 This is a cool presentation. My background on this is, I don't remember even how, but it was literally May or June. Somehow I ended up on the website here and got lost in this whole alumni feature that had been built out. And then like a week later, I think Travis was in an admin academy I was doing in June and I'm like, oh my goodness, I was on your website and saw all that alumni stuff you're doing. So I know there's a lot of people in the call who are doing a lot with alumni. And I've been thinking a lot about this since Travis and I met this week. And I've been thinking the three things that I think really stand out and what Travis is gonna present are that there's a culture around this and all of us want that in our school communities, that sense of community and coming together. There's a tool that's been built out that helps facilitate this. And then the third piece is there are these instructional anchors, these places. And we'll hear and talk about sophomore English, for example, that really make sure all kids get the benefit of this experience. So it's systemic. So with that said, I'm gonna stop sharing and turn it over to Travis. And if you have questions, as he is talking, I will be monitoring the chat, just roll them in the chat. There we go. Well, like Jason mentioned, appreciate the opportunity. I've found that just having this cohort group, I've gained a lot of knowledge and I appreciate the people that are here. I've connected with, I know Jennifer from Ridgewood on some great things they're doing at their school. And hopefully the purpose of this will be to give you at least an idea or maybe a suggestion on how to connect to your alumni but also how to connect careers to our students. So I said to Jason, I said, I would probably be the last person that would actually, if I was in high school, back when I was in high school, if you would have said that I was gonna be the principal of the high school, eventually have a 32 year career in education, I would have had a laugh at you because I had no intention of going to college after, I had no idea what I was gonna do but college was not in the forecast for me. So to come full circle and to figure it out, I tried to come up with a way that our students could figure it out a lot sooner than I could. What happens is a lot of times I'll talk to students and maybe you run into this too where you're asking kids, hey, what would you like to do when you graduate? What are your interests? And some have no clue. And some know exactly what they wanna do and we wanna help them navigate through that too. So I think we started off with this as a tool just to help students find careers and it became a lot more than that. So I'm gonna tell you a few stories along the way that's gonna help you understand how important this was for us. And typically this is done in a three part harmony. In other words, Linda Vanerlees and Kim Galing is with me but I'm gonna go solo today. So bear with me a little bit. We try to hit everything that people always ask you. Why is career connections important? We're gonna hit on that. What is it? Where can I find it? How do I get started with this? Who benefits? I mean, we're gonna try to hit all those pieces. I think at the end, hopefully you gain a nugget and you can take something away. So how does this, or why is this important? With ESSA, Every Student Succeed Act and with our career pathways, we feel like what we have created aligns directly with that. So I think from an ESSA standpoint, this is gonna be hugely beneficial. If you have counselors in your building that are always trying to figure out how to best connect with students and identify opportunities and options for them, it's gonna help those people out, it's gonna help out the curriculum. In our English classes, I'm gonna be able to show you how we've used it in our English classes and the responses we've gotten from students. So this is the big why, this is why we've done it because we think it's full circle. We think it encapsulates so many different parts of education. So, how did we begin this process? I felt like students need help to find their path. And we do start this process actually down in the middle school. We have taken it down to our middle school level. And we also want kids to know about careers that aren't your standard careers. A lot of students, when you talk to them and they say, I wanna be a lawyer, I wanna be a teacher, I wanna be an accountant. Those are just things they've heard. And that is what they know, but there's so many more opportunities out there for them. And that's why we felt like this was important. And also it gives us a chance to really celebrate our heritage. And that we feel like is important at our school. And I think for many of you, it probably is important too, is a chance to recognize your alumni and recognize your staff and recognize the good work they're doing. And so we've been able to also work on that front. So career connection, what do we ask? What we started with, as we said to our alumni, we asked them obviously give us your name, your graduation year, the schooling that you went to or the military, or if you went right into the workforce, that's fine too. We wanted to know what your career path was, what your actual job is. And then we added again, as a caveat, we wanted to capture their memories of Geneseo. So what do you remember about Geneseo and who impacted you? And that's gonna be really important here in future slides when we talk about that. At first, we thought this was definitely for students. We felt like students were gonna benefit from this. But then we didn't realize that parents were gonna benefit from it, teachers benefited from it, alumni obviously, people relocating, and even our businesses in town benefited from this. So these are the pluses that happened along the way. It was first driven by students and helping them try to find their path because originally we would, and I don't know how your school operates, but it would be you take a survey to find out what interests you might have. And then from there, we're gonna research on the internet and we're gonna find jobs that maybe through career cruising or Zelo or something like that, we're gonna find those jobs and we're gonna give you information and then you can contact those employers to see how this works. For us, we put it at a personal level and guess what? You're gonna contact Geneseo alumni. So you're gonna contact the people that sat in the same seats that you did. You're gonna contact the people that walked the same hallways that you did, had some of the same teachers that you did. And so there is an automatic connection even just by putting in the subject line, Geneseo. And for your school, whatever that is, that's what we tell our students. If you put in there, Geneseo alumni or you put in Geneseo, all of a sudden and their subject line, they're gonna already be captured by that and say, wow, okay, so I'm interested. What's going on here? So then it's been about a three year process for us to gather all this information, to put it on a website to put this together. But I'd like to share components of our website and again, tell you a little bit about how this works. It's probably typical to most search engines from the standpoint that we have, you can search your alumni, you can submit your own information, you can update your information, all those type of things. We search, you can search by degree. So if you know what you really need in that field, that might be important for you. You can search by graduation year. So we found that this also helps our alumni stay connected to each other because all of a sudden I'm the class of 1983 for Geneseo. So I click on 1983, I can see what all of my classmates where they're at, what they're doing, they can give me that information. We have the universities and the colleges. Now, this is the graduate year, or graduating or the graduate university that they went to. Because we had, when we originally started this, they started listing out numbers of colleges that they went to. And then it was a mess. So we did undergraduate and we did graduate. So that was important for us. And then we had to go back through and some people would put Western Illinois University, some people would put WIU, some people would be, so we had to try to go back and then clean that up and make sure it all looked the same. So we've done a lot of the legwork there to look at, and these are all of our alumni, where they've gone to. Everywhere from Harvard to Black Hawk College. I mean, so we have a wide variety of people, and this is about a thousand right now of our alumni. Our goal for the end of 2021 is to be at 2,000. So that's what we're projecting. And then obviously we have the careers, the different areas that people are involved with. And you can see that it's a wide variety there. We do have everything from lawyers to electricians, people that are in the military. We wanna stay connected to those people because we have a veterans wall that we display and we wanna make sure that they're involved. We have, like I said, pilots, we have travel agents, all those kind of things. So they can search by that, they can filter that. We also have it set up as a Google map. So I can click on this here and it'll zoom in and then it will take us to just alumni across the United States, in Canada, all around the world. And just like you guys have alumni all around the world and you say to yourself, well, that's kind of nice. But as a parent, it's really important. I have a son that got offered a job in Montana. And from Illinois to Montana, we've never been to Montana. He's a sports broadcaster for Montana State University. So when we clicked on Montana, I was able to find alumni that lives in Montana and we were able to email them. So we could click on them, email them and ask them about Montana, where do you live in Montana? What is, you know, what's it like? And all of a sudden he said, Bozeman, Montana is one of the growing places in the United States. I'm like, you gotta be kidding me. I said, no, there's a lot of young people out there. It's a great atmosphere. And my son loves it out there. He skis, he does a lot of things. So he's really enjoyed that, but it was nice for us to have somebody connected to that place for him whenever he went there. So we also, to tell you another quick story, is I was talking to a student of ours who was in the Air Force Academy and he was playing on going to the Air Force Academy. And I said to him, I said, do you know anybody in Colorado? You know, anybody in Colorado Springs? He says, I've never been to Colorado. I don't know. I said, well, let's go look on our alumni connection here. So we started to look and these are all the Geneseo alumni in Colorado. Here is Colorado Springs where we can zoom in even more. And we clicked on, I said, here's Beth Shawbrock. She's an alumni of there. So we clicked on her and then all of a sudden it pops up and I said, did you know that Beth Shawbrock is actually a professor at the Air Force Academy? And she's been there for 20 years. She's a Geneseo alumni. And almost you get goosebumps whenever you're like, wow, I can help this student make a connection with somebody that again, the moment you say, hey, I'm a Geneseo alumni and I'm looking forward to going out there. And when he emailed her, she replied right back to him. It says, oh, you know, it's great to hear from you. And so we connected him with somebody right there so that he had some comfort whenever he left. So that was a really a cool thing for us to have happen. We have, so the other thing is, is that you can, it's listed alphabetical here. So you can go through the alphabet, you can scroll through and see all the different things that people put. Here's where, again, what do you remember about GHS? Some people put lengthy things. Some people didn't put anything, that's okay. But some people put teachers' names. So what I purposely did was I would randomly go into teachers' rooms and I would have this with me and I would tell them, I would stop the class right in the middle of class. And I would say, I need to take a few minutes here to tell you what a special teacher you have. And that this person here from graduated in 2004 or whatever, they had this teacher and they purposely put that name down. Out of all the teachers that they've had in their career, they chose that teacher to put on. And you guys should be very grateful that you have this person teaching you that has made an impact on somebody that graduated 16 years ago. So if you wanna talk about something that boosts the morale of your staff, that is something that keeps them going. And in sometimes like these pandemics, they really need to understand that there's people out there that did realize they made an impact on them. So it's listed in alphabetical order. You also have a search engine here. So for example, if we did, I just search acres here. It will pop up and it will tell us where they are. Now we have a couple of acres in the United States. We have one in Australia. They're related, Todd, he's a firefighter. So if anybody's interested in firefighting, they could get in contact with Todd. Colin is a sales executive. He's one of our really bright kids, just a great leader. He was a captain on our state final football team, just a super kid and always willing to help our kids. In fact, he's Skyped with a couple of our kids before. It's pretty cool for them. And then we also have Kevin Akers who I thought this was really important too. Like when we talk about the current field, he says he's a supply management, international logistics, but basically supply management was his degree. And back in the 80s, probably people didn't even realize it was such a degree as that. Now there is a degree. And some of our students have actually gone into supply management because of reading this type of stuff. It's a fast growing major, a lot of job opportunities. He really plugged it here. And we have a couple of our students now that are going into that for sure next year. So it does help us to have students search different areas that they may not have even thought of as if you would have told me when I graduated high school that there would be a webpage design person. It didn't exist, right? So there's a lot of jobs that are being invented. We have artificial intelligence students working in that, working with Google. And so that's been really nice for our kids too, just to see that stuff. So we saw how it benefited the students but it benefited the teacher. I mean, the parent as myself as an example, it benefited our students that are relocating or even if an alumni is relocating, if they're going anywhere in the United States, whether it's New York or New Jersey, or they could contact somebody and say, hey, where's a good place to live? Where's a place that I should stay away from or whatever that looks like? We think that's a big plus too. So again, we could go over story after story and that's the cool thing is that, that's what you get out of this is you get a lot of great stories, but let's continue on to the program here. Okay, let's see. Think I can get this back here. Okay, so all right. So in sophomore English, they go through, at that time it was career cruising, we're gonna switch over to Zello. We think that's gonna be a great platform for us and we think it's gonna work well with our alumni career connection too. We send, the students kind of look through, they connect to a couple of people and then they send them an email. And now I will go back and say that the little zoom, the icons that are on the map, that's not their address. It's their zip code, but it's not their address. So we're not gonna stalk people. We're not gonna go up to your door and say, hey, I'm from Geneseo, back off a little bit. You know, in this day and age, we don't do that. We just do emails. We don't ask for cell phone numbers, anything like that. Now we may email them and we may Skype with them later in one of our classes. Like our teachers will do that too. Our teachers use this also. They use it to examine their curriculum because the kids are getting right out of college and our English 101 teacher will connect to students and say, hey, how was English 101? How did we prepare you for college? I mean, so there's a lot of things that we can use this for. And that's what's important, but the sophomore English has really embraced this in theirs, in their curriculum. So our teacher there, Rachel Brown, did a great job of creating a rubric for the students in this exercise. She gave them questions to start the process, but she also said, hey, add your own questions to this. There might be a particular for that career you're looking at. And then actually a form email that was used that way. Again, students that are trying to, they could create their own, but we wanted to make sure it looked formal, that make sure that when somebody saw it that, okay, number one, I'm gonna see that it's a connection to Geneseo. So I think that that's been really beneficial. And what we found is that they send those questions and then people send answers and then there starts a dialogue back and forth. And we asked the people in the, when they filled this out, if they would be willing to work with our students on this. And if they said no, we didn't accept them because that's what this is for. This is for mainly our students to use. And some of them just filled it out. And then when we said, can we contact, can our students contact you? And if they said no, then we said, that's fine. But then you're not on the website. And then the students had a reflection piece on the whole process then. At the end, they wrote their own reflections. And we thought that was really a great way for them. Here's just a couple, I'm not gonna go through and read these for you, but these are just examples of, that Ali, she talked to somebody that's a attack at Mayo Clinic and that's what she wants to get into. And all these different students had great experiences. And we actually have had four of our students go to the career connection conference up in Chicago. And they were basically the hit of the conference by a lot of people, just because at number one, you have students there speaking versus adults. And it was nice to hear from them about their experience with this and how it impacted them. So now we do have, like for us, one of the things that happens is in our process, we don't just allow anybody to submit anything without a checks and balance. And I think that's important that somehow, if you decide to do something like this, is that you consider that. Is it don't make it where they can have a password and get in and so we have people, if they wanna edit something, it goes through us. Or if they submit things, it goes through us. So then we have a venting process. So if we had something like this where somebody's just like, okay, I'm gonna mess around or I'm gonna type something really bad in there, it just doesn't get uploaded. And we do have disclaimers also on there that talk about what this is used for. You know, because some people will try to solicit from you, can I get your list of, even our boosters wanna say, hey, can I get that list? Can I get it on a spreadsheet of all of our alumni because we wanna do a fundraiser? And we said, that's not the purpose of this. This is not for that. We do send out every three years, we send out to the whole group just an email to say, hey, please look at your information and update it if you would. So we do that, so it's the most updated information that we can have. And then, you know, I've talked at a few conferences and then people always ask, well, you know, yeah, that's great, is there, how can I do this at my school? Because number one, we're a school of, just so you know, 870 kids in the high school. So we're not huge. We're not small. We're kind of in the middle. And I can, I'm just gonna take you through the process that we went through to do this, so you have an idea. And some schools that are larger, you would have a staff that could just kind of take this over and run with it. And you have people in your departments that could create the website, that could do all that stuff and take it over. And that's perfectly fine. There's other schools that are like, I would like to do this, but I don't even know where to start, you know? So I'd like to share with you a couple of things. So we used a website to impress, which is just a local one here for us. And they did the designing. The actual process started with our students in our class, our web design class. They're the ones that actually came up with the questions and came up with the survey pieces, all that stuff. So that was all student driven. In fact, I paid the winners of the people that came up with the most creative way to do this. I gave them gift certificates because I thought that way we're gonna grab our kids into this too. So that was good. So we have, for example, for us, we submit our alumni information, we update it, we filter it, we control all of it. And that we felt was really important for us is that we have control over that. Now, there are companies that will handle this for people too that will do the filtering, that will do the administrative work, obviously those kinds of things. And Kim, I just put her information up here because if you want a starting point, if you wanted somebody that, for me, I'm always like, okay, who do I contact in this? I don't wanna Google search it myself and find out. So I just thought I would put this up in case if somebody needs some assistance or if they would be interested in it. And then the other piece that, again, another caveat of this is that as we're gathering this information, as we designed a distinguished alumni award or created basically kind of a hall of fame of our distinguished alumni, through this we've connected to politicians, to business people. We wasn't aware of that the founder of Make-A-Wish Foundation, one of the co-founders of Make-A-Wish Foundation is a Geneseo alumni, Linda Burgendahl. And obviously she's on our distinguished alumni for this past year. So that was another piece that we were able to do was find these people that did, and then what they do is they come back and they speak at our National Honor Society, the National Technical Honor Society, Illinois State Scholars, that we do a big presentation about 400 people and we bring back our distinguished alumni to show our students that, hey, here's what this means. This is what you could do. Susan Hendricks, she was an executive director or one of the directors for the IHSA. John Edwards, if you see windmills in your area, there's a good likelihood that his company put those windmills up. He did all the lighting on the Dan Ryan. Those are big things that we can share with our kids. One of our alumni was a producer for some of the Scooby-Doo shows, which our kids get a kick out of. And then he came back early for the distinguished alumni and he made some presentations in our classrooms. So again, bringing the alumni back, whether in person or Skype, it was a great opportunity for our kids. So we do have, for us, our method for funding this was, you know what, I went out and got some sponsors. You know, I talked to Jason and I said, hey, maybe there's grant money for people that could pay for it. I don't know, but at the moment that you introduce this to your school board or parents or any of those people, they start jumping aboard. We had no problem getting supporters for it. So I want to thank you for the opportunity. Hopefully you found something and not get out of this. Whether it's one thing is, hey, how can I connect back to the alumni in our school? That may be it or whatever that looks like. And I think that's all I got, Jason. Awesome. Thank you so much, Travis, for all that presentation. Jen Kelcell's commenting on how it truly embraces the importance of community and it absolutely does. One question I'll throw out to, that Travis and I talked about yesterday, but I'm gonna throw it out actually to some of the EFE directors on the call or others with even advanced knowledge on it. Could some Perkins five money be used to help offset the cost of this? And they're Amy's asking the same thing. If Izby would be willing to use State Perkins funding for it. So if anybody wants to comment on that, please someone feel free to unmute. Yeah. Nina, did you unmute? I did. We have spent, I'm a former EFE money. Hi, Amy, former Perkins and CTI dollars, especially because you're reaching a greater audience, especially if you're utilizing this for your middle school as well as a step into it. So yes, I do believe funds could be available for it. This is similar to the career guide that we used Perkins and CTI funds for and actually the state then took it over. So ISBE took that over. So this would be something similar to do for that. And I think this would be great funds to that. Anyone also, I know I'm contemplating how to use my funds for the career endorsement pathway just with things being shut down. And I know I've articulated a lot of my money for external learning experiences, which I don't think are going to be able to happen this year. So that was one thing that I wrote down. Can I amend part of my pilot grant money in order to do something like this? I think it's fabulous. Great work. Yeah, and just a little bit of technical background on it. And this is going to vary widely depending on who's hosting your current school district website. And it doesn't really have to be living where your current school district website lives. It could feel like that to a user because they click and it would maybe go somewhere else. But in terms of cost, again, depending on who your website host is, this is not going to be a tremendous cost given some of the other costs we talk about with these funding amounts. And I really appreciate Travis talking through the data pieces too. Like that was a great example on someone's got to clean up WIU versus Western Illinois University. And you can't just populate a list. I mean, one of the schools, I like pre-populate a list of colleges and universities. I saw Denver Diesel and Mechanical or something that there's clearly not a post-secondary institution that I'm familiar with in Denver, Colorado. And so it's cool though to think about in most of our high schools, we're going to have students that end up with all kinds of different post-secondary experiences. So having that be a regular text field becomes important and then someone's got to clean that up. So there's a little bit of a people power issue. And on the flip side though, the database backend and the web front end, those are pretty manageable. And I appreciate that Travis brought up the role that kids could play. I mean, certainly we have school districts on this call and throughout the state who could have IT career pathway kids building this. And the one thing I would say is, you got to think about where you're putting it and who's maintaining it. I walked into a role in a district where a student had built a product and we were paying the kid a couple of hundred dollars a year to maintain it through college. And then the kid wasn't interested in maintaining it anymore. And we had high level code skills on our team. And it was still something that to unravel it was, we were better off building it from scratch ourselves at that point. So you do have to think through those things, but it's not undoable and awesome in the chat. So there's some back and forth going there with some of our EFE directors about collecting some information and sharing that with ISBI. And I think the one thing in Travis, I'll let you comment on with this. And I think Gina brought up the career guides as an example where, if ISBI takes on more of a role with this, the question in my mind would be, how do we retain that local, like that local control? And there's some of that built into the career guides and some of that is not. And so that has an interesting thing to think about from a website because Travis I think has done a good job outlining how important the local solution was. Right. And we did, I know that when we presented here somewhat locally, there's been some real small schools that said, could we team up and do like a conference one? And it has, I think that that same presence to connect because again, if I hear from somebody from Orion, Illinois or Rock Ridge, it's close to us. All right, okay, I know you're in our conference or you're close by, proximity wise. So we have said that some schools could do it that way. I think you wanna be a little careful though. I mean, obviously our intent was to really just work on the Geneseo alumni. And we were a big enough school that we could handle it on our own. But so there's another option for some people. And I know what Jason was saying about, it was time-intensive for us at the beginning to kind of go through because I am an alumni of Geneseo. So I knew some of the people that were entering information. So I could already do my vending process. If you don't know, if somebody just all of a sudden submits information, they're really not a Geneseo alum, you're a school alumni, then you do need to have what, and typically then that's the yearbook check. They give you a graduation year and you can check their name in that graduation year. And that's one way that we have also done it too. So again, trying to not only give you the positives but the angst of what we, the three years have accumulated too to this point. So, but again, I'd be happy to have somebody needs more information or just to, I think once you two, you talk about it with your, if you present this to your school board or your superintendent or whoever that is or even parents, they typically kind of fall in love with this. I know ours have and they really liked the connection. Awesome. Other comments or questions before we sign off? So we are not back together like this until 2021. I think we'll have a new Congress in session at that point. That was apolitical. That was just a statement of, let me just be clear because we're recording right now. Statement of, I'm just gonna leave it there. And with that said, Travis thank you so much for reaching out to present. We will be sending out a bunch of emails including one about that I'll get out today to ask you to fill out a short form if you're interested in talking more and helping us make this OSHA thing happen. The machine guard training for free for students going into work-based learning experiences and to Gina's point, it's a great time for us to get out ahead of that because we may not have a lot of students in a lot of workplaces until summer or next fall or even this time next year, unfortunately. But I think by this time next year, we're looking good. And so we'll be well, well ready to go and practice with that. And then again, a final call if you do wanna use the career pathway user group as an admin academy, please fill out that form. If you feel like Jason wears that form, you can email me but I wanna reach out to the DeKalbari this afternoon to get that rolling. And in the meantime, please post comments and questions and ideas for one another. I wish all of you and everybody you work with the most restful winter break in history, you deserve it. Again, I feel guilty every day that I'm not in a school district role right now. I live with it and I know what you're doing. And so let me know what I can do to help. Thanks again, everybody. Have a great Friday.