 Good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us. Today is the start of the second phase of our SBCT summer speaker series 2022 which we've also been referring to in terms of the concepts and discussions to highlight the CT for all students and each student. My name is Rodrigo Lopez and I am the director of B20 initiatives at NIU but I'm also a member of the NIU Illinois CT project team. So as I've said today is our first educator panel which we will be focusing on the conversations of family and community engagement and post-academic placement. What I'm going to do here in a little bit before I go ahead and do a few acknowledgements is I'm going to start to drop in the sign-in forms so if you please put in mind signing in we do want to be able to go ahead and track participation and it's also helpful for us to make sure that we know who's here and you know that way we can continue to build relationships and learn from moving forward. With that being said I did want to just say that you know we have members from our team here as I said Mr. Ben Owen who is going to be leading the conversations and the discussion with our panelists but we also will have Mr. Bill Rose from our team and give me just a second as there's a few more people coming in and from our SB team our colleagues sorry our colleagues at SB we have had a look in and so at this time I'm going to ask if Heather can just say a few words on behalf of SB. Sure good morning everyone very very glad to be here this morning with you and just have a listen to the discussion today and we're also very very excited to have these summer speaker series we think these are fantastic ways to connect in and really promote and explore all aspects of CTE so welcomed everyone and I hope you enjoy the session. Thank you Heather so I have just dropped in the sign-in form if you again if you wouldn't mind please taking a quick second to fill that out and with that being said I am going to go ahead and turn it over to Ben Owen so you can go ahead and introduce yourself and get started with the panel. All right thank you Rodrigo I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing if you want to take over the slide deck. So good morning everyone we're excited to have you here as Rod Rodrigo mentioned my name is Ben Owen and I am a CTE educator on the NIU Illinois CTE project team collaborating with ISV on that project across the state. We're excited to kind of kick off today with this educator panel and as a follow-up to the summer speaker series as Rodrigo had mentioned so just a little bit of background information for you guys on what that looked like and kind of what today's panel will kind of entail. So as Rodrigo mentioned as part of the career connected Illinois efforts in the state to ensure that we have high quality CTE in the classrooms that summer speaker series really focused on those three areas. We're going to as a follow-up dive a little bit deeper today into some discussion around our family community engagement and post-secondary placement topic with a couple panelists and how this will be designed is to have those individuals kind of in depth provide responses to some questions that we're going to ask them. As we go throughout if there's any questions from the audience please feel free to include those in the chat and we will do our best to incorporate that in as we go throughout. But before we kind of jump in I wanted to provide a background of the keynote that this is a follow-up to. So in June we had Dr. Ayanna Brown from Elmhurst University and Thought Spectrum who presented a keynote presentation on this topic and just kind of a quick overview of what that entailed was really focusing on a few different points. There was a lot of discussion and kind of navigating understanding the learner's journey and how that impacts individuals and some different frameworks that have had its historical impact to really get to the bulk of what the meaning was and how it ties to this topic in our CTE classrooms focusing on who is the learner and having a need to understand who our learners are and how that impacts the demands for those learners in CTE classrooms. How we engage 21st century learners and then ultimately coming to kind of the conclusion of that the importance of having a commitment to a learner as educators and that really boiled down to dismantling stereotypes about individuals and their journey making sure that we're engaging them as academic thinkers and then obviously creating connectedness which really goes to that relationship forming and working with community. So that's a little bit of background on the keynote that took place. So at this time we have two panelists who are going to be participating today and I would like to ask them to introduce themselves. So if we could could we have Joe and Karen both take an opportunity just to introduce yourselves briefly if you could share your name your school or district that you work in your current position in one aspect of CTE or college and career readiness that you love the work that you do with. All right do you want me to start then? Sure. Okay I'm trying to remember all your questions. Wow that's a lot I'm still in summer mode. That's okay so we're just looking for name your position in district and then one thing that you enjoy about CTE or what you might be involved with. All right hello my name is Karen Simmons I'm the director of student services for the Genoa Kingston School District so we are located near DeKalb near NIU about 20 minutes or so I guess north and wait no south I don't know my directions anyway we're about 20 minutes away from DeKalb and we are you know my role is I have we're a small district just you know under 2000 students so I have a lot of different hats that I wear in a smaller district and trying to help our high school to navigate the college and career readiness is one of those hats and I think that one of the things that I like about it is or that I enjoy about the work is that I feel like it's very proactive work it's the kind of work that you want to do as an educator as opposed to solving problems and I'm really excited about the possibilities that it has for our students but really need to dig deeper into making those connections happen. Thank you Karen. And hi all I'm Joseph Skalski I'm the director of CTE Pathways and College and Career Readiness for Community Unit School District 300 in Algonquin, Illinois. We are a very large district so on the opposite side we go between the fifth and sixth largest school district in Illinois have about 21 schools and about I believe 26,000 students I mainly work with the middle school through high school CTE programs as well as we have a number of pathway programs and then I get to oversee the dual credit programs with Elgin Community College. One of the pieces I love about CTE is I feel like in the past decade a lot of things have changed and the concept of find yourself in college is very expensive nowadays to do so I love that we're working to help students determine what their post-secondary life is going to look like so that they can have a better I love main townships return on investment concept that they have a better return on investment overall in their life and don't rack up the debt if it's not necessary so. All right thank you Joe. For those of you who are just joining welcome we just introduced our panelists Joe and Karen and we will be starting the panel discussion here shortly. If you have not had a chance to please jump jump over to the chat and introduce yourself if you haven't had a chance to do that and also Rod Rigo has dropped in the sign-in form if you could sign in if you haven't and Rod Rigo will be adding that again as we move forward so please make sure that you're able to do those things in the chat also. So before we transition over here to really start the panel discussion just want to remind everyone that this is going to be fairly free flowing in terms of our discussion with our panelists. We do have a series of questions that we'll ask but there will be some follow-up questions at times from myself or some of my colleagues over at NIU. We do encourage you if you have questions or things that come up or input also to utilize that chat and we'll try our best to incorporate that as we go throughout the panel discussion also. So with that being said we will go ahead and we will jump into the questions. So the first question we have Joe and Karen is how does your school district define the word post-secondary and how do students and families think you define the word post-secondary? Take a second to process and then either one can jump in. Okay I cannot jump in I feel like for district 300 we're trying to design around a very broad definition of post-secondary with that concept of having multiple exit points within different career clusters or pathways so our students can excel or jump into employment whenever they feel it's best suited for them. So that's why we're trying to design all of our pathways and CT programs around that concept of having a certification embedded, dual credit embedded along with the work-based learning experiences to show them what the different options are within that pathway and educate the family on what the post-secondary options are required for that pathway as well. Hopefully a lot of you have seen the model programs of study or model pathways that have been published by BelieveEd Systems that has the upper right quadrants that shows what the different career options are and then what the post-secondary sort of requirements are and just again continuing to educate families on that there's a wide range of these exit points and students can navigate that throughout their post-secondary life as needed. As far as how families define it I think we're still working with families on the understanding or concept that college is this four-year bachelor type of experience and educating them that there's a lot more options nowadays and you can piece things together you can go to community college and then a four-year bachelor's there's not this end point type of concepts but we're still working with our community on on what that looks like in many cases. Okay Joe um thank you for that um really good response and a follow-up question for you in terms of the interaction with the families and kind of what they may view it as um so obviously it seems like your district has a pretty defined goal of what you want to accomplish in terms of trying to bring along the family and community um what are what are some strategies maybe you use or what do communications look like and have you seen any benefit from those specifically like when you talk about educating the families can you just discuss what that might look like a little bit? A lot of that's in the earlier stages of sort of development we've done a lot of course with COVID with virtual sessions and I think we will continue to go that route but I think there is a need to doing some in-person at the different buildings in the near future as we're allowed to um I think sometimes there's a disconnect there's advantages the virtual where families that maybe can't attend or almost like squeezing in the meeting based on their family schedule are able to attend but there's a stronger personal connection we're also trying to work on social media with our communications department and ensure that communication is going off that way too. Okay great thank you. Okay um you know some of the same things from a smaller district perspective um I think though that in our area I think that a lot of the focus and a lot of families particularly and students still view post-secondary as going to college whether that be a four-year institution whether that be a community college I feel like they really feel like that is the next step that's the and we've been trying to you know do much of what Joe talks about with um you know educating the parents and I think for us that education comes through the school counselors having their um their individual meetings with their students that comes from having the school counselors do um in class um kinds of um discussions um and let's say for example junior year everybody takes US history it's a requirement so maybe the council counselors will go into all of the US history classes and talk to them about you know particular targeted topics we do the same thing all four years you know using like English 9 or you know whatever required courses are so education comes in that way education comes in the individual meetings education comes in some different parent nights which you know sometimes aren't well attended right um you know so we we're always looking for better ways to work with our families and to educate our families and to educate our students um as well this past year we did try to do a um more intentional um way of guiding our course book for our high school to where you know we tried to divide it into some of those career clusters um and you know career areas looking at those categories and saying well this group of classes together might look you know at possible careers in this and if you did want to do this this might be some education or some job experiences um we're also trying to build our dual credit but it's a little bit more challenging um I think in a smaller district maybe not maybe it's the same challenges right but um you know not many of our not really any except for one of our teachers is dual credit certified in-house so we rely a lot on our community college to partner with us some of those experiences for students and again being that we're in a small area some of that comes with our students actually having to get themselves to our community college for those opportunities which 30 minutes away and you know not great roads in the winter and so there's you know definitely challenges and barriers that are associated with that again being that we're in a smaller community community those work partnerships are also very challenging because we don't have a lot of the industry and business in a small town so um you know I'm not trying to say that we're not working really hard we definitely are but um I think that there are some just considerations that um that really um that come with a smaller area that you know makes it a you know potentially a little bit more challenging but maybe at the same time gives us some greater opportunities to be creative okay great thank you Karen um follow up question they're talking about the small community and some of the the challenges that you're facing is um as you're looking at providing and kind of continuing to grow those opportunities for students um what is the response or how how is your district navigating kind of continuing to educate families and to kind of let them know about the options not just being college but having multiple routes coming out of that um I mean it's a work in progress you know I think that each um each year um it seems to get you know more um I guess widely accepted but you know it's it's still a work in progress I would just say okay thank you all right we will go ahead and move on to our second question which is going to be um a lot of different components here so obviously we know that there are um multiple individuals who are going to be in involved in or need to be engaged in our discussions on post-secondary um in the CTE realm or in any realm for that matter but really focusing on to start um how does your school engage um parents in the post-secondary conversation and then as you answer that if you want to think about some of those other stakeholders who might be involved that's kind of where the question will transition to so um thinking about like school counselors which I know Karen you had already mentioned kind of how your um school counselors are involved in that process um your teacher classroom teachers CTE directors if you have those and administrators so just think about your stakeholders we can start with parents and then kind of progress to the discussion from there but how do you how do we engage those different stakeholders in the conversation of post-secondary in your districts well joe I can go first this time since you took the last question first maybe we can kind of tag team the order there um I would say that for us um we kind of start all of those conversations um in our middle school one of our um our encore rotations that our students go through as a as a career readiness um encore rotation for our district what that looks like is they have about two six-week classes in sixth grade seventh grade and eighth grade that focus on um careers and um they work on the you know taking the surveys and looking at um you know what they might be interested in and you know then they get the opportunity to um try to you know research a few different careers and look at you know what education is required what out you know what um you know what kind of skills are required and that kind of thing we um at the middle school they have some guest speakers come in and do some you know more um you know career discussion like I am or whatever and you know this is what my path was and you know the students have the chance to answer questions and then um they also um get the opportunity to um mock interview for a few different jobs we have a few local businesses come in and and do some of that that sort of leads to then the school counselors will come and they'll talk about you know particularly for the eighth graders you know what options are available for high school as they start to think about you know signing up for asking for particular classes and then um in conjunction with that it comes around the time of the ninth grade parent orientation where the parents learn about the different career because again like I said our course book now is kind of set up um in the way that it goes through those different career um pathways so um they'll talk a little bit about the school counselors the different options for you know freshmen and that kind of is that I guess entry point for parents to be involved could we do a better job sure probably a giant studying like that with all incoming you know ninth graders is probably not you know the best and and maybe the only way to do it but that's I guess the entry point then the students take home their course options both electronically and in a paper format and that allows the parents and the students the opportunity to kind of look at options together think about it um make their selections and um it just kind of grows from there then each year the school counselors do a fall you know kind of a career night where they talk about you know a little bit more in depth about the different opportunities and things and then like I said the individual meetings but I'll I'll be honest I I think that um you know we could do a better job of reaching out to the parents and maybe a smaller venue versus the giant um you know career night the giant orientation night and certainly that happens when students request it like if a student is wondering about something then the let's call mom or dad but maybe a more intentional way of doing some small groups or things like that might be beneficial as we move um as we move forward and then kind of as you know once you kind of set your path this is what I think I want to do then a lot of the elective courses that you take and so forth kind of fall in place after that with obviously the opportunity to um change gears if you if you so choose and I think that's one of the things that you know and I we're small enough that the teachers support this and you know all of that as well I think that one of the challenges though is that um you know we've gotten a little bit of pushback from our families about trying to um pinpoint students when they're so young into a particular you know area and that they you know high school is all about those opportunities and finding your passions and you know that kind of thing so I think we also have to be mindful and balance that so we try really hard to set our students up to counsel them with you know the broadest opportunities that would gait them to what they want to do but at the same time not pigeonholing them into something that they may change their mind about. Great Karen, thank you. Okay I can jump in um we for the first time this coming school year will be running a skills for success curriculum at our elementary schools it's a k5 curriculum um a lot of it's got to do with executive functioning skills development and stuff but they are going to be dabbling a little bit with like that college and career exploration components at a very foundational level. The ideas there like dress up as a community losing the word community role on that type of thing and maybe briefly to discuss it but they're in the middle of still working on finalizing some of the curriculum with that. Our middle school does have a college and career readiness rotation course in addition to project-based learning innovative technology where they get to dabble in different projects related to different career pathways we have and then I mentioned that our high schools also have some pathways in addition to our CT programs to study. One of the transitions we're making with the current pathway programs is each building has historically housed a pathway program that isn't replicated at the other high schools out of our three. We're sort of going to be backtracking when possible with some of us as we roll out the college and career pathway endorsements and when possible expanding these college and career pathway endorsements at multiple buildings mainly because we're not seeing a large interest of students willing to leave their base school to go attend full time another school to participate in that program. It also has to do with the concept of multiple entry points too. I believe Karen mentioned about having some opportunities where students can sort of try things and even go in different career pathways so they can explore in high school and that makes it difficult when they've transferred to a different school there's IHSA issues if they do withdraw and they go back to their home school to their base school so we're trying to eliminate some of that as much as possible and provide as many opportunities across all the buildings so that all students can have so that equitable opportunity there. We did last spring run for the first time in Northern Kane County Job and Career Fair at one of our high schools at Dundee Crown High School in the afternoon. It was mainly targeted towards juniors and graduating seniors. It ranged from everything from summer employment opportunities in the community to just the employers they're talking about their their their career areas. We are looking forward to potentially building that down the road and connecting it with some of our curriculum fairs. They have this sort of hybrid post-secondary and career exploration fair and connecting the curriculum to it as far as sort of those other stakeholders involved. We're in the process of reviewing. Currently we we use Naviance and we have a PACE framework that was approved and developed prior to COVID. Everything sort of got halted of course with COVID so this year we're really looking forward to diving deep into that PACE framework and we we have approved all the different objectives and stuff by grade level that we want to meet but it stops at the point of the how are those all addressed and we want to start creating that library of what is it district-wide approaches to addressing some of those initiatives as well as what are some building specific and then sharing those across buildings so they can all pull pieces that they like and embed it as appropriate for their building and that committee is going to involve counselors teachers admin both district and building level in that work. That team will also then again be reviewing other college and career readiness platforms so that we can sort of strategically ensure that some of this is happening for students and monitor data of completion because we do see this as potential almost like an MTSS for college and career readiness so when students aren't identifying a career cluster of interest or are having concerns that it sort of can level them up to this tier two level and we maybe can be more intentional in exposing them to different careers while students that's very focused we then can provide them with more in-depth experiences that we can offer through work based learning opportunities or classes so that's sort of a quick summary where district 300 is at. Great thank you Joe so obviously as you guys were talking to very different districts in terms of size but some similarities in what was mentioned there a couple things that stood out to me we're just talking about the flexibility and providing options for students to explore and see what those opportunities might be post-secondary and then something else I took a note on as you guys were talking here because I found it interesting that you both kind of focused on this was incorporating the career exploration and starting at the elementary and middle school level which I think is great to hear I was just wondering in terms of that if one or if both of you could kind of share maybe the benefits that you've seen of having that introduced at the elementary or middle school or some tips or strategies for districts who maybe aren't there yet but are looking to go that route to help continue to grow their program and enhance at the high school level well I mean we don't have anything at the elementary level at this time so actually Joe I'd love it if you would put in the chat what the curriculum is that your elementary students are going to be exposed to that would be really interesting I think as far as our middle school I just think it helps to you know we also have a very strong in our rotation in middle school community service rotation that our students do and I feel like that all kind of ties together gets students more knowledgeable about what service opportunities there are within our community it gets them more keyed into what businesses and industries are available in our community it gets them more aware of what possible career ideas are out there for them so I do definitely think that the focus of the middle school has been very beneficial and it's also helped then our students as they go up into high school with making more intentional choices for courses that they want to take as electives and possible pathways that they want to explore earlier because you know at least exploration wise so yeah that's what I and for us we're still like living through that curriculum development process we have I believe six different sort of learning objectives that they're targeting throughout the year and the team's still working through a lot of that but I'm willing to meet with anyone interested in talking more detail about it long term we we're still determining how that's going to fit into so that PACE framework we haven't extended it down to that elementary level and that's why I got sort of pulled into the involvement and the development of that those courses for the middle school the college and career readiness course has been really helpful to give sort of that opportunity for students to explore they did some Naviance work with interest surveys and different variety of surveys to help guide them to some planning for high school and post secondary we are needing to evaluate sort of our project based learning and innovative technology courses because those are supposed to be where they get a decent variety of like many projects to explore these different career areas I would say we're not addressing all of the CT areas it gets sort of difficult like VAX isn't addressed heavily in those those programs it's more of the tech multimedia programming type of stuff STEM related things so that is sort of long term how do we address sort of those other facts and business related pathways in those courses so okay great thank you we will go ahead and transition on to the the next question which is how does CTE fit into your school district's definition or outreach to parents so specifically looking at that CTE component in outreach to parents I think that's where we were doing a lot of work last year to sort of backtrack on that definition of CTE versus pathways um we had again these programs of study culinary auto um many cases very high functioning programs um they already had certifications built in sometimes they even had some articulated dual credit built in um but then they were recognized as the CTE programs to study and not necessarily pathway programs because they were offered at all three buildings while the previous definition of pathways were these unique programs at each high school and I think that's what we're starting to try to backtrack on and unpack into the community that these CTE programs of study are still very high functioning valuable pathway programs and I think that's why that transition to the college and career pathway endorsements across the board are going to be helpful I think in that communication with families um because I some of the ones we're going to apply for hopefully 2324 are our CTE programs of studies that are offered at all three buildings because in some cases they're the furthest along um so I that's where we're having to just clarify that definitions with families and and continue to promote that um uh there are some great CTE programs of study but that also includes that pathway concept and they're sort of one of the same in many cases so Joe going with that and this is going to kind of get into some of the questions we're going to hit here in a minute but as you're kind of navigating that um are you are you struggling to get like effective communication with with families and understand the difference in what options are or um I guess what what has the response been to kind of that altered communication that you guys have started um so far we've presented to our parent advisory councils um there's uh two or three different councils we presented to so far they've all understood it seems like the direction we're heading in our highly supportive of the direction that we're heading with it um in general we I still answer a lot of questions with families about what is the difference between pathways and CTE and and gen eds like I think there's still some confusion with all that um but I again I think with the rollout of the college and career pathways endorsements as we get approved that that will provide a much clearer um definition of what is the difference of a college and career pathway endorsement versus a CTE program study down the road okay great thank you for that clarification okay so for us I guess same but not the same so I would agree that I think our families um view CTE at least in our district something separate and again small district we don't even have very many in-house CTE we have a co-op um with uh several other districts in our area where our students go out of you know out of the public high school for their CTE so um unfortunately I think that it's kind of been viewed um through the years as a non you know college or non you know alternative to um well if you're not going to go to college consider taking these CTE classes and that's not necessarily true at all um we all know that um you know getting a degree in you know multimedia um you know is it's just as important as getting a certificate so um as one example so I think just um because a lot of our families are generational right so mom went to our high school dad went to our high school they took CTE classes back in the day now maybe the CTE classes are a little bit different now than they were back then but I think they're still that like generational um thought process about it so as we're starting to build career pathways and again our really we're not nearly as far as the 300 we're just you know trying to do the intentional um course guide um walk you know crosswalk so to speak um so you know again in our as we're um endorsing that as we're articulating it as we're sharing it at parent meetings and you know the board level and with students um hopefully it'll all come together um but we do have a I feel like a little bit of an uphill battle with CTE having been something that was so ingrained in in the district for so many years um and kind of making sure that we intentionally um you know rebranded if you will to where it fits in with those career pathways because it's going to be a hugely important um component. Thank you Karen I think that um statement you made about the branding and the marketing of um what we're offering is extremely beneficial and extremely important so thank you for that um gonna kind of continue on to the next question here and this is going to be kind of a progression of the the discussion we've been having so far about that parental engagements so the next question is is how is your school or district structured to lead that parent engagement in the activities and initiatives that um the district is rolling out? Is it my turn to go first Joe or your turn I can't remember? It doesn't matter um I think for 300 and it's sort of what Karen has shared with the sizes of the district like fortunately 300 has a lot is a much bigger district and has a lot more resources and this is something I've heard with um some of the other smaller districts we have worked with um we have an like entire communications department that's supporting this work and that branding piece you just talked about so um there's some advantages that we fortunately have that some others I think don't always have um so that's been really helpful with um moving forward um and it's taken off some load off of my plate that I think some other directors or administrators and districts have to sort of lead on their own um we have a variety of well-structured sort of uh variety of uh parent committees and and councils and advisory groups and that we can get to and and talk to different um stakeholders um different representatives um so that's also been an advantage um there was another piece I was thinking I'm mentioning and I've dropped it so I'll let Karen take it and I'll try to think uh what that was thanks Joe so you know a lot of our parent communication is done via surveys that we send out to parents you know how do you feel that this is going and that is going and you know that's you know you don't necessarily know um it's good information um I don't know about um parent committees honestly that's a little bit too deep in the weeds for me with you know my role at the district level and guessing that there are some parent committees that that go on but you know the other very real thing about a small district is that that you know that I just feel like necessary to share is you know doing more parent engagement activities would typically be after school or in the evenings when you're a small district you know you're you're counting on those same individuals to run those things over and over again and um you know you also also have to you know balance that you know protection of your staff so that they don't get over burdened or you know feel um overtaxed on you know their role so I think you know being creative about some of how that might work moving forward would be important um and it's not as simple as just saying well we would have somebody else run it because in a smaller community those parents and community members know those people right and they feel comfortable with them so we would want to use you know those people to help us with some of those activities but um I think we just need to think about how we can you know especially with like a school counselor flex some of their time so that they you know could in fact be available for some of those um smaller group activities I talked about previously because I think that's really where you're going to get your um you know your best um involvement is you know offering you know a large group a virtual session and a small group session you know just trying to hit it all the different elements great thank you Karen um I do have a follow up question not to put you on the spot but we'll put you on the spot a little bit um so Joe had mentioned the resource difference between a large district and a small district and then you are even navigating talking about like the human resource elements um in this being in a smaller district do you and talking about using that creativity do you have any um specific recommendations or things that you would recommend to individuals who might be in the same situation with those limited resources um that would be helpful if not that's okay because I kind of threw you on the spot but well do you mean in terms of like the parent engagement piece yeah well I mean you know like I said I haven't done a very good job of it right this is like an area of growth for me too but I would like to um to see about the possibility of flexing some of the school counselor's time um to maybe you know not have to be at work on a particular afternoon or morning so that they could you know take uh an after school you know kind of offer some different time frames right some parents might you know maybe offer a day session some parents might be able to manage that with their schedule maybe offer a late afternoon a four to six kind of a time frame at some point flexing a couple of hours of school counselor time maybe offering an evening opportunity for small group again flexing some of the school counselor time or using some of those parent conference times that you might already have built in your schedule um or you know depending on the district some districts have plc time maybe some school counselor time could be flexed in those ways so just trying to look at the resources that you have and then try to um to target those resources to try to reach the most amount of parents at different times recognizing that you know just because Thursday night at seven works for me it may not work for a lot of our parents kind of thing great thank you parent and then I remembered I wanted to just briefly mention about like our course structure and sequencing and our program development and where we're heading with that it has really I feel like been a benefit to our families in that we have three very different sort of communities in high schools that we serve um but we're not here to say it's college or not college we're here to again go back to that multiple entry and exit point concept and that return on investment concept so I feel like a very broad messaging and focusing the conversation back to the student and the families and through their experiences is has been and will continue to be really helpful um because again we're not telling students what they need to do we're providing a ton of opportunities which again a larger district we can have a lot of opportunities um but we also are experiencing some success regionally where we're partnering with some of our other high schools or districts in our 509 to sort of share programs across the districts when possible so again just huge opportunities that we're just trying to continue to grow that's great thank you joe all right transitioning to our next question here um can you talk a little bit about your parents response to post-secondary in regards to successes and challenges that challenges that you've experienced within your district with parent response to post-secondary think it's my turn Karen a little bit already so feel free to elaborate or bring up some of those points again yeah um so I think we go I go back to for 300 that concept of families are communicating that they're not always interested in leaving their base school despite which school they're at and leaving friends so trying to expand when staffing is available resources are available classroom space at one of our high schools is very very limited so that's a challenge but when we can align everything together and run a program at a building I think moving forward that's what we're going to do um and our community has shared that that's something they want um and as we continue to present and move forward with the college and her pathway endorsements we've had really nothing but positive feedback from families that this is the direction we need to go we need to expose students their opportunities and teach them what opportunities that are there and set them up for a wide range of post-secondary options great thank you so I would say that um you know it's it's a work in progress right so I think that you know we struggle not necessarily with the pathways at different high schools like um Joe talked about since we only have one high school but some of our CTE programs that are off site or even our um partnership um with Kishwaki College um preparation programs like we have an engineering math and science academy and a pre-professional academy that we partner with our community college for and even those experiences um some of the students don't want to miss you know out on being at the high school in order to take advantage of so um you know it's an ongoing um tap dance if you will or you know articulation where you point out you know the the benefits the challenges to making those decisions to um you know to go a particular direction with being out of the building for a portion of the day or not being out of the building for a portion of the day um to try to help the educate the families on um making the best decisions um it's only been about three years since we've had some onsite dual credit classes at our high school with um that are taught by Kishwaki College instructors where the students will get you know let's just say that basic English credit for the first um beginning English and that kind of thing and even getting some families to look at that as a as a benefit um is sometimes difficult because the students are like well I want to take Mr. Such and Such my brother had him and he was such a great teacher and you know trying to really you know educate them about yeah but now you're not going to have to take you know English 100 when you go to college and even if you're not sure you'll have that out of the way if you ever do go and you know so it's an ongoing and I think the more years we have dual credit the more years we have um the communication um channels as open as possible but the the easier and the better it gets great thank you um so I know that both of your districts are doing great things also for students are there any successes that you guys would like to highlight take an opportunity to highlight that's going well in your district in terms of the post-secondary or parent response to post-secondary that maybe hasn't been mentioned well for us um you know we had a really really great partnership pre-pandemic with an industry a business industry in our community that's actually you know thriving and um it would they would take um about two students each year which doesn't sound like a lot but for a smaller district that's pretty good and um they would employ them during their senior year um during a portion of the day so the students would go to school for a certain portion of the day and then they would work and get paid a you know good wage um and to learn and then they would also um send them after high school on to our community college for an associate's degree and then on to a four-year for an engineering degree um as long as they you know agreed to work for the company I think for just two or three years after they obtained that bachelor's degree so that was uh really and that was even pre a little even a little bit pre-pre you know all of the articulation about pathways so that was a really great um experience and opportunity um for our students unfortunately it went away with the pandemic and so hopefully that'll be something that we can build on um and um and further I also feel like our it isn't necessarily the same thing but our engineering math and science academy partnership with Kishwaki college is really great because the students go on for engineering with like 36 college credit hours um already um with a lot of those courses that they need they get their um their calculus sequence out of the way um which is huge because calculus is taught in different ways depending on you know what type of a college you go to there's the calculus for physics and then on and so um that was that's a huge benefit for a lot of our students and they started a pre-professional realm for like pre-dentistry or pre-medicine which has been very helpful to a lot of students that's enabled a lot of our students to graduate from college four-year college in less than four years so um and I know that's you know obviously one of the goals of the whole state is to look at that kind of running start program down the road or as we speak great thank you Karen um I feel like we've had a lot of successes um and then there's a lot on the horizon that we're anticipating um we applied for a lot of dual credit um in alignment with the college and career pathway endorsements with ECC so we're um sort of in the final stages of um watching um what staff get approved and um looking forward then to going back to HR and talking about who wasn't approved and how we can tackle that sort of moving forward um we had a lot of discussions last year about strategically aligning our course request to to the college and career pathway endorsements with ECC to be very strategic in that um we ran a summer camp uh for our middle school students that was a very low cost week long summer camp last last June at two of our high schools we're looking forward to expanding that to our third high school and then in the region we'll be having discussions this fall about how we can continue to expand across those opportunities across the region as well as at ECC and partner with some of that work um so it's it's sort of sporadic and our different successes that we've had but I feel like it is slowly starting to all come together and align a significant goal for this year though is going to be um increasing our community and industry partnerships and starting to pilot a variety of work-based learning experiences this coming spring and summer and next fall and I say a variety because we have an internship program that's already well structured and functional but as we have learned from partnering with other neighboring districts that flexibility is key when we're trying to hit that 60 hours for the college and career pathway endorsements because we have students involved in avid or banned um variety of of competing interest and if we want to see this be successful we need to have some flexibility in addition to our standard internship two-period block class um to be able to accommodate more students so great thank you joy I noticed there that you said that um you've had multiple successes and that it takes time um and I think that's important to note that a success is a success for our students and eventually it's going to take time and those are going to start aligning to the the larger goal um as we're looking to move in the direction of accomplishing these things so thank you for sharing that um at this time looking at the time here we're going to go ahead and transition and ask if there are any questions from anyone who's in attendance who want to uh ask either Karen or Joe questions uh in the panel you can go ahead and put those in the chat and then we'll help navigate that if um if you'd like and once we call on your question you can feel free to um kind of unmute and ask that question if you'd like so Ben I Ben I had one that came through on a direct message if I can share because I think it was really interesting absolutely um it was a question about um has 300 looked into offering any sort of virtual sessions um have you had any luck with uh virtual learning um to balance that concept of staying at a base school um in particular with dual credit that is something we had been exploring um and we want to um we look forward to offering that to our students this coming fall um because for non-lab based dual credit courses um particular for us right now it's um psych 100 we only have one teacher approved at one building um and it's a non-lab based class so we have been in discussions with the union about what it can look like to have a virtual section for the other two high schools um and what we've just talked about with ECC is that's sort of a high impact type of class it spans across sort of a few different um pathway endorsements um so we are exploring how we can potentially offer that so now of course with the lab based ones that's going to be a challenge um we are still at early stages of navigating what that might look like I know many districts allow students to travel from different buildings um for like capstone purposes um at the moment I'm anticipating welding and manufacturing are going to be our two programs that we probably do not expand and they will continue to live at Hampshire High School simply because of the resources and space involved in those programs. Great thank you Joe it looks like we do have a question that came in um from Michael asking do either of the school districts have an associate's degree program and if you do how do how do you communicate those to students and families? District 300 does we have our full-time accelerate program um in addition to our CTE part-time and our Jed Ed part-time courses um you for the full-time accelerate program they can take that as a junior or senior um of course if they don't start it so senior year then um they won't leave with their associates um we have been communicating that the last few years through a um collaborative video uh recorded video with ECC and us um that has been posted and shared with families um prior to COVID they did have some in-person sessions and stuff again I think we'll be visiting what that looks like um we also have a an assigned counselor at each high school who is responsible for being sort of the contact person at that building of course all the counselors can speak to it but the um specific counselor that has this responsibility is sort of the expert um so we encourage the families to start with their their base counselor and then if they have questions reach out to the dual credit counselor at the high school and then to myself or the building associate principal of instruction if needed um so we're excited I think we're in the third year or so of offering this third or fourth um numbers are sort of stagnant um we actually didn't fill all of our spots for next year um we think there's a variety of reasons um probably mainly pandemic related um we do hear concerns at one of our buildings and I think Karen mentioned it about transportation concerns because they do have to go to ECC for that um as far as solving that problem there's been some beginning conversations but it is it's a challenge between the three high schools we have um one is sort of in a very sort of urban area that we can probably figure out some public transportation to or um but then another one of our high schools Hampshire is an fairly rural community and there's not going to be that public transportation all the way to ECC so we'll just continue to navigate that um but we do graduates um students the last two years I believe with the associates degree um coming out of high school we have not had that um we don't have an articulated program at this point it's something that we're we're still working on um you know we've had a few meetings with our local high schools to try to see if you know we can increase dual credit opportunities by kind of pooling our resources together um as I mentioned earlier with engineering math and science academy we do the students are expected to provide their own transportation so we know that that would probably still be the case um for a you know dual certification program so it's it's something that we're always thriving towards but we're not we're not nearly as close to that so great thank you so just a reminder for you guys I am dropping a link right now for the sign-in sheets into the chat if you have not had a opportunity to do that can you please make sure that you um take just a moment to sign in to help us out um in addition if there are any additional questions you can drop those in the chat so we can facilitate some discussion before we wrap up on those here so any additional questions that anyone wants to ask and if I can just share I think Karen at one point mentioned like that they're not as far along as district 300 or something along those lines and I've done a lot of um research and partnering with neighboring districts and what I've come to realize is some districts are further ahead in some areas and some are further ahead in others and as a whole I don't think any of us are that far apart especially with the support ISBE has had in the past two years with this work um and just as a state it feels like there's a lot of momentum moving forward so I think all of our districts no matter where we're at can fairly quickly catch up and and be right in the game with every other district um in Illinois on this work so excited to keep this moving forward. Joe I think that's a very valid and very important point so thank you for bringing that up and the other thing to keep in mind is we consider where your our district is currently at is each different has uh different students and different needs so just because you might not be mirroring what another district is you might be um doing so because you're trying to really focus on the needs of your students and um like Joe said with the um project work in the state and the support of ISBE I think it'll be very easy for schools to continue to move in the right direction and ramp up from wherever they are in the process as we head into the next couple years. Yeah I agree and you're right I mean we you know there are a lot of similar things that we both shared um we might just have different ways of getting there and I think for the audience it's really nice because they can kind of see that complete difference between you know the how we're each incorporating the elements and the tenants um in spite of our size. Great thank you guys for that well it does not look like we had any more questions come in so at this point I want to take an opportunity um one to thank everyone in attendance for taking part of your day to learn a little bit from our panelists but also to thank both Joe and Karen for coming and sharing their thoughts knowledge and expertise to kind of help us all think about some of these things that are really important in our schools so thank you to you guys and I can stay on if anyone has questions or wants to speak individually but other than that that kind of wraps up our panel discussion for today we do have some additional ones coming up focused on those other topics so if you have interest in attending those I would definitely encourage you to do that also but thank you everyone for attending and again thank you to Joe and Karen for um sharing your expertise and knowledge today