 OTAN Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. My name is Jen Grythin. I am the DELAC lead and GED teacher and lead teacher for Marina Valley Community Adult School and we're excited to be here today to present our project or a mid-year review for bridging the pharmacy tech gap. Before I introduce the rest of the team I do want to tell you in the chat I just put the link to a Google doc and it will take you to all of the links that you will you'll see as we go through our presentation so you can go and explore those on your own time. Our team members include Dr. Patricia Vizano, our principal, Lolita Anderson, our ESL teacher and ESL department chair. She's here presenting with me today. Cynthia Canchola is our CTE pharmacy tech teacher. She is not here but she worked in partnership and collaboration with us as we kind of went through this whole process and then I'm also joined by Jennifer McGrath our GED teacher and lead teacher. Go ahead and do the next slide for me because I can't change it. A little bit about our agency. Marina Valley offers adult basic education classes. English as a second language, high school diploma, high school equivalency or GED in our career tech ed department. Currently we have 696 students enrolled in a virtual 100 percent virtual program. Prior to the COVID pandemic we averaged about a thousand students who would come to either morning or an afternoon evening session and then COVID hit and we had to pivot. So prior to COVID we were 100 percent face-to-face. We had two programs, a high school diploma online and a GED online section that was sort of hybrid but not really. Those were the only two programs that we had that had any type of online component. The pandemic required that all of us really just pivoted and did everything that we were doing in the face-to-face instruction and turning it into a technology-based setting, which was a lot. So this D-LAT course that we took with Destiny Simpson and Dr. Porter and our coaches and OTAN, it really helped us address these issues and rethink how we were going to do this as we move forward. And we'll get more on to that in just a minute. And so to introduce our pharmacy technician program, we have had this program and assistance at our school for the past three years. It is a nine month course intern and includes internship, which where the students actually go out into the pharmacy and the pharmacies and learn more about and get on the job site experience and towards their hours for total certification. In order to be in this program, they have to have a high school diploma or equivalency and a balance of security number. And upon completion of this program, they are able to earn their immunization certification, which is where they're able to actually give shots in the pharmacies, which is helping out in the wake of the COVID situation. And as well as they get their state board certification for to be a pharmacy tech. And it is good for the state of California. There's also a national board equivalency of this as well, where they can go and travel to different states to be able to work as a pharmacy tech. And here are some pictures of some of our students. And this is pre COVID. So that's why they don't have their masks on. So these pictures were taken pre COVID. And you can see here, it ends up our classrooms, some of our cohort students and we have students that are practicing learning how to take the do their measurement of their accounts of their medications, and as well as how to weigh the different medications for compound medications where they have to put different ones together. So this is part of their training they do on site in the class, they take this experience out into the field. And part of our reason for doing this, we offer this course here in place because there is a high demand for pharmacy petitions in the area. And especially the next two years, there is a projection at least 2000 pharmacy tech positions that will need to be filled in the area. And this is for the Riverside and San Bernardino County area. So there is a great need for this particular entry level job for our students. And with that being said, and because of the fact that there is going to be greater demand for helping out our medical offices and helping to provide vaccinations, our pharmacy techs can be certified to give those shots as well in the pharmacies. And this is a picture of one of our students down here who actually graduated from our program. And she works in the field. And just a little quick story, she was one who gave my husband his second vaccine shot. So just about a month ago, that was pretty neat to have one of our former students giving a shot to my husband. That was pretty cool. So and how so basically what we're doing to help our pharmacy technician program is that in working collaboration with our pharmacy teacher, she has identified some skill areas where we need to help to grow our enrollment in the pharmacy program, we need to help our students to have to bridge these gaps. And so we decided to create what's called a bridge course. And in doing this bridge course, we've identified five gap areas that will help our students before they make the transition to go into the actual pharmacy tech program. So what this is, we are developing a customer service course, so they can learn a little bit about what it's like to be behind the counter and communication skills and whatnot. And they will also have a better background in medical terminology, anatomy physiology, and as well as strengthening skills in math and what the areas of medical mathematics they need for this particular course. And it's also going to align a lot more closely with our costs as math tests. And the last component is our computer and digital literacy skills where we need to help strengthen students skills and working with the computers because they're going to be online doing the computers quite a bit and as well as working with the pharmacy techs, the software that is being run in pharmacies. And so I've been taking off to you, Jen. So like many agencies when COVID hit, we saw a decline in our enrollment and they were scared of technology. They weren't sure how a class was going to work. They weren't sure how they were going to be able to do school when they couldn't come to the site. We did see a drop, but to combat that, we we recruited heavily on social media and our websites to get students enrolled and get them ready to go to enroll and recruit students for this pharmacy tech class. We plan to do class visits, be it virtual or in person, depending on how the fall rolls out in 2021. Our counselors are speaking to interested students as well as teachers and former students who went through the CTE program are coming back and talking to students who could be potentially interested to kind of recruit them towards it. We also noticed that we had some gaps in our students' digital literacy skills as far as how are we going to do school? Like all of you, when we pivoted to Zoom and online instruction, we really did struggle getting students into the site, how to get to Google Classroom, how to log into a Zoom. And there were several hours of myself and other teachers sitting down with students one on one going through how to do that. So to mitigate some of the frustration experienced by students and by teachers, we put together this technology orientation website. It's also on that Google doc that I just sent you. And here it houses just some basic how-to videos, how to log into school account, Google, the ins and outs of Google Classroom. And we use this just as a reference for teachers and staff alike to reference. And then they could give this website link to their students. And it's also synced to our school website. If you don't have YouTube, if you're not using it, I encourage you to. There's a lot of great stuff in here. But something that we are most proud about is not only did we make these as a staff for our teachers and students to use, but some of our students took the initiative and decided that they were going to help out. So with that, Lola, could you please talk about these student-created tutorials? Yes, of course. So by now, you are fully aware that digital literacy is a valuable tool for lifelong learning. So once you get your adult language learners to buy in, you know, it's important that you're conscious of the devices that they're using. And that brings us to the student-created tutorial. So I got my students to buy in. And I had over students, over 30 students joined on Zoom. As soon as I asked the students to use the annotation tools, I had students asking for help. I realized I was helping them based on the device I was on. Other students were trying to get, you know, trying to help based on the devices they were on. So one thing before this Zoom chaos, you know, turned into Zoom chaos, I thought, you know, we all know how to use YouTube, right? Yes. Okay, so I asked the students to open up a new tab and basically search for tutorials based on the device that they're on. So we use Burlington English, you know, we're on Zoom and we use Google Classroom. So they started searching and I couldn't copy and paste from the chat fast enough. I mean, students caught on how to copy and paste onto the document that I was using. And so the next thing you know, it became a collective effort. And it was just very empowering for both for the students and extremely helpful. And it's okay that we have dupes because every student's effort is in there. And that's yeah, that's my testimony. And I believe we're moving on to screening and requires scores with Jennifer McGrath. Yes. So with that, and just a little sidebar Lolita teaches our ESL program is her ESL students that created all those tutorials. So it's wanted to give you a big shout out on that with I was really proud of that for ESL program. And so now moving on and making that transition to screen. So when thinking about how we're going to select our students to be part of this bridge program and where what this is, what are the type of students we're looking for for this bridge port that we can help better service them and give them a spark if they're interested in wanting to go into the pharmacy tech field. And so we are looking at our test scores for the ABE and ASC students, we wanted to target the low for the reading scores or low adult secondary education and risk levels five and six. And also we are going to go down to as low as the NRS level four, five and six in the math with the consideration that we are going to be providing a much more intervention in the module and medical math module for the course. We will be providing a lot more interventions to help fill in those gaps because most of our students may have high literacy but may not have as high level in skills and math. It could be because of literacy gaps there may be. So that's something that we want to take into consideration. And then of course for our ESL students, we will be looking at targeting the ESL students that are in NRS level six advanced level. And keeping in mind that these students will be probably in their current ABE ESL classes and also maybe doing their GED classes or high school diploma classes and finishing them up and they may take this course at the same time. So it's kind of like a natural chance for them to have a goal setting up. Oh, OK, I'm interested in risk and pharmacy tech, but I want to give my skills ready to go to that level. So working at this student foundation here to help tie in that and then they hope the goal is to have them when they're finished with their ESL and ABE classes and this course, they're ready to make that transition to enroll the actual pharmacy tech program and continue their pathway into a job. And so how do we bridge this gap? Lolita. Burlington English is an online learning management system the ESL department uses and also credits for increasing ESL CASAS test scores. So these students are meeting their benchmarks, payment points, but Burlington English also has a career readiness courses and one of those CTE courses is pharmacy technician. So having said that, our hope here at the Moreno Valley Community Adult School is to be in collaboration with Burlington English, you know, and get permission to integrate their curriculum supplemental material slash worksheets and embed them into, you know, some of our five modules that we're offering in intro to pharmacy. So I believe that and it's a star next slide. Oh, that's OK. I just wanted to add on to that as well. And is that in addition to using Burlington English as one of our resources, but just the Barbie tech soft skills component of it, we are also going to be blending in to a variety of different resources of curriculum. We're going to be using the actual pharmacy tech curriculum to build in for the medical for the term for the anatomy and physiology as well as for the medical mathematics components. We'll be using Aztec sources and a variety of creative resources. So it's going to be a blended of a variety of curriculum for these modules. And then with that, the whole goal is that we're looking at some outcomes, helpful outcomes here for this is the main ideas to increase and sustain enrollment in the pharmacy tech program. We want to expand that and create more enrollment for this course and also, of course, to support the increasing job market demand for pharmacy technicians in the entire region, which includes the city of Marina Valley. And with this in mind, we're hoping to expand our medical pathways and build further bridge courses to create and expand our medical pathways into medical billing and coding. Phlebotomy, we do have a phlebotomy program on our campus. We want to bridge do a great bridge course with that program as well and for hopefully a future medical assistant program in the future. And what one of the things that we would like to be able to do is because this is such a new and very unique adventure is that after we have piloted this course in the fall, this fall, we're going to be piloting this course. And over the next year, through refinements and evaluations and seeing how it works and everything, we're going to use the Moodle platform to create this course and put it in there. So we have a shell that we're going to be working with and we're going to build the course in there. And after it's all said and done over the next year, after this second year of our cohort, we would like to put this out on the public domain and put it out there and offer it for other adult education agencies across the country to have access to it to see if it's something that could be helpful for their programs as well. So kind of giving back to the community what we have gained from our D-LAC program. We want to give something back. So this is a very exciting adventure that we'll be doing. And Jen. The long and the short of it, I know we're running low on time. So the D-LAC process in the OTAN course without this program and these courses we wouldn't be here today presenting to you about the Bridging the Pharmacy Tech Gap. We wouldn't be able to do that. To date, we have developed our orientation materials and we have we've worked it into our master schedule for fall of 2021. This whole process assisted us in developing our leadership and presentation styles and communication styles. And the work that Dr. Porter provided allowed us to really see where our strengths were in different areas of ways we needed to approach tasks. And then all of our D-LAC trainings allowed us to learn and network with other adult agencies and pull ideas together because, you know, it's really better to use more than one brain, right? The smartest person in the room is really the room. So that's really how D-LAC and OTAN assisted us. Jen, if you could move it on to the next. Yeah, you go. Sorry. So a special thanks to Dr. Porter, Destiny Simpson, Netta, Penny and all of OTAN support staff and a special shout out to Coach Susan Greer. Development of this course would not be possible. And ideally, these resources provided valuable insights to what we need to consider and how we can build this course from the ground up. So thank you so much from the Marina Valley Adult School team.