Panelists:
- Dr. Adriana Cervantes-González, Program Manager for Residency Programs, Tulare County Office of Education’s California Center on Teaching Careers
- Brooke Berrios, Residency Program Coordinator, Tulare County Office of Education
- Dr. Colby Smart, Deputy Superintendent, County Office of Education
- Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick, President and CEO, Alder Graduate School of Education
- Joe Edelheit Ross, President and CEO, Reach University
WestEd Moderators:
- Jason Willis, Senior Fellow, Strategic Resource Allocation and Systems Planning Team
- Lupita Cortez Alcalá, Director of Education Policy and Outcomes, Strategic Resource Allocation and Systems Planning team
- John Diaz, Researcher
- Dana Grayson, Director, Teacher Workforce Program
Host:
- Danny Torres, Associate Director of Events and Digital Media, WestEd
Danny Torres:
Hello, everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar. Our topic, Strengthening Funding Resilience for Educator Preparation Program Grantees: Lessons from Program Leaders. Our featured speakers today include Dr. Adriana Cervantes-Gonzalez, program manager for residency programs at Tulare County Office of Education’s California Center on Teaching Careers, Brooke Berrios, residency program coordinator at Tulare County Office of Education, Joe Edelheit Ross, president and CEO at Reach University, Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick, president and CEO of Alder Graduate School of Education, and Dr. Colby Smart, deputy superintendent at Humboldt County Office of Education. Thank you all very much for joining us. My name is Danny Torres. I’ll be your host.
Now, before we move into the contents of today’s webinar, I’d like to take a brief moment to introduce WestEd. WestEd is a nonpartisan organization that aims to improve the lives of children and adults at all ages of learning and development. We do this by addressing challenges in education and human development, reducing opportunity gaps, and helping build communities where all can thrive. Now, I’d like to pass the mic to Dana Grayson, director of the teacher workforce program at WestEd. Dana, take it away.
Dana Grayson:
Thanks, Danny. Welcome, everyone. So glad you could join us today. I’m Dana Grayson, the director of WestEd’s teacher workforce program, and I’m joined by my colleagues, Jason Willis, a senior policy fellow with WestEd’s resource planning program, Lupita Alcala, WestEd’s director of education policy and outcomes, and John Diaz, a WestEd researcher who plays a leadership role in our educator preparation program funding technical assistance. As you all know, educator preparation programs are experiencing unprecedented shifts and uncertainty in the federal funding landscape. And in recent years, there have been a number of resources and webinars like these focused on building sustainable and affordable ed prep funding models.
But we recognize that preparing for long-term sustainability and navigating an unexpected disruption to funding are two different contexts, so our focus today will be to highlight the types of strategies that can hopefully be useful and applicable to grantees at this particular moment in time and also probing for some of the more innovative strategies for both short-term funding stabilization and long-term funding sustainability. We are thrilled to be joined by a panel of educator preparation program leaders representing a wide variety of contexts as both K-12 and higher education leaders that have led residency and apprenticeship programs in partnership with public and private universities in rural and urban settings, and we invited each panelist based on some of the unique strategies they have employed.
We’ll open with a brief overview of a few high-level principles, and then we’ll plan to reserve the bulk of our time today for an interactive panel discussion with our panelists. So let’s go ahead and get started. So first, some context that will be familiar to most of you. We know that increasing access to and affordability of high-quality pathways into the teaching profession is essential for meeting teacher workforce needs, and California has invested more than $1 billion to strengthen the teacher workforce and has also benefited from federal teacher preparation grants, including the Teacher Quality Partnership and Supporting Effective Educator Development, also known as TQP and SEED grant programs.
Some of these grants are, some of California’s state grants are nearing expiration, and both of the federal programs have recently experienced disruptions in access to funding. So, as we dive into this context, we invite you to get the conversation started in the chat so we can hear a little bit about the current context for the folks who have joined us today. Danny, you can go to the next slide. And any questions that are top of mind related to fiscal sustainability and stabilization. So we’d love to hear from you how your program is navigating current or anticipated shifts in the funding landscape and what questions and challenges are top of mind for you and your colleagues on this topic. And as you answer those, I will move us ahead to the next slide.
So this really brings us to the main guiding question for our discussion. How can programs pivot strategy to ensure short-term sustainability and long-term sustainability without compromising program quality or compromising affordability? So before I turn it over to my colleague, we’ll introduce three high-level principles for fiscal sustainability, understanding your current funding model, strategies for short-term stabilization of funding, and strategies for longer-term sustainability. So I’ll turn it over to my colleague John, who will briefly walk us through these principles before we pivot to the panel. And thanks to those who might wanna chime into the chat.
John Diaz:
Thanks so much, Dana. So, as Dana was saying, there’s three principles that we’re gonna go over, the first of which may feel familiar to folks who are currently working in the residency space or apprenticeship space or just ed prep programs in general. It’s just engaging in cost accounting to understand your current funding model. Some of our panelists will talk about this in a little bit more detail, but this is really all about asking, you know, kinda the basic questions that you see on this slide. But taking that time to really catalog your current operating and per-candidate funding packages, as well as figuring out what components are covered by each partner, right? This can help facilitate some of those conversations that can feel a little uncomfortable about cost sharing and what does the cost burden look like between a partnership.
And how do you begin those reallocation discussions? So, for example, maybe in your residency program, you feel really, really good about how your university’s covering tuition costs. And maybe wages are really well covered by a paraprofessional role, but you’re not so sure how to fund that end-of-year PD for your candidates, and you’re also not sure how to get that .5 FTE you need at the district central office to administrate over the program. So going through this process and seeing, oh, hey, we’ve got a lotta these things covered, but there’s a couple areas that feel gray, the district could use some support from the university here, or the university could use a little bit of guidance from the district in terms of what these needs actually are to approximate those costs better, right? It can be useful to think about this process as sort of ingredients, right?
What are the different ingredients that come together to make up both sides of the partnerships’ operations? So which staff are working on what, and how are the roles funded, for example. And our research, which is illuminated here on this slide, right, has taught us that this can look a lot different depending on where you are both geographically as well as the size of your program and the specific goals of it. It can also help to engage in this sort of cost accounting process to understand your candidate funding packages and understand what’s right for them or what feels like the right mixture of supports for them, as well as trying to approximate that marginal cost that your EPP is taking on for each additional candidate.
So what does it look like to scale up? Well, if we’re doing this cost accounting early on, we know how much more obligations are coming from both sides of the partnership, or if there are more, you know, folks involved in that partnership, what everyone else is gonna have to put in to make sure that we can grow and expand our program to meet the needs of our community. So again, we’ve compiled a few resources and profiles of residency and apprenticeship programs that break down what this sort of expense categorization process looks like that could just serve as some examples for consideration. Thinking about our second principle, though, this is all about stabilizing program funding.
And really building off of that first principle is after you’ve identified sort of those areas of opportunity, you can more precisely understand new areas of need and start mapping out, okay, we know that we need new funding entirely. Where is that gonna come from? Or we know we need to replace our funding, where is that gonna come from? And thankfully, the CTC has a couple of wonderful resources, a funding matrix that’s available on their website that gives detailed information about federal and state funding sources that can be used to help finance EPPs and a matrix for funding programs as well as for candidates. And so this is really both sides of that equation, depending on how you and your specific program is looking at this issue of fiscal sustainability.
Talking a little bit more about that, this isn’t just about highlighting the resources that are sort of currently already in place. This is also thinking about the reality of today and that there have been disruptions to our funding. So it’s not just about building new inputs or trying to scale up your program, it’s also about maintaining what you have because there have been these sort of stoppages or these uncertainties in the funding landscape, particularly in the federal area where we’ll hear more from our panelists on this. But when a program does experience that disruption, and we’ll look on our next slide to kinda think about this together, like TQP or SEED terminations, right, or temporary or long-term reinstatement of grant funds, you might wanna actually explore some strategies that are targeted at these sort of stopgap short-term solutions to stabilize your program to help buy some time.
And so we have our colleague, Jason Willis, here on the line with us to provide some expertise, who is a former district CBO, just to share some of his own thoughts on how to explore this principle. So, Jason, hand it off to you.
Jason Willis:
Yeah, thanks, John. I really appreciate that setup. And I think importantly, you know, as you were talking about in particular buying time, this is one of the things that actually can lead to more stabilization around programming. That if you’re in a situation where you’re having to make decisions really quickly, sometimes we kind of overlook variables or we overlook conditions or considerations that might actually allow us to sustain our program over time. And so, in this way, I think, John, the way you set up this slide is perfect. That is, that these short-term options, if you wanna say check for change between the couch cushions, you know, allow you to kinda put those things in place that buy you the time to be able to then think about longer-term structural changes.
And so an example of this, you know, a couple of examples, actually, is exploring kind of short-term options to think about allowing you to move to bigger cost-cutting measures or support for strategic pivots. You can think about philanthropy or other state or local funds that might allow for that kind of an option. Also, thinking about digging into grantee guidance. Particularly, as we look at the federal government and the actions that they’ve taken up to this point around educator program preparation or educator preparation programs, that in particular, there’s windows, opportunities to kind of go back, draw down funds that you may have assumed you may not have been getting that allow you to kind of bring in some extra cash, you know, to help you kind of continue on with the program in the short term.
Tapping into reserves, you know, this is an option. And just remembering that this is one-time funding. It’s not something you can use on an ongoing basis. And the last two here that I think are really important is thinking about relationships with other community groups or advocacy organizations that you might be able to collaborate with on shared goals that might be able to take on some of those parts of the program that, in a short term run, might be really important. And that building the case, right, like a large part of how we think about the effectiveness or the value proposition that educator preparation programs allow is really engaging state leaders. Now, this creates the opportunity to engage and educate and bring them up to speed on where things are with these grants, and it also maintains this opportunity to look at longer-term funding.
For example, might the state make an investment specifically in apprenticeship programs or residency programs or other kinds of educator preparation that’s really important for the viability of really high-quality teachers in the classroom. So, John, those are just a couple of things that I wanna throw on the table, but I think complements really nicely with how you were kind of setting up under principle one.
John Diaz:
Excellent, thank you so much, Jason. And so now that we have that clear sort of concept of how principles one and two tie together, moving to principle three, this is really all about planning for long-term sustainability. And luckily, we’ll have experts on the line to talk about each of these things in detail. But just to tee up some of this content, first and foremost, one of the really interesting things we’ve seen in the course of our research the past few years is how programs have embedded costs into existing IHE or LEA budget items. So some programs, for example, have worked to align their budget cycles and staffing plans across K-12 and higher ed, so this means, you know, I think, in California, a lotta programs are already leveraging existing FTEs for paraprofessionals or instructional assistants, right, that serve as residents or, you know, in the future will serve as apprentices. And there’s a couple other things in that context that folks will talk about on the panel.
The second piece of that is streamlining program design without compromising program quality, and so this looks like really figuring out how to minimize overhead and operating costs through shifts to program delivery or format in some areas which can potentially decrease time to degree completion through things like recognizing prior credit and even tuition for candidates, right, or designing things in a way that just makes your overhead costs a little lower because you’re not having to staff up programs just as much. But again, something that our panelists will speak on in detail. And then lastly, this is thinking about leveraging district budgets or district funds to support your EPP program. So, in some cases, this looks like thinking about ESSA funds, so Titles I, II, and IV, in particular.
But also, as we’ve seen in California, and SRTAC actually just recently released a brief on this, is looking at your LCAP, right? Connecting to particular goals, whether it be goal one and meeting LCFF priorities one, three, and five, to really, really create a robust and sustainable and consistent investment in your educator prep programs, whether that be residency or any other pathway just to make sure that it’s a sustained part of the way that your district and your partnership is sort of building out that teacher pipeline. All that being said, I’m gonna stop there because we wanna maximize the time that we have to talk to our panelists and hear from their wisdom and not just hear from John. So we’re gonna move forward to get our panel started, but while folks are settling in, just a couple of questions that we wanna ask.
You know, from the things that you’ve been hearing, you know, what of this feels familiar, feels like, oh, you know, I know that already, and we’re already doing all of that? You’ll see a poll kind of pop up on your screen. Please let us know, you know, what feels like I understand that very clearly, or, oh, I wanna explore that further. If you have questions, you know, the responses you’ll give to this poll, we’ll document that and look back. You know, if you do have questions or if you feel uncertain about things or you wanna learn more, we would be glad to touch base and learn from you as well if you do have a lot of experience or feel really confident in these approaches.
We’re just trying to curate and collect the research and evidence throughout the field and make sure that we’re illuminating that to folks across the state, right, so that we can all learn. We can be sort of a broader community of practice. So please take a moment to complete this poll, and we will shift into our panelist time. I believe I’ll hand it off to Lupita to get that started.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you, John. We are thrilled to be joined by five educator preparation program leaders today, each of which brings a unique context and perspective to the topic of educator preparation program sustainability and affordability, including county office of education and higher education leaders representing programs that partner with both public and private universities to provide teacher residency and teacher apprenticeship pathways in rural and urban settings. We intentionally invited these leaders to join us today to share how they are navigating the current funding landscape and highlighting some of the particularly creative strategies they have utilized.
I’m gonna provide a brief introduction to each, but I also hope Jason Willis is on because Jason Willis and I are gonna be co-facilitating this piece of the webinar with our presenters. Okay, first, I’d like to introduce Dr. Colby Smart. He joins us from Humboldt County Office of Education, where he serves as a deputy superintendent. Colby will share about the funding model for the Cal Poly Humboldt residency program, which operates as a consortium supporting multiple LEAs to prepare educators in rural Northern California. Next, we have Dr. Adriana Cervantes-Gonzalez and Brooke Berrios. They join us from Tulare County Office of Education, where they have led and supported the Teacher Residency for Rural Education, the TRRE project, which is initially funded by a 2019 Teacher Quality Partnership grant from the US Department of Ed.
During that grant period, the TRRE project, and I hope I’m saying that correctly, prepared roughly 60 single-subject educators to serve in six local districts. Tulare also received a 2024 TQP, which was funded to expand the residency model to other regions in the state. Adriana and Brooke can speak to how they have navigated sustainability planning and the changing funding landscape. Next is Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick, and she’s the president and CEO of the Alder Graduate School of Education, a private graduate school of education that has prepared over 1,500 teachers alongside more than 35 LEA partners across California. Alder launched the program prior to the state’s one billion investment in the workforce and can speak to how they focus on deep partnerships and transparent data sharing to support cost sharing.
And finally, Doctor, or Joe Edelheit Ross is the president and CEO of Reach University, which operates teacher apprenticeship programs in California and nationwide. Reach University’s apprenticeship programs have identified several creative strategies for streamlining operating costs and maximizing candidate affordability while maintaining quality standards. Some of Reach’s programs have also been impacted by recent TQP and SEED grant disruptions. Let’s go ahead and get started. We definitely encourage you to share your comments and questions in the chat or using the webinar Q&A feature, and we will aim to answer as many questions as we can during the discussion or as a follow-up to the session if necessary. And I know, Dana, you’re gonna be helping me with, kinda helping us with navigating the questions in chat.
Okay, the first question is really around educator preparation programs. Obviously, they’ve faced a number of recent shifts in funding landscape, including the sunsetting of pandemic relief funds and the recent cancellation of several federally funded teacher workforce grant programs. So the first question goes to Adriana and Brooke. Given the Tulare County Office of Education was a recipient of both the 2019 and 2024 Teacher Quality Partnership grant, can you share how the Teacher Residency for Rural Education program has navigated shifts in the TQP funding landscape?
Dr. Adriana Cervantes-González:
Hi, everyone, thank you for being here this morning, certainly. And pardon, you’ll hear a little bit of chatter in the background. We do have students’ poetry and prose, so that is happening at the same time as we’re on this panel, so pardon that if you hear that in the background. So, for us at Tulare County Office of Ed, certainly like many programs, the disruptions were happening, and while that was happening, the California Center on Teaching Careers that is housed here at Tulare County Office of Ed does have a history, a longstanding history of being able to pivot and having some reserves, and also the relational aspects, right? John touched earlier on some of the relational pieces, and it really did take us calling upon our partners, some of the relationships that we’ve had over the years, as we were having the impacts of needing to cancel contracts.
For the current cohort, we are in the recruitment phase now, so we did have to call right away our IHE partners to share about our impacts and also have the discussions with school deans about how do we continue in a time of uncertainty. So we did rely heavily on our relationships to be able to have some of the difficult discussions. But like I said, the center has been well poised in terms of multiple sources of funding to just be able to sustain, including our team that works to support the rural school districts at the sites. Because we are a county office of education, we are uniquely situated in terms of our rural region where we do have universities that are not in our immediate reach, right? In terms of proximity, we have a university that’s 70 miles away. We have another four-year university that’s about 50 miles away.
So we’re in an area that really relied on working with IHE partners so that we can bring programming to our students. And so it was our staff here at Tulare County Office of Ed, obviously, with the innovative leadership of our executive director over the years, to really work towards having meetings and sessions with school deans during this interim. And then also, the folks that we work with in the rural school setting and districts, and Brooke can talk about some of those touch points with our school districts who initially were also investing into the residency, some of the pivots that we’ve had to make there.
Brooke Berrios:
Yeah, thank you for that. And, Lupita, I know you said navigated, but we are navigating every day. It’s still something we’re navigating through. I can’t wait till we get to say navigated, so we’ll get there. Anyway, with that, I think to continue that conversation is we are uniquely situated and positioned to support these small rural districts that with both, I think we said, soft and hard costs of running a residency program because they don’t have the capacity. And so, working as a consortium, we have this mindset of like the sum of us. So if one of our districts, we’re almost cross-training each other, our potential teachers, you know, the next employees that come in, and if one does really well, it’s gonna benefit everybody in this area. So we’re really looking at it from a mindset of the sum of us.
But with that, too, we have had to rely on longstanding relationships to have harder conversations because the county office has been funding most of the residency program for the last few years, and we’ve had to shift those conversations a bit more to talk, you know, how do we continue this program? Can we continue this program? And how do we create more of a cost-sharing model? And, you know, learning there are so many programs out there that, I mean, we’re gonna hear about Colby’s program today, learning about others that are doing this in the field. And lots of resources like John had shared from the CTC. And our Statewide Residency Technical Assistance Centers, SRTAC, they’ve been working tirelessly to support, launch, scale, sustain residency programs across the state, and they are also creating resources to help those that are in residency programs.
And one of the newest resource that has been out that is very helpful right now is “Leveraging LCAP Funding,” and I can put that link in the chat, and it’s a resource from, there’s lots of resources. But I’ll put ’em in the chat, and you can take a look. But those sustainability resources have been very helpful.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you. And Local Control Accountability Plan is something that California uses to account for the funding that’s provided to districts for our national guests. Thank you so much, Adriana and Brooke. That was super helpful. And Joe, the next, the question is for you is really, we understand that Reach has been impacted obviously by TQP and SEED funding disruptions as well. Can you share how you have responded in recent weeks to pivot your funding strategies?
Joe Edelheit Ross:
Every day I do that, the mute button is off. I’m so excited to be around almost 90 people who share a commitment to building the teacher pipeline. And at Reach, our mission is to turn jobs into degrees. We call the model the apprenticeship degree. It’s for paraeducators and library aides and other school employees who could become teachers if only they had an affordable, debt-free way to earn their bachelor’s degree, essentially without leaving their job or not only while working but also by working in the school. At scale, our internal cost to run this is less than a Pell Grant, but we relied on programs like TQP and SEED and other programs to expand and grow the apprenticeship degree into new regions.
So it was a pretty big setback that day back in February, a Tuesday, I think it was, when we received three letters from the Department of Education canceling three TQP and SEED grants that were supporting work in Arkansas and Louisiana. Over the next five years, those grant cancellations represent $14.7 million in funding. There are other ways to fund our growth, but the challenge, I think, for us and others was the abruptness in the cancellations. It was a $2 million hole in our current operating budget. And there are times, you know, with time, you can adjust for things like that, but there wasn’t a lot of warning. It was critical that we already had in place a very, very, very cost-effective model, and yet, we still needed to take immediate steps. We had to reallocate budget. We had to make cuts to staffing in ways that enabled us to sustain the work.
And sub-grantees were affected, and I’m not gonna mention all of them, but it was really kind of a reverberating effect across the field of teacher preparation and also evaluation programs. Third-party evaluation programs were temporarily affected as well. I should say that I’m optimistic that even the TQP and SEED programs may get restored through a variety of means in the mid and long term and that there are lots of other ways to braid together funding. And I also should note that work-based programs, which essentially include teacher apprenticeships and teacher residencies, are supported across the political spectrum, work-based learning, apprenticeship-based learning, so I do think when the dust settles, even if funding may not come from the Department of Education over the long haul, the Department of Labor and local funding, I think, is looking for methods and means to build a teacher pipeline that embraces job-embedded assets, which I think a lotta the panelists here are engaged in in driving forward.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you so much, Joe. Just checking to see if there’s any questions thus far. Okay, I’m seeing none. I’m gonna move on to the next question. We’re gonna pivot to talk a little bit about some of the creative strategies our panelists have used to leverage some of their existing general funds or ESSA Title funds to fund programs. So this question goes to Colby. Can you talk more about how Humboldt utilized county, state funding for the Cal Poly Humboldt residency program?
Dr. Colby Smart:
Sure, Lupita, I’d be happy to. Good morning, everyone. Pleasure to be here. So before I kind of explain kind of the how, I’d like to share a little bit about the context of Humboldt County, especially for those of you outside of California. So Humboldt County is located in the far north coastal part of California. We have about 17,000 students. We have 31 school districts and 15 charter schools. And so, if you do the math, that translates into a lot of very small school districts. We’re primarily rural, and we do have the good fortune of having Cal Poly Humboldt real close to us. So what that number of districts and that few students translates into is a diseconomy of scale. It’s very expensive to educate students in rural areas, and there is a resource constraint among the available teaching workforce.
So what we were trying to solve for when first going and exploring residencies were two primary things. First of all, how can we improve the highly qualified nature of our workforce? And secondly, and this is more of a persistent challenge we were trying to address, was how do we keep teachers who are graduating from Cal Poly Humboldt who primarily come from more urban settings to stay here in Humboldt County? And that’s why we decided that residencies were a good fit for our community. So our first grant was in 2019, and long story short, it was a very, very successful program. In fact, 94% of the teachers that have gone through that program are still in the classroom in Humboldt County. So what we were solving for is really being addressed through residencies.
About halfway through that grant, we started thinking about, okay, well, how are we going to sustain this? And in 2022, we decided to look into sustainable funding at the county office. And for those of you outside of California, county offices of education receive base funding for each district in their county, and so that’s when the high number of districts can potentially be very useful for small rural areas. And in 2023, I believe it was, the allocation for that increased significantly. So thinking about the high turnover and the transiency rates among teachers in our community, we decided that a good use of these county operations funds, and that’s what they’re known for, would be a good sustainable way to keep this success going.
And keep in mind, we haven’t moved away from seeking out grants. We’ve had a total of three CTC grants. We just received another one. But as we build towards sustainability, we do recognize the importance of braiding funds to mitigate the real challenges that come from grants that sunset without a plan. And so, what we do is we allocate a set amount each year based on and calibrated to the specific need in our community. Our first grant, for example, was focused on special education teachers. And over the years, we’ve noticed other gaps that we’re seeing in our community. For example, STEM in secondary, and then also P-3 credentials, and finally, school nursing. Now, the nice thing, and what this has evolved into, as we receive new grants and new funding opportunity, that opens up that sustainable allocation for those more niche programs.
For example, we’re opening up a school nursing residency outta those county operations funds because we’ve received additional funding through the CTC going forward. So, I’ll just say that I couldn’t be more pleased with residencies specifically in the area of teacher retention. We do know the great cost, often hidden cost, that comes with teacher turnover. I read one estimate that the soft costs associated with recruiting teachers, things like actual recruiting costs, and then also the soft costs related to the drain that happens when teachers leave, the organizational history, that sort of thing, it runs about $40,000 per teacher. So the question is, you know, are we going to invest this way in teacher residencies, or are we going to invest the other way by recruiting? One way or the other, we’re gonna be expending dollars. So that’s kind of our main focus of our strategy.
Jason Willis:
Yeah, Lupita, I just wanna jump in to add a bit to what both Colby and Joe are saying. And I think, in particular, you know, as a veteran chief financial officer for school systems, one of the things that I’ve noticed is that often in education, we think very much about the short term, right? So, we think in annual budgets, or we think in, you know, the month or the next activity that is right in front of us. And I think that the case that both Joe and Colby are making is that the investments and building programs like residencies or apprenticeships in the longer term actually save the system money relative to what the cost otherwise would’ve been to continue to do business as usual, right?
This is Colby’s example of basically I’ve got turnover at $40,000 per teacher that leaves my system versus investing in a program like residencies or apprenticeship that over time basically will reduce that turnover, thereby returning dollars back to the system that could be used for supporting instruction, supporting students, so on and so forth. And one of the things I wanna just connect this to, whether it’s the LCAP in California or it’s another planning mechanism, many, many states in the country have these planning mechanisms, certainly for their financials, is making the case that building these kinds of program costs into ongoing use of general fund dollars, I’m really referring to base aid that comes to school systems from the state or that is raised through property taxes, is probably, in my opinion, one of the best investments that systems can be making as a condition of creating a stable, ongoing, and highly qualified workforce that’s there to help those schools and those systems.
So I just wanna underline some of the things that both Colby and Joe are saying so far that feel important to think about in terms of the mindset that we’re trying to change and getting away from the, you know, what you might refer to as the leapfrogging that we have been tending to do in these kinds of programs from one grant to the other, trying to preserve them as a condition of supporting quality teachers in schools.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you, Jason. And, Colby, there’s a question for you. “What are the county operational funds usually allocated to, “and did Humboldt districts miss those funds being allocated to other initiatives?”
Dr. Colby Smart:
No, no, that’s a great question. So those are typically related to supporting districts and their need, everything from professional development to supporting our own regional programs like Glen Paul, which is a school up here in Humboldt County that supports students with special needs, and they’re actually district students. So, no, there was no direct cancellation of other programs in support of this. And I will say that this decision was aligned with the new additional funding that was allocated by California on an ongoing basis, so there wasn’t a need to cut anything.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you, Colby. Heather, I understand that some of the LEAs that Alder has partnered with have used LCAP funding for some of their expenses. And we talked about LCAP being the Local Control and Accountability Plan. It’s a three-year plan that school districts must create and update annually, and this outlines how they will use the state funds to improve student outcomes, focused on high-needs students, addressing state priorities, just for those that weren’t familiar with the LCAP. Can you tell us more about how Alder has worked with districts to build the funding for this work into their LCAP budgets?
Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick:
Yes, thanks for having me. Excited about all of the people who wanna do this work. About five of our partners so far have already built some of the funding for the residency model in their system into their LCAP, and I think what we’ll start to see is more of that. And there’s six pieces to why I think that’s true that I hope are helpful, whether you’re in California and you have an LCAP or not. The first one is we’re all about to do the work with less funding, right? We’re back to a time prior to when California was in a boom time. You may be in states where it doesn’t feel like you’re in a boom time, and you’re trying to do more with less. And so if you’re trying to do more with less, you need a financial plan, and all the LCAP really is is a financial plan.
One of the neat things about a financial plan, the one here, the LCAP, but anywhere, the best ones are going to be tied to your goals. What are the most important things that you’re doing with your money? How are you designing that financial plan with those goals in mind? And what we’ve seen across the districts, even ones who haven’t moved to an LCAP, when they said to us, “Yes, we’re really interested in doing this work with you at Alder,” they’re doing this with us for the kinds of goals that, you know, are the most important. They recognize 80% of their school budgets goes to teacher salaries. Teachers are the biggest single variable in student achievement in tons and tons of research. So this notion of how do we keep great teachers? How do we bring in great teachers?
Teachers, teachers, teachers is an enormous piece of that goal that then feeds into a financial strategy that aligns with that goal. So then, if we’ve done anything at Alder that really speaks to helping our district and county and other partners think about the work, I would say a few things. One is we’ve worked very intentionally. You heard lots of people, Adriana spoke to this and Colby, everybody’s speaking to being in relationship. So graduate schools of education and/or, you know, county offices and the people who need to hire great teachers, we have a lot in common. And I’ll come back to this ’cause I think it’s a really important part of the financial model, but this notion of understanding we have this shared cause. One system really wants to graduate amazing teachers, and one system really wants to hire amazing teachers. And so, this alignment creates the opportunity for a deep and meaningful conversation over time and a deep partnership.
One of the ways that we think a lot about strengthening our partnerships is through an annual impact report. So I bring all the data on the five big whys of our partnership to our district or county partners and say here’s all the neat things you’re getting outta this, and, ooh, this didn’t go so well this year. What do we wanna do about that? So it’s this ongoing conversation that I think really matters. And when that data comes in that I’m bringing them is helping them feed that back into their financial plan and their financial strategy, and to think about what is the ROI here? Why am I thinking about doing anything with my money that’s aligned to a teacher residency?
So that annual data report, I think, is critical and something that has worked well for us in this conversation about sustainability of a teacher residency or any sort of excellent teacher pipeline. Included in that data report, goes back to something Colby spoke to just a moment ago, the retention. And Jason pointed to the cost of losing teachers. All of you on this call are probably here ’cause you know. I don’t need to tell you how expensive it is to replace especially an excellent teacher, so that’s part of the data then that we’re bringing is tracking our teachers over time. Okay, so that’s one piece. Another piece, and Jason talked to this a bunch, John talked to this in one of his slides, what we’re trying to help all of our partners think about is if you look at all of the ways you can bring in new teachers, you could hire subs, long-term subs, you could hire interns, you could hire, steal people from a neighboring district, you could bring people.
In California, we do a lot of, the Philippines has a relationship for special edu. So right, there’s maybe six different buckets, and residency is one way you can hire new teachers. And what we’ve been looking at with our partners, our districts is to say, if you look over time, not in the first year, if you only look at the cost of a residency model to you in year one, of course, a residency model looks prohibitively expensive. But if you look long term, which is, of course, the way we all wanna do our budget planning. None of us think it’s wise to make a budget for a day and then make another budget for a day, right? The idea is you make a budget ideally for a year, many years out. The older we get, the more important that gets. So, in these big systems, of course, these long-term budgets are critical.
So we’ve helped our partners think about all of the different pathways and their return on investment from these different teacher pathways. Not that they all aren’t important. You’re gonna have to hire some long-term subs. You’re gonna have to hire some interns. But one of the things you also wanna be thinking about, but where are you getting your best-trained teachers from? And what we’re seeing is the residencies are doing that. Happy to talk a lot more about that data another time. But if that’s where you’re getting your best-trained teachers, and they’re the ones staying the longest, and then we show them the ROI. So I think there’s a beautiful conversation to be had about thinking long term about your teacher talent pipeline and the costs, not in one year, but long term.
And finally, I’ll say, when I think about what we’re all thinking about, I want us to think about the four big beneficiaries of a residency model. One is the candidate themselves, the person who wants to be a teacher. They want the most robust training they can get. They take it so seriously. They wanna be the best teacher they can. The residency is that pathway for them. They are benefiting from the residency. The second ones who benefit are the districts, the CMOs, the counties. Whoever hires that deeply-trained person, they’re the second beneficiary. They are going to benefit because it’s a better-trained teacher. There’s all sorts of things that I can go into. They stay longer, yada, yada, there’s more.
The third beneficiary is the grad school of ed or the teacher prep program because nothing matters more to people who take their grad school of ed seriously than graduating people who everybody says are really deeply trained and who stay and are happy and, right? So the third beneficiary is the ed prep program. And finally, it’s the state. I saw people are on here from South Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Virginia, and I know people are on here from California. All of our states care deeply about the teachers we hire for our public schools. We all get it. We’re part of a democracy that relied, la, la, la, la, right? We need really highly educated students, so we need highly trained teachers. So the state is the fourth beneficiary in this work. And if we think about who benefits, I think that also helps us think about who’s supporting it, who’s got dollars on the table, who’s helping to realize a pathway that develops our best teachers year over year over year over year?
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you. I know I shared a question in the Q&A that Colby received, and I don’t know if you’re able to see it, but it says, “Have you shared this information with COE sups at CCSESA or region?” Will-
Dr. Colby Smart:
Yeah, we’ve, yeah, we’ve shared our model with our Region One and Two, my counterparts, over the years, who are also part of SRTAC. Dr. Sheila Rocker Heppe, who I believe is on this as a participant, she leads our effort as an SRTAC hub, and so part of that responsibility is to support districts in moving into residencies. And so this model is always available. In fact, if any of the participants wants to reach out to me directly after this, we’d be happy to set up some time to share in more detail.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thanks, Colby. And I just, I wanna reiterate, Heather, I wanna double down on what you talked about, data and sharing information that, you know, really makes the case for their return on investment. And I think you mentioned what those reports included, but if you don’t mind just reiterating what types of things you share?
Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick:
I didn’t mention. We share out how many new teachers did we start with and actually complete so that you hired them. We share out how good are they based on what your principals are saying about them, what your mentors are saying about them. We share out the retention, and we compare their retention to in-system retention. So how does Alder alum retention stack up against your first-year teacher retention? Colby, did you wanna say something, sorry.
Dr. Colby Smart:
Oh, when you’re finished, I just wanna add, you know, part of that retention, what does that translate into, and that’s impact on children. That’s the most important outcome we’re all here on Earth to provide. When you have better qualified teachers, we know you have better regulated students. And teachers who are able to introduce so many different opportunities for support, whether it’s from differentiated instruction to providing, you know, enrichment activities with students. So, and the culture of a school improves, and what couldn’t be better than that?
Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick:
I’ll build on that. And one of the other things we share out in the impact report, to your very point about the culture of a school and so many pieces that rise together, in a residency program, at least at Alder, we’re spending a lot of time supporting our mentor teachers, and we also report out to the district or county office what are your mentors saying about their work with us, and they’re seeing higher… and mentors have to be sort of, you know, quote, unquote, the best teachers in the building, the ones that people want to clone. And so, for the district to see, oh, the mentors are saying because of my work with Alder, I’m more likely to stay. My students are learning more. I’m learning so much through the professional development opportunities that are provided by being a mentor in this model. So all of that is in the data. And well said, Colby, about the overall effect.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Awesome, thank you so much, Heather and Colby. Okay, next question. While teacher apprenticeship programs unlock access to some additional funding streams that aren’t available for other pathways, there are some cost reduction strategies that all programs can consider when thinking about sustainability and affordability. Reach University has gotten some attention for some of the creative strategies they have used to reduce costs and maintain candidate affordability. So, Joe, can you share a little bit about how Reach has approached finding ways to streamline program costs while not compromising on the quality of the preparation model?
Joe Edelheit Ross:
Yes, I’m happy to. And to step back, the purpose of this is to expand the pool of candidates who can eventually step into high-quality residency programs because there are so many people working in schools without a degree who could do that if they had a degree. No bachelor degree candidate at Reach pays more than $900 out of pocket per year for full-time enrollment. They typically play monthly, so that’s $75 a month. The rest is paid by Pell or by workforce dollars or by employer contributions. So when we set out to design the apprenticeship degree, we had to ensure it was both high quality and could live within the boundaries of what the Pell or the local registered apprenticeship program or an employer might fully fund. So what does that mean? That means, as data points, the Pell maximum is 7,395 per year. IRS tuition benefits typically max out at 5,250 a year.
Workforce boards, they might pay two or $3,000 a year. And you don’t design assuming you can braid all those together on top of each other. You assume there are data points to the limit that public dollars might be expected to provide on an evergreen basis. So, in other words, you’re designing a program to be fully paid for at scale for between 3,000 to $7,000 a year. And at Reach, that means, for example, delivering 30 high-quality credits with synchronous face-to-face seminars twice a week for an internal cost of about 3,000 to $7,000 a year, so how? Five methods among many I’ll highlight today. First, credit for learning at work, which has a double meaning. It means learning at work and also learning put to work, theory and practice. Half the learning comes from on-the-job experience.
At Reach, the rest comes from seminars. This reduces seat time, which is a driver of internal cost, and replaces it with experiential learning, which can be assessed through technology-enabled ways. And credit for work embraces the job-embedded learning benefits of working in a school as a paraeducator or as a library aide, for example. Second, we employ a guided master curriculum. This is common at the graduate level. I’m sure it’s used by the residency programs like Alder that are represented here, but it’s uncommon at the undergraduate level. And what it means is that candidates come in and they take a guided series, prescribed classes. This engages the cohorts with each other. It also means that if something goes bump in the night, someone has to step out, they can step right back in, and there’s a cohort right behind them that they can step into. It simplifies advising, and it simplifies the entire process, and it ensures a high-quality set of learning objectives are met.
Third, job-embedded faculty. We call them professors of practice, not adjuncts, because they’re still practicing what they profess. They’re at the center of our work. They drive quality because they have that experiential perspective to add. It’s an affordable model. But even, you know, adjunct salaries are considered to be low, but you can actually pay more than the typical adjunct salary and engage principals and superintendents and teachers as your professors so that the candidates and the faculty are job-embedded. Quickly, fourth, transfer policies. Again, this is an undergraduate issue, but it actually is quite costly administratively to crosswalk individual courses in someone’s prior transcript to requirements. Instead, we treat all prior credits as electives.
And then, when someone comes into the program, they transfer in and have a prescribed curriculum that delivers all the learning outcomes. So any associate degree from any major transfers into a program that leads in two years to a Bachelor of Arts in liberal studies. Finally, employer-driven recruitment. In higher ed, a tremendous amount of money is actually spent on consumer marketing. People don’t realize this. In an apprenticeship degree program, there is no consumer marketing because it’s all about partnerships with an employer, with a county office, with a school district, with a charter network. Typically, in higher ed, the recruiting costs that’s leaning on consumer recruitment can start at $3,000 per enrollment and can go way up to 12 to $14,000. In a apprenticeship model and in a residency model, which is also partnership-based, the cost of enrollment goes as low as two to $700 a year.
So apprenticeship degree approaches not only turn the K-12 workplace into a college campus, but they deliver a lot of tremendous cost savings while delivering the high-quality benefits that come from job-embedded, experiential, contextual post-secondary education.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you so much, Joe. Gosh, this time has flown by so quickly, and such rich information. Just the last questions, going over to Heather at Alder. I understand that Alder also draws upon their partnership model to implement some shared staffing models for their split-funded residency director role. Heather, can you share more about that?
Dr. Heather Kirkpatrick:
Yeah, it ties to who I said the four beneficiaries are. So resident pays tuition to the grad school, the grad school, we share about 1/4 of our tuition with our LEA partners to create that full-time role of the person who works full-time at and is an employee of the school system, the LEA, the district, but who really is shared across our orgs. And then, the district, of course, is paying mentor stipends like you would expect. And the resident stipends ideally are a combination of state funding and district funding. And then, it all goes around. Resident pays us, we pay district, district pays, so it goes around and around like that.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Thank you so much. Oh, well, I want everyone to join us in thanking our fantastic panelists. But there are some questions. There’s a question on online colleges. “Have online colleges thought about providing an ECE degree in addition to a liberal studies degree?” I know it’s not a funding question, but if anyone has a response, that would be awesome.
Joe Edelheit Ross:
The answer is, the answer is yes. EDvance, by the way, is an institution that does that in California, exclusively an apprenticeship-based undergraduate early childhood education degree, so look them up. And there are several other institutions looking at early childhood pathways that are fully job-embedded and apprenticeship-based. So it’s coming, and there’s already a few providers out there.
Dr. Adriana Cervantes-González:
Adding to that Lupita, Joe, in California, University of California, Merced is also looking at that. They’re one of our partners for Tulare County Office of Ed in adding that ECE emphasis.
Lupita Cortez Alcalá:
Fantastic, thank you so much. Thank you again to our panelists. Fantastic as always. And, Dana, passing to you.
Dana Grayson:
Thank you, Lupita. And just thank you so much, everyone, today for your sharing and your expertise. For those of you who are interested in accessing the resources that we shared today, Danny’s gonna pull up a QR code, and we’ll also make sure to push out a link in the chat. They’re all available on the event landing page. And as we close today, we just wanna really thank our moderators and our featured panelists for contributing your expertise and our participants for engaging with us. We really just appreciate your participation. I will turn it over to Danny to close us out.
Danny Torres:
Thank you, Dana. And thank you to all our moderators and panelists for a great session today. Please do reach out to Dana to discuss any additional questions you may have or if you have any further needs for support in this area. You can reach Dana via email at D-G-R-A-Y-S-O at WestEd dot O-R-G. That’s [email protected]. And if you’re interested in learning more about WestEd events, resources, and services, please feel free to subscribe to our email list at wested.org/subscribe. With that, thank you all very, very much for joining us. Be well.