ava. And then in August, we had a skeleton crew of three. It would be one ESL instructor and one academic instructor, and those instructors were providing a synchronous instruction to our students. And then in October of 2022, we grew. We were able to open two more ESL classes. We hired a step teacher, which I believe has been elaborated on a little bit. And basically, the step teacher was the person who onboarded all of our ESL students. So it's been quite an interesting ride. Next slide. Back to our strategic plan. Our blueprint in adult ed was design. And our goal was to target enrollment of 500 students by the end of June. And so there we went with an unwing and a pair. And so Nick pulled it. We did our target in January of 2023, like to say, using fuzzy math, one could say, we had a modest increase in enrollment from July to, or from August tomorrow, beginning to now, of 157,200%, meaning we went from zero student to 100. Let me see, where are we at? 1,572. What is the job? 1,572 students. There you go, 1,500. So we didn't exceed our plan. It's been quite as interesting, as we said, a ride. Even with lack of resources and everybody pinching in left and right to help Aber grow, putting in hours here and there, left and right, it's all come together. It's amazing what we've been able to accomplish on a wing and a prayer and also a package. So I believe that is the end of my slides. And I think it is now turning it over to Roche Wilson. All right. So for Ava's current statistics, our enrollment, we've exceeded our enrollment target by over 1,000 students. We hit our goal in March, despite the lack of adequate resources, thanks to the extraordinary hard work of our principal, advisors, and a few teachers. Ava has been able to expand the staff, schedule, and enrollment numbers exponentially in a very short time. Some of the programs that Ava currently has, for 22 classes in the morning and the evening, we have staff, student tools for educational pathways, ESL, distance learning, citizenship, ABE, ASE, reading, math, AIS labs, CN, of course, CTE computer essentials teacher, okay? Our staff consists of one principal, 18 teachers, two advisors, one in one school administrative assistance, and a partridge and a pear tree. So now I'll turn it over to Josh. Actually, I think this is still you. So some of our challenges and setbacks are accountability. Accountability is difficult to maintain with only one person. The principal, who is responsible for operations, staffing, student recruitment, and services. Ava currently has no additional administrators to carry on some of the incredible weight put upon the principal. And she didn't pay me for that, okay? One of our biggest challenges is, is that we enroll lots of students, but many students don't stay in the program over the 12-hour threshold, which refers to last persistence. Go ahead. Go ahead, Ms. Gonzalez. Bernadine, were you going to say something about persistence? Yes, I was. I was just so engrossed in presentation, I forgot. So one of the things that we learned from doing a dive into our data is that the persistence, we took a look at it and before, from the time of, I want to say August when we started enrolling students to about December when I did not have any advisors on staff, persistence was a problem. We didn't have, other than me and a couple of people working in the extra hours, we weren't able to go out and pick up those students who missed an orientation. It was all emails hitting us. Once we hired two at Weisler, one for ESL and one for academics, we were able to provide a little bit of a safety net to ensure that students are able to attend. And if we can't, we're trying to pick them up as quickly as we can. So the persistence, the issue with persistence has been health. We went from 200 and some zero hour students down to 71 hire two advisors. So it made a significant difference in our ability to keep students beyond the 12 hour persistence level. So for recruitment, currently we have a small budget for marketing but our hope is that we will increase its own. We need to hire more advisors as long outreach and navigator. Our goal is to be able to market via social media, communication with other schools, mass messaging, increased distribution of flyers, mailers, marketing materials, and our own website. All right, Jeff. So I'm going to quickly discuss some changes since we began in the DLAC program last October. And I think we've already discussed a lot of these changes. Our student body and staff have grown exponentially. Our curriculum program has expanded considerably. We discussed that earlier. And we exceeded our initial target goal of 500 students. Just in case you forgot, I just wanted to remind you of the fuzzy math. So part of the progress report that DLAC asked us to talk about were next steps. But this is a little difficult for us because our ambition is quite big. Our goal is to become a model of an online school for schools and districts all around the world, really. And we've got some big challenges sort of blocking us from doing that. So instead of talking about next step, we thought I would better talk about our vision for what we'd like to see happen moving forward. So part of that vision includes expansion. And we'd like to expand all of our current programs and schedules. And that would include opening afternoon and Saturday classes, more CTE classes, and also collaborating with other in-person schools to partner with them on CTE classes and programs. High set prep and testing, high school recovery, parenting classes, and of course, CASAS and EOSIVICS testing, which of course is a challenge when you're fully online. But we're hoping to make some progress in that area very soon. In addition, as we expand, there will be some issues that come up that we would like to partner with our district on. And that is things like devices which is a little bit of a challenge because our students are fully online and they're spread out all over the place. We have to partner with our district and other schools to really streamline that process. We need to get appropriate staffing to really hit those big goals that we're looking to hit. And you can see what we did with the skeleton crew. Just imagine what we can do with a fully staffed school. And that includes more advisors, more office staff, more administrators, and of course, more teachers. And then PDs as well. Our district does a fantastic job on professional development. However, our school has unique needs since we are online and our needs are different from the in-person schools. So we would like the ability to do some hyper-focused PDs just for our school on things such as summative assessments, which again is a challenge when you're fully online. It's something that we need to sort of discuss and unify. That's just an example. And the last thing I will talk about is this idea that I came up with which really encapsulates the vision that we're trying to achieve. And I would just like to mention that we'd like to thank Susan and D-LAC for really helping us to focus that vision. This idea for a virtual affair is that the school votes on a theme once or twice a year. Let's imagine that theme is careers. So every class in the school decides on a project that they're going to do for this virtual affair, which is like a science fair that schools do, but it's fully virtual. It's online completely. And each class can do whatever they want. They can do a whole class project. They can do group projects. They can do individual projects. And when those projects are finished, they're digitized if they're not already digital. And they're uploaded onto our virtual fair website. And then the fair opens, and it's open to literally anybody in the world to come and visit to see what the students are doing. And the idea of this fulfills a lot of the goals that we have. First, it promotes pride in our students, which is in line with the idea of growth mindset that our district is really focused on. We want our students to see that they're making progress and feel good about what they're doing. That really helps with retention and to get our students further toward their goal. It serves as an intra-program marketing tool so that, for example, the ESL students see what the CTE students and the high school students are doing. And they get excited about continuing into those programs. Vice versa. High school can see what the CTE students are doing. It builds those important tech skills that we want our students to build, which is in line with those 20th century skills that matter. And it also serves to lessen that digital divide that we've been talking about in the last couple of days. It builds school spirit, which we're a fully online school. We don't have a building, so we can't have those holiday dances that those other schools have. We don't have those end-of-year parties. So this is a way to sort of build a sense of community within our school and get people sort of proud to be part of that school, which, again, helps with retention, helps with mark recruitment, all that good stuff. It promotes new andragaji to our teachers, which, you know, this is a really good way for our teachers to be able to do a hands-on sort of project which uses project-based learning differentiated, learning all these things that our district is pushing. And, you know, some teachers have been a little resistant, but as we all know, if you actually go ahead and do use some kind of new methodologies in your classrooms, you tend to get excited about it, and there's a lot of buy-in there. It serves as a progress gauge for teachers and their students, as well as showing outcomes to our administrators. We know how much you administrators love to see those outcomes. It's a marketing tool. Our students are going to invite their family, their friends, their coworkers, their neighbors to come and see what they've been doing in our school. So it's pretty much free marketing, right? So people will come, they'll see what's happening at our school, they'll think, oh, I want to take a class here, oh, I know somebody who wants to take a class. And it's a great publicity tool. You know, we can reach out to media and also social media. They might be interested in covering this because this is, I think, sort of a unique idea that hasn't really been done before as far as I know. And that, again, serves as free marketing for us. And that'll boost the number of people who register in our school. So all of this will aid in our pursuit to really become, I guess you can call it an industry leader. That's our hope. And maybe open some doors to be able to collaborate with other schools and other districts who come and see this and they go, wow, this is really interesting. I have some ideas that you could use or, you know, can we work together to really push education further into the 21st century? And if this goes well, if we're able to do this, I think we would like to present this at TDLS next year. So we'll see. And that's it. We're early. Look at that.