 So with that said, I think we can go ahead and get started. We've got a full agenda here today. So today I wanna start by saying, first of all, I apologize, hopefully sound will be okay. I am down at triple I at the joint conference today. And so I'm coming to you from an open space here. So there will be background noise and apparently 80s music is the soundtrack for the day here. And so hopefully that's okay. Second of all, Bill Rose, our teammate Bill from the NIU Illinois CTE Project, Bill is out for a family wedding. So Bill is not with us today, but Heather's here. Heather, you wanna say good morning? Good morning, everyone. Glad to see everyone here looking forward to this, to our day today, next hour together, I guess. So good morning. And thank you to those of you who've already started with introductions in the chat. So please go ahead and drop your name in and who you are. We're so thrilled again to have so many people from around the state with us this morning. There's so much we can learn together and we're excited to share some big announcements today. So this is our agenda. We do some quick announcements. We have an IWAS update. You're gonna be interested in hearing as well as being interested in hearing about the next couple months meetings for the career pathways user group. And then we'll shift over to work-based learning and specifically the internship section of the work-based learning continuum today with the 60-hour supervised career development experience. So again, thanks for being here. We wanna remind everybody that the meetings are not really what we want the user group to be about. As we saw previously, we are now up, we had over a thousand students earned the endorsement in school districts throughout the state. There's literally amazing work happening all over the state. Do not be shy, please, about emailing the group with cool things you're doing. And later on in this slide deck, we do have the email address for the Google group that you would use to send. Either, hey, here's something we did. This worked really well. Here's a question we have. Here's something we're struggling. Let's take full advantage of the user group. Just like we see across the state of Illinois with the principals in the IPA user group, the lists serve with IASBO and the chief school business officials and all the business office folks in that list serve and the multiple tech lists serves that serve our ed tech folks. So we wanna provide that same space here. The other thing to keep in mind is while the numbers of students who are earning endorsements does keep going up. As Izby came out and told us 11 months ago, this is not about the number of endorsements. This is not a race to have more endorsements than your neighboring school districts. This is about making sure that the endorsement that happens in your school or district is of really high quality for the student earning it. And that also from the process of doing endorsements for those students that we expand out things like work-based learning, career focus counseling for all students that we shift all learning to authentic learning throughout the school day and that all kids are learning and practicing and getting feedback on the essential skills. So with that said, we do have the CT calendar linked in here. All of this is free with the exception of the conference that is very low cost. The next session coming up right after Thanksgiving is in this assessing the essential skills series that was launched a few weeks ago. We've already had two sessions and this is by career pathway. So this next session will be focused on the Arts and Communications Career Pathway. I know Bill and Betsy have really rolled up their sleeves and they've got some different things planned for this one because the different needs of each pathway. So that's really exciting, really cool. Second of all, the link is here for the ISBI website which is the official website of the ISBI Career Connections Conference. The call for proposals is out. If you are here, you have something to present on June 18th in Tinley Park. I guarantee it and or you work with people of something to present. Additionally, we are days possibly hours away from registration opening. There is an early bird rate. Rodrigo, can I put you on the spot? Do you wanna share what pricing information looks like for the conference? Yeah, absolutely, I'm happy to. So we're gonna go ahead and run with $50 per person early bird registration, which will go through the end of February. And after that we'll be shifting to $65 a person. But from the moment it opens through June 18th, we're actually also gonna be offering a group rate. So for individuals from the same organization with a minimum of five people, they will also be able to go ahead and take advantage of a lower price, which is set at $40 a person. That is for five people from the same organization to come through together. And obviously for that, there's no limit beyond the five. And so as Jason said, here in the next couple of days, you'll be able to go ahead and see them maybe as early as tonight. We're really excited and we're hoping that you all come through and join us on that day. Yeah, so obviously at $50, people who've gone to conferences know what a bargain that is. And that's because we really just need to cover a few minor costs that can't be covered under Perkins funds and we want it to be as accessible to as many people as possible. So watch for registration be out. We'll certainly email this group as soon as that's out. Now we're excited to have some updates on the ongoing work that's happening in Iowa's. So Heather, you wanna take it away? As you can see from this slide for our user group meeting in January, we are going to open the Iowa's platform and I'm going to walk you through how to input all of your information and what that's gonna look like. And just kind of the timeline of things just as a brief overview right now, like I said, it's gonna open in January and access to that will only be given right now to those who currently have applications in. So all of the current users of the PWR platform will have access to Iowa's. We, I still am building the guidance documents that goes along with it and the FAQs and creating a video for everyone, much like we have on the website now for the PWR platform. And we're just ironing out a few things as it relates to access and who's gonna get that access and how we're gonna handle that. But you can expect the superintendents to receive the information from those districts that have sent in their application already and have the PWR platform. And then we'll open it up to the rest of the state so to speak, those who haven't turned in that application in July of 24, because as you know, from 24, 25 school year, that's when the decision has to be made as to whether or not you're going to offer a pathway endorsement. Anyone who sends in an application between January when this opens and when it opens to everybody will get direct access to the Iowa's platform. So PWR platform users now will just need to transfer their information and all new applications after that January 19th date will just get direct access to Iowa. And Jason, I know you have seen the prototype so to speak and went through it. So I obviously think it's fantastic that I may be a mid-biased one. Yeah, I mean, as someone who was lucky enough to get to work in Iowa's from its inception for different parts of my job, I mean, even seeing that it's part of Iowa's, this is like, wow, this is really great. It's really up to date. So things like you select what career pathway and then you're presented just with the technical competencies for that pathway, some really cool stuff. And then you're just like for a team-based challenge, you're just checking the box, which one or two technical competencies is this team-based challenge addressing. So it should both really help people conceptually as well as be pretty quick and easy to enter your information in. Couple of things, Joe, we'll answer that here in just one second. So yes, that is correct, Joe. And we've got a little more information coming about that here in just a moment. The other thing I do wanna mention is because I know it will come up for our EFE directors, our CCPE coordinators, our Area Career Center folks, we're gonna continue to have to work through challenges on access. We know right now the workaround is, if you can work with each of your districts to get individual access through that district, that would be the default workaround that superintendent can give access to any user that they want to. But that's the thing that we'll come back to. Kate, that's a great question. Hold on to that for just a moment too and we'll make sure we address that here in a second. So if you are submitting applications that you want to go through now, so for example, for your class of 2024 to earn their endorsements this year's 12th graders, those do need to be submitted by December 15th through the current PWR system. So you can see the timing here is that will happen and then we will shift moving forward to IWAS. Heather, do you wanna talk here about the timelines of approval status and that kind of thing which has come up? Sure, so within the past week or so, we are numbers of districts that have just done the initial application. I'm not talking about plans submittal, but just initial application to gain access to PWR. I think I've handled 45 of those. So that is a little bit, it's not that time-consuming. Okay, maybe it's a little time-consuming to make sure that everyone has access to getting access to the platform is happening within a couple days, hopefully now because I'm caught up with that. As far as reviewing, same thing's happening. I'm getting them and that's fantastic over and over. Okay, here's my approval if here's my approval. So I have locked out the next two weeks to be looking at all of these. So that's my goal. I can't promise that all of them will be reviewed in that timeframe, that that is my goal to get those done because I know that we will have more as we get closer to December 15th. So I promise you, I'm doing my due diligence to get these reviewed as quickly as I can. So, and just calling out again, there's a lot of times that those of us on the school district side say, is be this, is be that. Two things I want to mention here. One is Heather is, is be on this. Heather is the one doing the approvals. I think people in here know that. And so it is an enormous amount of work and that's also in addition to not only reviewing those but trying to help people be successful with those and other parts of her job. And so I'm not saying that to be defensive on Heather's behalf, but saying that because everybody on this call is looks like and so I hope with that understanding. The second thing is, I think increasingly I will give the shout out that we're seeing from Izby that all the Izby folks who have worked in school districts kind of recognizing that and trying to put that knowledge into practice on behalf of school districts. So thanks. So we did a survey recently of the career pathway user group to help identify some upcoming topics. And so we're trying to, we collect data in all kinds of ways, right? Including street data, the conversations we have with you, the emails we get from you, the things we hear when we're lucky enough to be out in schools or doing a workshop in the field. And so there was a wide range of topics that people offered said they wanted to learn more about. And so we asked what would be your top pick? And really the top three were these, the top one is what we're gonna do today, which is the internship, the 60 hour supervised career development experience that was over a quarter of people said that 18.4% of people said the application process through IWAS. So good news, exciting news, January 19th, fire up the popcorn or bring the donuts or whatever you wanna have at 9 a.m. on a Friday and make sure you're there, let your friends and neighbors and other districts know they won't wanna miss that. And then the application and capstone curriculum. So I think and Heather does not even know this yet because this was a yesterday afternoon thing and a back and forth, but Rodrigo and I were able to be in a school district yesterday afternoon. And I think it looks like part, at least part of the February meeting, we definitely wanna spend on how we select which courses, what different districts of different sizes might consider in selecting which courses should go into a course sequence, including some of the nuances of which dual credit courses if they're dual credit versus AP or IB should be selected and what some of the considerations are with that. So probably coming up in February is the tentative plan right now. And so again, we're trying to hit the top ones that we see in the data and then are having corroborated in the field. So with that, let's go into work-based learning. So most of you know the work-based learning continuum. Today we're going into step four there, kind of right in the middle of the career development experience. We're also gonna dabble in apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship. Great question. All of the prior meeting videos are on our YouTube channel and we will drop the link in for that. We have a special playlist just for the career pathways user group. So other great resources there too though like our career pathways virtual trailheads. So we're gonna be on the right side of this continuum today. Whereas last time, we talked about the career exploration experiences which was off to the left. And so making this continuum active and it's been really cool. I've talked with I think at least four districts in the last week and a half who are really bringing this continuum out in conversations with teachers and with counselors. And so that is not something I had necessarily thought about but I can see how that can really help shift to kind of a greater intentionality with how we're using time and what decisions we're making about time and human resources. So cool thing I'll throw out there. So with that said, one thing the basis you can't do an internship unless you've got a partnership. We do have a whole half day workshop that does also qualify for an administrator Academy credit about developing a community and business partnerships. And so these are some quick hits from that that are all important. I'm not gonna read through all of these right now. But one thing that we literally just saw yesterday afternoon at Oak Park River Forest High School. And this was literally launched 36 hours before I took the screenshot is the business teachers at OPRF launched a page on LinkedIn to start pulling together. People have already been volunteers but other volunteers, a couple of crazy things. So first of all, in less than 48 hours, another, and they had not even posted it on social media yet. They'd sent some invites to some specific people. They hadn't sent an email to the whole staff yet which was one of their plans. And when I then clicked after I gained my membership and clicked on the other members, I don't even understand this. I don't live in Oak Park. I've never lived in Oak Park or River Forest. I was a second or third degree connection with I think 16 of the 19 members. And so it just goes to show and none of these people were educators and my family's pretty much all educators. So like this is kind of a cool idea. And so one of the things we wanted to throw out is like here is a low cost, low time intensive way that really any district in the state could, you could do seven pages, one per pathway to cultivate potential partnerships. And then one of the things that in talking about this yesterday we shared back, make sure you're showing there, posting the cool things that you are doing as social media has become less centered in a single place versus maybe where it was three or four or five years ago. This is a great way to cultivate specific partners with what's happening in those classrooms, courses that will be part of those core sequences as part of the pathways and you can organize around the seven career pathways. So you do have to develop partnerships to be able to do the internships, the 60 hour supervised career development experiences themselves. And so we wanted to give a call out to that as an idea to do that. Heather, if you wanna jump in on any of this, please feel free. These are kind of the key elements that define the internship that these have to occur under authentic working conditions, ideally in a workplace setting if they're remote, it's gotta be because that is authentic in that work environment. Heather? Yeah, I think that, yeah, this is a nice overview and I'm really excited when we have our speakers in a few minutes to talk about this because they're gonna give you specific examples of what this could look like. So I get quite a bit of questions on this and I completely understand why we did the survey. We got, this is one of those topics that we really needed to explore. I think that there's another slide that's coming up that kind of highlights some of those frequently asked questions, but yes, just what's on this page is really what we're looking for when you do your submission and I don't need, I know that sometimes they'll send in, well, I need to link which skills it relates to it. That's not what we're looking for that. It's more of that conversation that's happening between the school district and that employee or employer basically for them and what that's gonna look like for the students to get that skill assessment. Yeah, so, and the third bullet there just to call out in terms of the requirements, students do have to either earn credit and or be paid. Obviously where the money comes from to pay the students can be a challenge. In a perfect world, they would get both. And so you'll see that come up in the questions that Heather was just referencing. So this is the skills assessment and then the 60 hours and how those can be divided out. Heather comments on this. Yeah, so the rule state now that it is a minimum of those 60 hours and it can be two different or distinct experiences that can be combined. We're also looking for a minimum of 20. So you can have a 40, 20 split or a 30, 30 split or all 60 hours or more. So I have some that have reached out and said, well, it's really more than 60. Can I put more than 60 in my description? Absolutely, you can put more than 60. We're just looking for that minimum of 60. And again, that minimum is legislative. Just so everybody's clear on that. So here's the common questions. Heather just answered the first one. Heather, you wanna jump in on highlighting some of these other ones? Yep, so and we talked a little bit, does it have to be paid? No, and as Jason mentioned, ideally we'd love to see both for that student that they're getting credit and they're having the opportunity to be paid. And as they're paying, the students can address those concerns about equity and then does it have to be credit bearing? And again, technically no, because it's and or for that component that I really advocate for it to be credit bearing for that student if possible. Yeah, and Bill and I and other members of both of our current and former teams, one of the questions we've said and certainly I don't wanna have this debate right now, but if there is a debate around this, that would be one that we could take offline and then come back to at some point is what are the reasons to not have students are accredited for it? We're not seeing a good reason to do that. And so good question from Terry. There's questions from Cassie and Terry there in the chat. Heather, I don't know if you wanna address those. Sure, yep, Cassie, yep. I just emailed this morning trying to find out when those rules are gonna be posted, but they will be released for public comment. As soon as I have that information, I'll make sure to get it out to the group, but they are not passed and they're not final. So the board has approved them, but then the next step then is that they're out for public comment. And it is work-based learning on our Perkins data. It has to be credit bearing. Yes, you would have to code it that way if you're gonna go through the Perkins data, yeah. And that- Or embedded, we do have, I'm sorry, Jason, I didn't mean to interrupt you. Please, no, go ahead. We do have some classes that it's embedded into and we've identified those. So if you look at the data metric for the Perkins for that particular indicator, you can see the courses. We've actually identified those courses that have the hours embedded. And then that would count for that. And the CNA is one example of that, that course. However, that is, even though it's embedded, it's not pertaining to this in the sense that it's not necessarily the 60 hours. So you have to be careful with that. So we're recognizing that within the Perkins and of course it's not coded for a group five. And I wanna mention one other thing here and I don't wanna confuse the issue, but I really appreciate Terry bringing up the Perkins work-based learning overlap here because while most of the maybe all of the internship work that's been done up until this point has been certainly based in CTE if not meeting the Perkins qualifications, also it doesn't have to for the career pathway endorsement requirements. So for example, there is a world in which at some point in the future you could have a biology teacher who's also earned the work-based learning designation and is supporting a group of a handful of students who are out in a really a biology-based work-based learning experience. And so I just want people to remember that there's quite a bit of flexibility in that ultimately the post-secondary and workforce readiness act is meant to be a broad curricular legislative initiative and not just a CTE initiative. Now it moves CTE to the middle of more kids, all kids schooling experiences. So nope, the hours can count Angie for but they need to for the CNA they'll need to get the full 60 hours to also earn the endorsement whereas the CNA requirements is lower than that. We've actually got that coming up in a slide. Hopefully I'm answering that correctly. I'm gonna pop on here. I think we've got a couple more questions at the end to summarize but we do have three presentations and we're right on track with time which is kind of amazing to me. So I'll be very excited about that. We've got three different school districts that we're gonna have presenting here this morning. And cool, I see all three of them now. So first we're gonna go out west to our friends in the Quad Cities here and Kristen we know has already tested is working. Kristen, if you wanna hop on and jump right in and just tell me when you want me to advance the slides we're really excited to hear this because we're gonna go all the way the right side of the work-based learning continuum here. Sir, good morning everybody. Thank you, Jason. Again, my name is Kristen Allen over here in Rock Island, Illinois just a short drive across the Mississippi River into the state of Iowa. And my role here is secondary teaching and learning coordinator. And so the work that we're talking about today is a part of what I do but there's many, many other things I do and my role primarily is support. We have two junior highs and a large comprehensive high school here in our district and I support really anything and everything that falls under the umbrella of teaching and learning. So today, I am here to talk about the reality of how challenging it is to design these 60 hour experiences and I would be in the 26.5% of you that said how do we do this? Because I will tell you that we still haven't really fully figured that out and that's okay in this work. I'm jealous when I see a lot of your titles spilling into the chat because I will let you know that we do not have any specific staff in our entire district earmarked for college and career preparation. It's me, some principals and assistant principals maybe some counseling staff and teachers we do not have any specialty staff which can create a challenge in some of this work. So we do not have the 60 hours figured out. We are right there with you trying to continue brainstorming and considering possibilities. But what we have done and I guess my message to everyone today is it's okay to start small and it's okay to really look at and capitalize on things that you might already have in place or that might be leading you in the direction of this because our journey is almost backwards in a lot of ways. So to give you a little perspective on what we do and where we are with this I have to take you back about 12 years ago when I was in a much different role working at Rock Island High School we had a welding program that was in place. It was not as productive as it could have been. We live in an area where there is strong manufacturing. John Deere is in our backyard. And so we began to breathe new life first and foremost into our welding program. There was a need for it. We developed a partnership with our local community college. We began to infuse the dual credit opportunities. So that was really the first layer of this many, many years ago before things like CCPE and these endorsed pathways even existed. And we began to build a really good welding program. You probably have areas inside of your schools that you're proud of that are thriving where there's a need and urgency to develop. That's a great place to start. And that's exactly what we did. About four or five years ago, and I was not directly involved with this, John Deere came knocking on the doors of our high school and some other local high schools and said, hey, you have welding programs and guess what? We need welders. How could we come together and really make this prosperous for students in the community? And that led to a lengthy and involved process of developing a true welding apprenticeship, which does exist. We have a department of labor approved apprenticeship that really was initiated by John Deere. Again, I was not involved in that process, but it is, it is a, there's a lot of components that go into the process of developing an apprenticeship. You're following department of labor guidelines, of course, you're designing and developing the skills and competencies, all of which fall inside of the manufacturing skills and competencies in the endorsed pathways. You're building a sequence of courses and experiences. They were building a pay scale, et cetera, and there's an application process. Students actually begin an apprenticeship at the summer following their junior year. So they've completed some welding coursework prior to that. They work a full-time job in the summer for pay. That leads into the following school year as a senior where they work hours throughout the week. They receive both high school credit and pay. They continue to work throughout their senior year and even beyond the senior year. And honestly, every single student who is in this lands a job either at John Deere or another large local manufacturer, McLoughlin Motors. So this existed before CCPE. So last year, we capitalized on what we already had in place. Welding is going strong, it's thriving. There's a need for it in our community. And we had the makings of a pathway and we embarked on that journey. We were approved late spring and we had, I believe, seven students, somewhere around seven students earned the CCPE endorsement because of their involvement in the apprenticeship. We do not currently have a true 60-hour experience. We have an apprenticeship. We have about 30 to 35 students who enter the welding pathway. There are typically about five to seven who engage in and complete the apprenticeship. That's fantastic. These kids are exiting. In fact, the welding teacher told me he has a student who's been out, I believe two years now, making close to $80,000 a year. He's had extensive training with John Deere and he's traveling the world. It's phenomenal. But we know this isn't enough because there's another 20, 25 kids who necessarily don't want to go this route, right? It's a significant commitment. So we are still trying to consider how do we build other experiences? In a field like manufacturing and welding, you have students age is a concern. To Anthony, yes. In the apprenticeship under the Department of Labor, there are some different guidelines. And that, well, again, I was not part of that process, but that was worked out with John Deere following Department of Labor guidelines. And most of those students begin when they're around 17. So age is a factor. Industry can get saturated because companies can only take on so many kids. Time and manpower, you know? I described in our district, we don't have a crew of people out helping to develop these things. The teacher, the administrator can be saturated with just not enough time or manpower to do this. This program honestly serves a fairly small number of kids. So sometimes there's thousands, those of you who work in high schools directly, you know, there's thousands of priorities on any given day in a high school setting. And oftentimes other things are getting attention. So we are currently beginning to look at how can we build internal? How can we build internal? And thank you, Terry. Terry is saying approved apprenticeship does lower the age to 16, that is correct. But in this particular 60 hours, it is challenging to put a 16-year-old student in a setting where they would truly get welding workplace experience. So we're starting to look internally. We're not there yet. Our first idea was to capitalize on some work that students in the class have done in the past, which was designing and building things like fire pit rings and lawn and garden ornaments, which all involve welding. And the instructor and I discussed that and it just felt too big to take on right now. So now we're looking at potential of a repair shop. We're looking at, you know, our instructor, our main instructor happens to own a lawn care business on the side. So he's been actually having the kids learn how to do some repairs on his own trailers and things like that, just feeling this out to consider, could we build an internal repair shop that might allow us to develop a different kind of experience where we can serve more kids? So, you know, my message today is say, we certainly don't have it figured out. We took some things that were going pretty well in our district. We have found some ways to capitalize on them. It's given us lots of ideas. There are still many challenges. And again, I'm going to say I'm super jealous of all of these CTE coordinators and career pathway staff that some of you have in your districts because the time, the planning, the conversations, the reaching out, it's significant. So we're on a journey. We are proud that we have the endorsement. We want to do more with it, but just know that starting small and taking steps do matter. And eventually, you know, I hope that like all of you, we will land on a number of different options for our students at Rock Island. Kristen, that's awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks to everybody for the comments and questions in the chat too. That was really enriching. And I know I have more questions at the moment, but I'm going to hold those right now. So we can go on to the other groups. And I'm going to encourage you, feel free to keep adding comments and questions to the chat. I do want to get through all three groups. And then of course, if we've got time, we'll absolutely take questions today. Otherwise, we can take those questions out of the chat and get answers, seek out answers to those and come back to them. So thank you again, Kristen. Really, really cool to hear. And yeah, what an amazing opportunity for these kids. I'd like to be 20 years old and making $80,000 a year and traveling the world too. That sounds like a cool life existence. So with this, we're going to go over to Elmwood Park High School and Elmwood Park Units School District 401. We've got Amanda here, who's the principal. Amanda, who can pop on and unmute yourself. And then from there, we're going to go over to Leiden. So Amanda, just let us know when you want me to flip slides as we go here. Awesome, I am not going to take as long because this is very brand new to me. So just a little introduction. I am in my first year as a principal at Elmwood Park High School. We are what I consider a small high school of only just over 1,000 outside of O'Hare Airport. So kind of to what Kristen was saying as well, we do not have a person here who is specifically dedicated to college and career pathway. And thus it becomes me. The three years prior to this, I was at Lake Park High School in Roselle, Illinois, where I had an assistant principal and this was her focus. She's actually on here and I want to give a shout out to her that's Kate Foster. She was amazing at this work and I really relied upon her to kind of educate me on all of this, but I was very far removed. So this is the first year that I'm really kind of diving in headfirst with this work. So I'm very much learning as I go along. So I will kind of give you the rundown as to what I've learned about what we're doing here. So if you could flip to the next slide, that would be great. All right, so we do have one college and career pathway here and that is in our business area. So the way it essentially functions is our students have to take two full years of business courses. So usually what that looks like is typically within their freshman and sophomore year, they're gonna take two semester courses and the offerings that they're gonna select from are either business principles, specifically information processing too, or business law. So it'll take two of those. And then from there, their second year is going to be where they get this workplace experience learning. And that is a year-long course called Virtual Enterprises International, which is a nationwide course. So kids are taking this course across the US. So our teacher has essentially provided a curriculum that they use for this course. Any of you who have incubator at your school, which we had at Lake Park last year, it essentially functions the same way. So what is happening is the students are coming into this class, they're coming up with a product and then each of the kids are taking on a different role. Maybe they're gonna be working on the marketing portion of it. Maybe they're working on the accounting portion of it. And so what's really cool in that respect is a student can actually take Virtual Enterprises International multiple times. They could take it two years in a row because the one year they may be focusing on the marketing portion of it and then the next year they're gonna be in it and they're gonna be doing the accounting portion of it. So that's what also makes it kind of unique, but that's where they're gonna get those 60 hours. Also for this particular program, we partner with a community college that is literally right around the corner from us, which is wonderful. And that's Triton College. So our teacher here at Elmwood Park who teaches this course is dual credit certified to teach the course. So our kids will walk away also getting a college transcript with the grade. And then as far as the mentorship portion goes with the VEI curriculum, they will actually take trips to compete at our Wednesday board meeting this week actually. Our teacher, Mr. Ildefonso, went in front of the board to get it approved that our students be able to take a trip to New York City to be able to do their competition. And that's where the mentorship really happens. The students will get feedback on their product and kind of how they're doing it. And that's where the mentorship occurs. So that's kind of what it looks like here at Elmwood Park for our workplace learning portion. So Amanda, we did have a couple of quick questions. I want to take a couple of these real quickly. Maybe I'm regretting it now. Maybe I'm regretting it now as the questions keep coming in, which is awesome. But do you know costs, first of all? I don't. I mean, as far as I know, there may be a cost of fixed because, well, no, I don't think there is. The only thing that there's going to be a cost for is further travel, I believe, but I will get a certain answer on that. But they do fundraising for that. So no out of pocket, really. And then the next question is, do you know what the dual credit courses are on the Triton side that students are actually earning dual credit for? Just had this conversation about an hour ago. It's going to be called entrepreneurship at the community college. So, and again, this is a great lead-in. It's a great preview to the February meeting because we might have had, I mentioned that Red Rigo and I yesterday just had a conversation about this. It might have been with business teachers at a neighboring high school too, Elmwood Park, actually, that is also a Triton center district school. And so there's a lot to consider. And obviously there's a lot to consider in terms of who our teachers are and what they can be credentialed to teach. Like there's so many factors that we need to be thinking of when making these choices. So that's great. And then I might go with one more of these. Can I just add something to what you just said? So on the note of that, we were kind of in a hiring bind this summer because we had this position vacant and it took us quite a few rounds of interviews to specifically find, because this is a class we want to maintain given what it is, it's our only pathway. So as we were hiring this summer, we had to look for somebody who was specifically qualified to do this course. And we got real lucky, but it was literally down to the wire of us hiring because we needed this specific course. So that's a really important point because we heard Amanda say that, she considers Elmwood Park to be a small school of about a thousand students. We know there's hundreds and hundreds of high schools around the state that would go, whoa, that's a really big school. Certainly in suburban Chicago, that is a relatively small high school, but across the state, that's a very medium large high school. And so that, we know what an issue that is. And when you have someone who leaves, who was teaching the dual credit class in a smaller school, it's an even more significant issue. It's one of the reasons that through the work that we've done on the P-20 network side through the dual credit think-tank, we've talked a lot about how school size is actually one of the factors that oftentimes is a hidden factor that matters in what can realistically be offered. It's not a legal factor or a financial factor necessarily, but practically. So all right, well, thank you. Heather's looking up stuff, I think from the application itself and there are more questions here, but I'm going to leave those now and I apologize to those of you who've asked them. We'll see if we can come back to those. If not, thank you for putting them in the chat so we can pull them from this portion and go back to Amanda and the team at Elmwood Park and see if we can get answers to those and then we'll be able to share those out via email. So Amanda, thank you so much. It's awesome and it's great. And with that, we're going to go again kind of around the corner to Leiden High School. We've got Frank and Tony sitting together, which is cool, that's fun. And so we're going to turn it over to you guys when you want me to move the slides, just let me know. Thank you so much, Jason. Hi everyone, I'm Frank Holthouse. I'm Tony Pagucci. We're coming live from our TSI room here at Leiden and we are just around the corner from Elmwood. So great to see so many awesome partners on the call. Yeah, so Leiden High Schools, if you're not familiar, is a two school high school district. We serve approximately 3,600 students over two campuses. We are a comprehensive high school. We support all pathways to success and a big part of that success is our TSI program which we'll be talking about now. If you go to the next slide, please. You want to take this one? Yeah, sure. So just to give you a breakdown about our technical support internship, this program was brought on when we brought our Chromebooks into the school. We have 1,800 Chromebooks or I guess 1,600 Chromebooks at either school that fluctuates from year to year. But our technical support internship is a capstone course. So basically our students take that kind of the end of our tech pathway. They can take it as a sophomore. They could take it as a junior. They could take it again as a senior for credit. And a lot of our students do that. What's cool about the program, we have the first point of contact on all technical issues at our school. So even if it's an administrator, a teacher, anyone in the school has a technical problem. They have to go through TSI first. TSI then answers the phone or takes all incoming traffic and then determines how we support that issue. Obviously our priority one is to support the student Chromebooks. We have to make sure that there's a Chromebook in the student's hand every part of the day. So we're always making sure that we're supporting those via fixing them or making sure that students who have uncharged or forgot Chromebooks have one. We also support faculty and staff technology. So any classroom issues that come along with the smart boards, the projectors, audio, any classroom technology TSI students are dispersed out to the classroom and they are basically working on those issues. And then our third one, which we'll talk a little bit further is they select and work on a pathway of learning. So they have an opportunity to kind of pursue what they wanna pursue when they're not working on some of the other things that we have. Yeah, so just a touch on that. We were one of the first school districts to go 101 with a Google Chromebook and trying to problem solve that. Do we hire more faculty and staff to support those? Are there more creative solutions? And so we had just again, a really innovative and creative team that came up with this TSI idea. And we can't really control when these tickets and issues come. They kind of come in waves, right? So a Monday after a long weekend, we know we're gonna get a lot of tickets and we'll mainly be focusing on priorities one and two. And then it's like a Wednesday and things are humming along and we're not getting a lot of tickets. So we gotta keep those students busy and that's where that pathway of learning comes in, which we'll talk about next. So next slide, if you will. So we offer certifications in TSI. We actually a certified CompTIA testing center here. We're a private testing center, which basically means that our students can take certification tests in our building. That wasn't always the case. We used to have to take students off of campus to various testing centers to get tested. But through a lot of work, we were able to partner with CompTIA and Pearson to actually have a testing center in our school. Our main priority or our main certification is the CompTIA A plus. If you're not familiar with that, that's kind of like a globally recognized IT certification for entry-level IT people. So we kind of call it the silver bullet for our certification at our school because what it does is it provides immediate employment opportunities for students. We've seen that through the years of the program, many, many, many students have gotten jobs right out of high school by completing the A plus. Up to date, we have 188 Liden students that are certified through A plus. So we're pretty proud of that number. And we've seen a lot of success through that. And just a touch on that a second. This credential is backed up by our advisory council. We just had a meeting last week. Today, our advisory council is mainly made up of alumni that are working in the field. So we could see that this process has worked, right? They are now out in the field doing the things and being practitioners. And then also backed up by our tech department. So we're level one tech support here in TSI, but we also have level two and level three and a whole tech director. And they meet with our TSI program to make sure that there's some authenticity behind the work that we do. Next slide, please. I'm gonna interject right there though, real quickly. And we also see the question popped up in the chat too. You may come back to this with the slide where you talk about some of your superstars and that's fine, we can hold off on it. But if you can work in kind of what some of the paths some of these students are have gone through post high school and who some of the companies are that they work for and because I know that there's a variety of different paths that have resulted in for these students which I think is one of the very cool things. So I will click the slides and you guys keep on going there. Right. So just to capitalize on that a little bit, we do have the various employment opportunities and what we have done now is we have a direct link to various recruiters in the Chicago area that are basically networking with students once their certification is obtained. So getting an A plus certification, if you put that on LinkedIn, Monster indeed, you're getting calls the next day. So people are calling you and asking you, can you work? Really the A plus is globally recognized. So showing that you've completed that certification says a lot about you and you know your stuff if you've completed that certification. So our students do get immediate opportunities out of the A plus and we're really happy about that because then they have the choice to kind of go to work or they could go to entry level positions or they could go to junior college or even a four year college as well. So next slide please. Just to kind of further the certifications we offer Office Microsoft Office that's also offered on campus. So Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access students have completed almost 1,250 certifications since we've done this. What we found out of all of these is that Excel provides the best marketable skill for students. The other certifications are important it's important to know PowerPoint and Word and Access but because so many small companies in our community still use Excel as a part of the way to run their businesses what we found is Excel is really marketable when we're trying to get students jobs. So there's a lot of small business opportunities within our community because they're always looking for people who can do Excel, graphing, pivot tables things that are important in that regard. Next. We just offered Google IT, Google IT is actually free. So any student can actually get Google IT certified. It's new to Liden as of fall 2021 there are five modules that are involved. Google will claim that this is pretty equivalent to the A plus that we had just talked about. We would kind of agree with that with the exception of there's no final test for the certification. So students can actually go through all the modules complete all the quizzes and tests that go along with it and then they become Google IT certified. So we've had 40 TSI students that have completed this certification so far. We still believe the A plus is more powerful certification in terms of employment but this is a nice one to have on your resume especially with the Google name attached. I think we have one last one. And this is our last one. These are just examples of students who have gotten jobs out of TSI. Like I said, we have had many students get jobs out of TSI but the reason I like this slide is you have one student who went immediate into their workplace. You have one student that's at Michigan State University and you have one student that's at junior college. So they've all taken kind of different routes. All of them had multiple certifications, A plus. If you finish A plus here, you could do net plus, security plus, cloud plus. The guy on the left completed maybe like three or four of those, which is great because he gets out with all that under his resume and in his belt. He's had some work experience with a local PC shop right now, he's been working there for about a year. And then they're also college and career ready as well in terms of getting these certifications. So it's a good way to show that no matter where you are on your path these certifications do help you out. I'm gonna jump in and wrap up a couple of things here real quickly. Heather, please jump in if you'd like to. Again, there's more questions in the chat for our friends from Leiden. Again, it's amazing stuff. I've got even more questions and I knew what was being presented. And so I'm sure there's additional questions out there. So please don't be shy about over these next couple of moments dropping those in. So one of the things we do wanna think about is that these opportunities are leadership opportunities for themselves and with their peers. I mean, until we've completely restructured school where all kids are getting these. And I think that's an important point to consider in thinking about how you're preparing for this. And then the other thing is one of the things we talk about with our forming community and business partnerships workshop is we wanna put ourselves in the shoes of our partners. We really wanna think about be empathetic from like a design perspective for where our partners are at. And so that's something we'd encourage all of you to do. And then different partners will have different abilities to offer different things. And frankly, some may start real small and grow into long-term very large partners. Others may start big and it may be a great experience but there may be other reasons that they need to step back from that without it having been something negative that caused that. And so partnerships will change in a valve over time too. And all of these are areas where you can continue thinking about where the partner can exist. So one of the common questions that came up earlier today it always comes up, Heather referred to this also, is the CNA, where did the extra times come from? And we're not suggesting that these are solutions. We are saying that these are solutions that districts have used to solve this even particularly in a first year. What we've also found is a first year where the first year we're doing the endorsements we put in some solutions in place that we don't use in the second or third year anymore because we're able to fill out that 60 hour experience in much the same way we're filling out the shorter CNA experience. But that first year it might be, hey, let's add some weekend time, let's add some spring break or winter time. And frankly, depending on where your partner is they may love that. Like weekends are times that for example, senior living centers are less well-staffed on weekends but the needs of residents don't change on a Saturday versus a Friday. And of course for some of our students weekends might actually be a better time for them to complete those extra hours. And then for other students weekends are worse time, right? So just having kind of that range of options there. Heather, anything to add here? Nope, I think you summarized that quite nicely. So if there's any, I see the messages keep coming in. And so what we'll do is I don't wanna keep our featured guests today any longer because I'm sure they have other things to do but certainly as usual, we will stay on and if any of them can stay on I know Amanda went through and tried to reply to some things in the chat. We will also obviously export this chat and one of the things that we'll do is go through that probably we'll probably get the video up on YouTube first and then separately go through the chat and try and call out answers and use the Google group to get those out to everybody. But we're happy to stay on. I do wanna thank all of the districts that participated. I wanna remind everybody that we know many, many people could have participated. A couple other really important reminders. And Rodrigo, if you wanna drop the link in the chat for the evaluation, we know we've lost a few people here as we're wrapping up. Having these evaluations is really important to us. We look at these from every event we do and are constantly making adjustments to not only how we're delivering workshops and other learning opportunities, but what we're delivering. In addition to that though, the December 15th meeting that is the day our applications are due for the 2324 endorsements. So we said it does not make sense to have a different meeting that day. We're gonna add an extended office hours in addition to Heather, not that you want this, but Bill and I will also be there and can help. And so, and there will be a time where people can help together. We can shift into breakout rooms if there's certain needs. You don't have to, you don't have to come at all. You can drop in for as long as short as you want just like the regular office hours that Heather is doing every week. Heather, any comment about that? Nope, we just decided that that would be the best use of time for that. So I will have office hours. I haven't set my December date yet, but I will have office hours earlier in the week and then in addition to this one on that Friday. And then again, we've got these additional resources linked in the link to the evaluation. And again, if you could please, please, please complete the evaluation for us, that would be great. And then remember here is the email address that you would send to send an email to the Google group. It's as simple as copying that and pasting it into your email and sharing something cool you've done, asking the question, highlighting a newspaper article about another school in your area that you saw. And so thanks again to our presenters today and to all of you for all the work you're doing with kids and teachers every day and for helping one another out as we go.