001The recording. All right. Welcome everyone. Good afternoon and we are so happy to have you here at our last highly mobile and at-risk student programs quarterly meeting for the 25-26 school year. I cannot believe we are at the end of the school year already. My name is Dr. Ann I serve as the manager for the highly mobile and at-risk team and we are so grateful for you to join us today from across our great state. Your presence here reflects the deep commitment that you bring in supporting our students and families and we're honored to spend this time with you today. On the next screen as always we do like to share that we are located within the office of special populations and student support at the Texas Education Agency. In our program we do um
002center around two three I'm sorry three key work centers or work streams. Our Texas Education for Homeless Children and Youth, our at-risk programs including foster care and pregnancy-related services, and our military-connected students. Each of these programs are designed to support our students who face unique challenges and transitions. John if you click on the next button and they programs will pop up. Our team is here to ensure that you have the tools, resources, and guidance needed to serve our students with excellence and compassion and so we are extremely proud to partner with you in this work and grateful for the dedication that you bring to our campus. Without further ado I'm sorry I am maneuvering around a lot here. So this is our agenda here very very defaulted that we start off with our introductions and
003then we do have an amazing guest speaker today, David Demarest from the Texas Challenge Academy. We're very excited for you to be able to um hear about the Texas Challenge Academy and how they support the most at-risk students. Then we will um go into our respective program updates starting with our techie program. Then we have our at-risk and then closing out with will be our military connected student programs. On the next slide. So again, my name is Dr. Ann Lay. I am honored to lead today's presentation. I do serve as the manager of highly mobile and at-risk leading in military connected students. John John uh went ahead. I wanted to announce you guys know his face. You guys know his work. He has transitioned into being our new McKinney-Vento state coordinator. So I'm going to
004hand it off to let him introduce himself. Hi, good afternoon. I'm John Robbins. I'm excited to transition to coordinator job. I was previously an HMR program specialist here on the team. So I've been working with our McKinney-Vento work across the state of Texas and I'm excited to keep working with everybody. Thanks, Dr. Lay. All right, guys. I want to lastly, we're so excited to be able to welcome our new at-risk state coordinator, Ms. Ann Caldwell, who will be leading the foster care program and pregnancy-related services. So I'm going to hand it over for her to introduce herself and John, if you can go on to the next screen. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for all of the love already. I know there's some familiar faces in the crowd. So this is a slide that has
005a little bit about me, but I am deeply honored to step into this role of at-risk state coordinator. My combined experiences and child welfare, and program management have given me a real understanding of the challenges that you navigate every day. And it's also strengthened my commitment to ensuring that at-risk students have access to the best possible outcomes. Over the past 2 years, I've served as the regional homeless and foster care liaison at Region 10 in the Dallas area. Um and over those 2 years, I have supported more than 115 districts across North Texas, working alongside these amazing educators as well as the incredible ESC network. We have the best ESC liaisons there are. Um it's really shown me just how dedicated and innovative this community is. And I know that same commitment exists across the
006entire state. So, thank you so much for the warm welcome. I'm truly excited to partner with all of you as we continue strengthening these supports for our most vulnerable students. Also, I want to give a shout-out to Dr. Layne John. If you've been on any of these calls, you know how wonderful they are. If you've emailed those inboxes, you know how quick they are to respond. They are truly as amazing um in person as they are here. So, what you see is what you get. They're incredible. I'm so humbled to be a part of this team, and I look forward to working with all of you. Thank you, Anne. We are so excited for her to be able to join our team, our dynamic trio now to be able to move our work. And we
007have so many plans in place for the summer as we prepare for the 2026-2027 school year. Um we do have some housekeeping rules, some technical support and engagement. Um please make sure that if you have any questions to use the Zoom's Q&A uh feature to be able to submit the questions. Um the chat feature is for us to be able to provide you with live links that you may um click on to see um live what we are uh discussing or referencing, but also for you to be able to provide input. If you do put questions into the chat feature, it may get lost because as you are monitoring the chat, you can see how fast the the chat reel is going. And so, when you submit your questions into the Q&A feature, it sits
008there until it's answered. The recording of today's presentation, as always, will be posted on the HR webinar website. Um and the PDF copy of today's presentation, like last quarterly meeting, is available. However, we would like you to attend to the rest of our webinar, and we will provide that link to you at the very end before we close out. So, um I am excited. At this time, I would like to welcome David Demers. He's going to introduce himself and then um share about Texas Challenge Academy. Thanks so much, Dr. Lee. Um just uh give you a little bit of a rundown on me. I'm the director of the Texas Challenge Academy. I've been working with uh youth development programs uh across the country for the last 20 years, and I'm just blessed right now to
009be able to be the director of the Texas Challenge Academy here. Um honored to be able to present our program, uh what it is that we do, and how it is we serve the uh the at-risk youth population here in the state of Texas. Um so, um I'd like to kind of uh kick in just really quickly and give you a little bit of a rundown on who we are. Um Texas Challenge Academy is a 5-month long uh residential program for 15 and 1/2 to 18-year-old youth who are at risk of dropping out of high school or have already dropped out of high school in the state of Texas. Um our funding, if we can kind of move forward on a couple slides, uh our funding comes uh from the state of Texas, uh the
010Texas legislature, as well as uh from the uh congressional budget um coming through the National Guard Bureau. And what it allows us to do is be able to provide this program at no cost to youth that fit the criteria for for our program. There is a small cost for some shoes and a pair of shirt and a pair of pants, but otherwise the entire cost of the program is covered by us. We cover all um all of the food, all the the the um hygiene, anything else that a youth needs while they're on the campus, making sure that they get all the access to everything that they need while they're with us. Um >> [clears throat] >> We uh there's quite a bit of interest in the program and you'll see some of our numbers
011here. Um we typically have about 2,000 youth per year that express an interest in our program. Um and we only have 142 beds. So, we're talking about 142 every 6 months. So, it's just short of 300 youth out of those 2,000 will be able to come to our program. It's really important that you recognize that early application for our program is really important. We want to be able to select the right people for the program and so the earlier we know you're interested, the better the chance we've got of making sure we go through the process of getting you into the program or getting you through the application process. TCA is located in Eagle Lake, Texas. Um and is and as I said, we generally accept 142 cadets, 110 males and 32 females. As you
012can see our campus right here, it's about a 5-acre campus. We have quite a bit of outdoor space. We house a school as well as all of our basic necessities of nursing program our nursing team as well as our food and our kitchen program here on the campus. Our youth leave the campus to do many special activities within our local communities. But we run about a five five acre campus here. I should let you know that our next campus our next program starts on July 19th. So if you're interested in the program, you want to make sure you get started with us and we'll give you some contact information here in a little bit. We focus on eight core components. These components were designed maybe 30 years ago as we were looking as as the
013people that designed this program were looking at kind of what's needed for a youth when they transition from high school into adulthood. What kinds of skills are are necessary for them to be successful in independent living. And so you'll see these academic excellence is only a component, but it is a significant component for many of the youth that we serve. Leadership, followership, physical fitness, responsible citizenship, service to community, life coping skills, job skills, health and hygiene. I think everybody on this call would agree that these are all important components for a youth as they transition into adulthood. I'm going to go through them really quickly and give you an idea of what they look like so you know how how we engage with them. For starters, academic excellence and service to community, um we partner
014with the Rice Consolidated Independent School District in Altair, Texas. It's 17 miles away. They run our school. So it is a fully accredited high school. Most of our cadets come with credit recovery. Many of them will earn their high school diploma while they're with us. We also have a GED component, but every youth that comes here actually participates in the high school credit recovery process. The average youth at the Texas Challenge Academy over the last uh four years has earned about seven credits while they're with us. So that's quite a bit of high school credits to earn in a five-month period of time. Um we also have the service community projects um where we're working with local communities uh local community partners. Uh our youth will do 40 hours of service within our local communities
015in the 5 months that they're with us. Um moving on to leadership, followership, and life coping skills. Um we uh the cadets are going to uh work through uh within their platoons. They're all going to have a form of leadership. Many of them will be squad leaders. Uh some will be platoon guides. Um but there are a number of different promotion opportunities within the campus. Um but they will all learn how to not only lead, but also how to follow instruction from their peers. Um they it's it's a lot of self-development, but it's also a lot of teamwork that the cadets will will participate in. Um life coping skills, we're going to do job readiness. Um we're going to do uh curriculum-based classes. We have what's called PRAP where our youth are going to work
016on uh post-residency action plan. So when they as they're leaving our program and transitioning back to their home communities, uh they've got to have really clear plans for if they're going to be employed somewhere, if they're going back to high school, if they're going to college, if they're joining the military. Whatever their next transition plan is, we want to make sure that we uh we have a real clear plan and that it's an actionable plan for when they when they leave here. Um our life coping skills uh really focuses a lot on on behavioral uh kind of uh challenges that many of us face. You know, how to handle emotions that are uh that are really kind of pressed up against ourselves and how to put keep ourselves in a position where we're highly successful
017with the people that are that we work around. Um physical fitness and job skills. Um we wake up every morning at 4:30 in the morning, believe it or not, every one of our cadets is up out of their rack at 4:30 in the morning. 5:00 in the morning, we're outside doing what we call PT, so daily workouts. Um we do PT tests once a month to make sure that we're measuring the progress of our cadets and and uh how much how much stronger they're getting, how much more fit they're getting, but it's good habits and that's so we'll do we do outdoor a lot of outdoor activities throughout the day and it's it's interesting to see how much our youth truly enjoy being outdoors when so many of our youth spend so much time indoors
018today. With our job skills, we do resume writing, we have a mock interview process. We we actually partner with local community partners to help us with with some of the things to get our kids ready for job skills and we do service community projects, they're a lot based on those job skills. So our youth get get rated based on those things and they they get their their actual service hours based on their actual participation and not just actually showing up for those things. So we we work a lot with those types of things. Responsible citizenship and health and hygiene, we we we work with help making sure that our youth really understand the the structure of our government, their voting responsibilities, individual rights and responsibilities within our country. Our classes in health and hygiene really
019focus on basic taking care of oneself, but also nutrition, substance abuse prevention. About a third of our youth have prior uh um challenges with with illicit drugs and things like that. We are not a rehab center, but many of our youth come here and they find that it we we create an environment that makes it easier for them to kind of disconnect from the from the the use of drugs and things like that. So it isn't uncommon for youth to come here that has a that has prior weed use and things like that and and go through the process of cleaning themselves up while they're here. Um so I want to make sure that we're we're clear on what TCA is and and kind of also what it's not um, because some people can misunderstand
020what we are. We are a 5-month residential program and there are a lot of benefits to, uh, participating in our program. But, we are also not a, uh, we're not a juvenile, uh, correction facility. We're not a lockdown facility. Youth come here and they choose to be here. Um, our doors for our program are unlocked from the inside out. They're locked from the outside in, so other people cannot just walk onto our campus, but our youth are truly here as volunteers. Um, and so we want to make sure that the youth recognize that this is really about choice. It's not about force. And so we're not making them do something. We're asking them to choose to move into a, uh, a positive future. Um, we are not, uh, a therapeutic mental health facility. In fact,
021that's that's, uh, while we do have counselors on campus, um, and we are absolutely trauma-informed with the way that we approach our youth. Um, we do not, uh, we're we're not designed to really work with that that youth that has significant mental health challenges. Um, we're not an educational miracle maker, though we do clean up, uh, a lot of things within, uh, how we, uh, how our youth engage with our society and all the distractions. So, uh, because our youth are here, the distractions at home are gone. They don't have their, uh, their cell phones, so the the social media distractions and those other types of distractions are gone. Um, they they don't have a computer with them, uh, except when they're in school. Uh, so some of those distractions are gone. We don't have
022video games except for as privileges and that's very rare. Um, so a lot of those types of distractions are gone and what that does is it allows our youth to really focus when they're in school. Um, and they tend to do really, really well in school compared to how they used to do. But, we're not going to turn a kid that's, um, that's not good at math into an an amazing mathematician, um, but we will get them some extra experience in math, um, so they tend to do a lot better. Uh, we're not a scared straight program or a boot camp and that I want to be really clear. Our staff do not run around yelling at cadets and scaring them and and trying to frighten them or threaten them with, you know, what's going
023to happen if they don't do what it is that needs to happen. Again, this is about choice, and the most important thing about our program is that our youth come here and they're they're given a a safe environment to figure out who they are, what they want to become, and we want to encourage and strengthen that opportunity for them. Uh we we're not trying to scare them or force them into a choice. Um we're also not a military recruitment organization, although about a third or I mean about 25% of our youth will join the military in some period of time within the 4 years after they after they come to the program. There are reasons behind that, but we are not actively recruiting youth to the military through our program. Um I want to be
024clear. It is an incredibly challenging environment. When we talk trauma-informed, that doesn't mean we're we're coddling youth, and I know that we all understand that. This is a really challenging environment, and many of our youth In fact, there are only a few youth that come to our campus in any given cycle that don't at one point in time or another want to quit. Um we are absolutely quasi-military structured, and what that means is that we're going to get up at 4:30 in the morning, and nobody's staying in their rack at 4:45. Uh we're all going to PT at 5:00. We're all going to go do chow in the morning. We're all going to go to school when we're scheduled to go to school. Uh it is expected to kind of create that structure and rigor
025around a youth so that they can get used to being successful in those types of environment. It is highly challenging. I can't I can't express that enough. It is what I would call an emotional gym. If you go to the physical gym to get physically strong, you go to a place like Texas Challenge Academy to challenge and test your emotions and build strength within your emotions, your resilience, uh your your uh determination to succeed in life. Um it's probably the hardest thing that the child has ever experienced. Um but I have been doing this for over 20 years and I have never seen anything change a youth's life and trajectory the way that I've seen Youth Challenge do in the 5 months that they're with us. I should also be clear that there are 12
026months of follow-up services that we provide after a youth graduates from the program. So, we continue to follow them uh with mentoring and with support on our campus and it is highly common for a youth to call us 2 3 years later asking for a uh a letter of of um recommendation or asking for advice or even to just celebrate that they're having their first child or they just graduated from basic training or they're going to college or they're graduating from college. Um so, those things uh we follow our youth uh once you're part of our alumni, you just it's it's part of the way that we operate that you're just part of our team forever. So, um I'm going to let this uh or the next slide will give you some links to our
027social media. If you want to scan those links uh with your phone, uh you can uh you can connect to us on Facebook, uh on our on our webpage, or on our YouTube channel. Um there's a lot of really nice uh information that's out there. Um if you have any interest at all in the program, uh on the next slide you'll have all of our uh our contact information, myself and uh my uh uh senior recruiter or or uh the supervisor for all of our recruiters. Uh and between either one of us, we're uh we're open to whatever it is you need. All you have to do is reach out to us, let us know that you're that you need some help, and um we've got teams uh we've got folks all all throughout the
028state that can help you uh figure out what it is that we can do to help. So. Thank you, David. Um on behalf of our team, thank you so much for joining us today and for sharing your work with Texas Challenge Academy. We really do appreciate you taking the time to highlight how the program supports young people through uh structure, mentorship, and opportunity and help to build a strong foundation for their future. At this time, I do not see any open questions, but I'm going to give it a minute. Audience, if you would like to ask David any questions, this is the time. We did get a couple earlier asking if students did have to graduate from high school to attend the Challenge Academy. I did provide the link to the Texas Challenge Academy and
029David, if you wanted to share a little bit about that, I did put that it is ideal for youth who are currently disengaged from school based on what was on the website. Right. So, a youth can be just struggling in school and come here and not not from a It isn't that we don't work with with special education students, but if you've got a youth that just, for example, the distractions at home are just keeping them from being able to be successful in school, this is a really really good location for them. Our youth have to still not have a high school diploma in order to participate in the program, so we can't bring somebody on the campus that that has already completed high school. So, that's important to know. I will tell you that
030about 50% of our youth that come to that that graduate from the program will have either their GED or their high school diploma when they graduate from us. So, it's about it's it has gone up to about 65% at times, but for the most part, it's about 50%, and about half of them will get their GED. So, if a person comes in with only about two or three credits, we're we're going to continue to work with them to get them towards their GED, and we give them enough enough of a landing space to be able to to be able to really practice towards getting that GED. Like I said, many of our youth the average youth will earn about seven credits with us, but we've had youth earn It isn't uncommon for us to have
031a youth earn 10 to 12 credits just by getting here, getting away from some of the distractions that they had at home and again, they're going to wake up here. We're going to get them to school. So, you don't have to worry about whether or not they're sleeping in or anything like that. Uh they're they're going to get up here and and and get in school and they're going to have enough time in the classroom to really make the progress that they need to make. Got a couple questions here. Um is there transportation available to your campus? So, generally that's not what we do. We generally work with people within the community uh and some folks uh we've we've had a number of people that have community sponsors that assist them with getting them to
032our campus. Um and we do have a foundation that has the ability to be able to support some things. Um we've bought plane tickets for people, but not generally for day zero. Uh not generally to get them to the campus, but it we we may need some things like that for some families in need to help a a youth get home for the PRAP break or to uh to get home after graduation. It's happened before. Um I'm going to do a two-fer question. Uh one question is where is it located and the other part is is there any possibility that the Challenge Academy will be coming north of Houston? Okay, so we're currently located about 40 mi uh west of Houston. Um it's Eagle Lake, Texas. So, it's just south of the 10 Freeway about
03340 mi west of Houston. Um as far as our location, that's not my choice. Uh we we've absolutely looked at whether or not there's options for additional academies in the state. And if that's something you're interested with or interested in, get with your state legislator. Uh let them know that you'd like uh to add another campus to somewhere else. But, we're fairly close to Houston. Um we're we're uh and and we we get people from everywhere from El Paso, Lubbock. Um they're all literally all over the state. Um where they're because they're in residence here so much, it isn't too much of a burden for families to come here. We typically have about three times a year where a families need to make the trip down here. Okay. We do have two more questions. However,
034I would like to encourage Monica and Kimberly to send those questions in to David directly because I do want David to share that success story that you had. Yes. >> Yes. Awesome. Thank you so much. So, we we a few years ago we had a young man who was homeless and he he reached out to our program wanted to join our program and he was living in the Dallas area. He happened to know a lady who was willing to drive him down here, but he he was 18 years old. He needed to do all the application process himself and our team worked with him to make sure that he was able to get all the paperwork turned in. I remember seeing him on day zero sitting down and filling out the the final pieces of
035his paperwork so he could he could come into the program and the and the lady that so kindly drove him down here saying well he's just a guy that he asked me if I could drive if I could drive him down here cuz he wanted to join the program. He he I remember he took the ASVAB test. He wanted to join the military. He needed his high school diploma. He finished his high school diploma and he took the ASVAB test and he scored a 17 and he was so discouraged because this was his one chance and he needed to land well. We worked with him. We found him a place to stay when he finished the program. We got him connected to a recruiter. After the recruiter worked with him, he got a 53 on
036his ASVAB and he joined the military. He's still in the military to this day. He enjoys the heck out of his service. But this was this was one of those things where I promise you that we will work with your youth if there's any way at all that this would be a good fit for them. We'll do everything we can to make sure that your youth comes here and that they're successful while they're here. Again, this is a lot about their choice. This is not about tread on our shoes. This is about tread on their shoes, but this is what we do and there's nothing that we take more enjoyment from than a youth that comes here that otherwise may not have made it, but they come to our program and it's it's the kind
037of defining factor for them. Thank you so much, David. Audience, I did share the email addresses again in the chat. If you do have further questions, please feel free to email David or Alexandria, and they will be more than happy to answer your questions. Thank you again, David. Thank you so much. I appreciate you all. Okay, so now we are going into our HMR program updates, and at this time I would like to hand it over to Mr. John Dobbins to share our techie program updates. Thank you, Dr. Lay. And good afternoon again, everyone. Today, I would like to focus on a lot of the activities and that we should be engaging on for the end of the year. >> [snorts] >> So, for the end of the year, this is a great time for
038us to be reviewing our McKinney-Vento programs, looking at our procedures, our services, and our outcomes. We need to be analyzing our data. This data can come from surveys, it can come from student trends. We want to be identifying any gaps, any barriers to access. Are there areas that we need to focus on with our growth for next year? You do need to be maintaining your rosters from the end of the year, and also consider establishing procedures to review and to to review and determine eligibility at the start of next year. As we know, our our our homeless indicator in PEIMS does not transfer from year to year, so it's critical to maintain our rosters so that we can check on our students at the beginning of the next year. Also, using our program assessments to
039inform our funding and resource needs, and also documenting any needs for transportation or staffing or training for next year. Continuing with our end-of-the-year needs, we need to look at our community partnerships, review how effective those partnerships were. Are there additional partners we can make in our community? And also looking at our community partners to see what services they can provide over the summers while our students are not in school. When we're looking at our summer planning, uh we need to ensure that our students who are experiencing homelessness have access to summer school and also summer programs. We need to plan for continuity of services and transportation, and also record transfers for our students that will be moving from campus to campus. We're also going to be updating our procedures, identifying strategies and outcome and outreach
040materials that we may need for next year. And again, we're going to be planning for our staff training for either over the summer or for the new year. Important notes here for school of origin, we need to develop a school school system policies and procedures uh to support identification of school of origin transportation services, uh include school of origin programs, services, and procedures in your annual McKinney-Vento training. We also need to review our intake forms to assess what services are already provided, what items were requested but not available. Also looking at how often do families contact for additional support. We do provide you an example here of our of an intake form. We need to make sure our intake form includes uh things such as transportation, free lunch programs, and etc. Anything that our students
041need, any barriers that they may face because they are experiencing homelessness. Uh as a reminder your SRQ um your SRQ along with in- intake forms are auto uh of identification and disqualification of McKinney-Vento program services. This is a sample that you should use, but also tailor it to your school system. Also at the end of the year, this is a very important note. Liaisons must ensure students who are experiencing homelessness uh when they are filling out their FAFSA that they do get a verification letter of unaccompanied homeless youth if they are unaccompanied. This will greatly benefit them when they're applying for financial aid for college. Uh we do also provide you here an example of a verification letter. When you're planning for your summer training and also when you're looking for next year, we do
042provide uh McKinney-Vento professional development website. This is a centralized location uh for trainings. They are self-paced trainings and videos that either yourself or your staff could take or you can also utilize these to provide training to your staff. Uh they are focused on understanding, identification, removal of barriers, and requirements for the school systems. Our trainings are provided for all staff members, principals, administrators, we have for school nutrition, and also transportation specialists. While you're looking at your end of the year next year, we want to remind you of our fantastic education service center regional homeless uh homelessness liaisons. Every region has dedicated homeless liaisons that are located there to help support you with professional development, technical assistance, and also resources and supports. If you've not contacted your your regional liaison, you should contact them. They do
043provide ongoing training and any technical assistance you need, they're there to support you. And again, they are fantastic. Highly trained, highly responsive. They they also I I loved how Ian mentioned earlier that we try to respond quickly. They also will respond extremely quickly to provide assistance. This year we're we're coming almost 1 year to the end of our tech sheet support. Well, it's not ending end of our first year of tech sheet support and it's been highly successful with our tech sheet support. We do have email intake forms. We have a website that you can fill out intake forms. We also have a 1-800 number. And this they have done a fantastic job. This year they've received 1,363 intakes and they have successfully within the time limit, which is within 48 hours, responded to 1,359
044of them. We do hear notes some of the areas that that we are seeing that what levels we're seeing for intakes, eligibility, and grant support, and discipline are our highest areas. The great thing of this is we work with our support network and we tailor our training and our supports and even our webinars based on the inquiries we receive. So, it's this network is not just to provide technical assistance support. It's also helping guide our training and supports at a state state level and also on a regional level. Here is just another look at our different intakes for this year so far and you can see the intakes by region and by type. So, we've received 100 and they received 145 intakes by email. 100 1,008 were direct intakes, 70 uh six with the 1-800
045number, and we did have 134 with our public forum. Some grant reminders, big big grant reminders. We have several grants that we're utilizing right now. Uh and a reminder that these grants will be uh need the grant funding needs to be expended by August 31st. An important note here is we will not have any carryover of funding this year. Again, there will be no carryover funding this year. So, by August 31st, we need to have all of our funding utilized. If you need assistance with how to effectively utilize funding, again, you can email uh us directly at our homeless education inbox, but also reach out to those amazing uh McKinney-Vento liaisons that are at your region to assist you. Uh you Another note is the end of the year report will be due November 20th
046uh 7th um because November 29th is a Sunday. So, end of the year reports are due November 27th. I will be emailing all uh all contact grant contacts uh this information and the end of the year reports. Uh also a note here is I have begun emailing out monthly reports on your grant usage. And this is just information for you to remind you of your grants uh and also remind you of what funds are available. Uh and I just mentioned, sorry, I got ahead of myself. Uh there will be no grant carryover uh into uh after August 31st. Again, we do have those monthly emails. Here's an example of the email you'll see. And also uh the we are currently working on the 2026 and 27 continuation grant, and it will be available late summer.
047We will email you that also. If you are a grantee and you did not receive one of these emails directly from uh from us, please email the TCHEE I'm sorry, the Homeless Education inbox so that we can ensure that we have the correct contact. Uh also reminder, we have an amazing resource for you to help you navigate our TAA grant opportunities webpage. This will show you how to access the webpage, but also how what information you can gain from gain from the webpage to help support your grant funding usage. Um and so for the 2026-2027 TCHEE resource grant, this is an exciting project that we have begun. Uh the resource grant is going is working through region four, and it's often running right now. We are looking to enhance co- cohesion and alignment with state
048strategies uh with McKinney-Vento requirements. Uh we're also going to expand on our regional capacity, and we're going to improve student outcomes through targeted interven- tion. Uh and what the goal of this grant there is like Anne was going to share with this. The goal of this grant is we're going to be producing resources and training statewide. And Dr. Lay is leading this grant. Would you like to mention something? Sure. Um yes, we're super excited to be able to offer this unique special projects and um of course ESC4 amazing team um to be able to uh partner with us and help us to extend the statewide impact for our TCHEE student programs by producing statewide resources, um promotional uh videos, and also training around those resources to help build the capacity but also increase the knowledge
049and awareness and understanding of McKinney-Vento eligibility and support. So, we are super excited for this and we are very excited for how this is going to be received by the field and how the impact is going to be be measured. And so, be on the lookout this next school year we're going to be rolling out a lot of resources and trainings for our TTY programs across the state. Thank you, Dr. Lake. Absolutely. Okay. >> And having a moment for reflection. Yes, we have a question about how can someone be included in grant communications? If you just email us directly at the homeless education inbox, please mention I know many of you all do have a signature blocks, but just let me know what what grantee you are, what school system you're with, and that way
050I can I will communicate back with you directly and that way I can update because I do have a roster of all grant of all contacts, but as we know the grant contact was last year and in education we tend to move around. So, please email us at our homeless education inbox. Also on the same note, if you go into our sign up to subscribe grants division does have a listserv that you can subscribe to so that you can stay connected to any and all things related to grant announcements or any any of the outreaches that they send out as well. Okay. We have a couple questions about the three-year grant. Is it safe to assume that we will receive the same grant amount for 26-27. And I I believe this is for the 26-27
051continuation grant. John? I I'm happy to announce you can anticipate that the funds will be similar to last year. Uh uh we're we we have already received preliminary numbers uh from the US Department of Education. Uh we won't have a pause like we did last year. So, uh we do not anticipate uh any major changes in the funding amounts. And uh Tuana did ask if there's going to be an application. Yes, the 26-27 continuation grant will continue to be an e-grant. After this school year, we will consider um the 27-28 um to be a competitive grant uh if the fundings um become available. Um Okay. Is Tasha sent is this information public? Tasha, I'm not sure. Are you referring to the grant information? Yes. Yes, grant information is publicly available on the grants opportunities page
052and I will drop that link for you. Anytime um I would bookmark um the web page because uh grants um for all programs uh um that is available within the state is going to be updated there. That is a public site. You can always access it to look for uh relevant program uh grants to be able to apply to if uh you qualify. They always include program guidelines, which includes eligibility list and the criteria around it. So, I will drop that link. And Mr. Dobbins, if you want to go ahead, we're going to move on into our at-risk um program updates to include foster care and pregnancy related. Thank you, Dr. Lay. And you can also just a note on the grants, the grants opportunity tool that we provided can be utilized for any grant.
053It works just just change the names and it just it really shows you how to utilize that website. And for our at-risk programs for foster care and pregnancy related services, again, we're going to focus on our end-of-the-year activities. We want to focus on successfully closing out our school year. Important reminders of transition assistance, strategies for planning for the upcoming school year, and also it is foster care awareness month. And we did release from TA on social media so that we can really focus on foster care awareness month. Important note for the end of the year. It all schools need to be meeting with their 11th and 12th grade students in foster care to explore post-secondary opportunities. We want to provide a FAFSA completion support for all 12th graders as a FAFSA completion is a state
054graduation requirement. And we will be dropping this in the chat. Oh, sorry. Hold on. I had a technical issue. School assistance for students and families. School districts and open enrollment charter campuses must provide professional development opportunity and resources to support key staff members such as principals, registrars, counselors, and designated lead liaisons, coordinators, and trust for transportation specialist. Uh It's very important that we do ensure that our staff is in workforce with students that are that are in foster care. We provide transition tool assistance toolkit. This transition assistance toolkit goes in depth about how to utilize how to effectively utilize nutritional benefits, how to have effective enrollment conferences, also have a student welcome packet, and also works with student transition student sorry school introduction to ease of transition, and we are dropping the link to this
055toolkit in the chat. Strategic planning for the upcoming school year. We need to be uh submit and update your school systems foster care liaison contact in AS TED. This is critical that you do update. If anybody is moving to a new job, we must update. It's a requirement to update in AS TED. We need to maintain ongoing communication and collaboration with our DFPS education specialist. We need to look at school-wide foster care training that might be needed for our registrars, nutrition services, transportation specialist, counselors, and any other relevant personnel. We need to ensure accurate and timely documentation to support proper PEIMS foster care identification, and again, our enrollment conferences and welcome packets are required. We need to ensure that we have trained all of our staff to have effective conferences with their students when they
056join our campus. We do have a note here Dr. Lay would like to speak on. Sure. Uh, we are also super excited for a new resource or a a hotline that communities, families, school systems can help to support uh students who age out of foster care. So, there's a UT initiative to support youth transitioning out of foster care. It was launched by UT Austin, the foster the Texas Foster Youth Network, which is a statewide effort. And uniquely, staffed by individuals with lived foster care experience, ensuring that trauma-informed peer-based support is provided. So, too often young people aging out of care are handed long list of resources with very little guidance on how to access them. This initiative creates a single entry point, which helps to reduce barriers and improve follow-through through a very critical transition
057period. So, I'm going to drop the two announcements that was released into the public through news channels. And you can read that. And we are super excited for this to roll out because foster care students, whether they age out of our school systems our K-12 school systems, still need our support to be able to be successful later on in life. Um, on our next Yeah, on our next slide. On our next slide. Yeah, May is National Foster Care Awareness Month. So, if you would like to share anything in the chat regarding what your school may have done to promote foster care month or you plan to, you still have time. We're on the seventh day of May. We will be dropping a link for our Child Welfare Information Gateway Toolkit into the chat. And we
058on our social media our Texas Education Agency social media platforms, we did provide that announcement. And so, we recognize that educators do play a critical role in supporting the academic success and well-being of our students in foster care. So, thank you for the important work that you do. All right. We got our moment of reflection and processing for the at-risk portion. And I do not see any questions so far. And while while we're looking for questions, and before we head into military with Dr. Lay, just really it's been an honor during our transition to help support the at-risk programs in foster care. I've worked with many of y'all. Y'all do fantastic work. I cannot thank our school systems enough. We do we do have our foster care champions in every region also that are there
059to help support you, too. You can reach out to them for anything that you may need in the foster care and supporting our foster care students. But just I am so excited that Anne Caldwell is joining. She is going to be phenomenal in this area. So, Anne, I just I I'm I'm happy that you're going to be able to support them. Any questions? We do have a question about when will we know about the continuation grant for Tetchy? Okay, for that depends. So, the continuation grant that is coming, you that you will be notified. It should We're anticipating a June release. Uh and and we will have the funding ready before before the start of the of the the next grant year, which would be September 1st of 2026. But anticipate that you will be
060hearing about the grant and receiving information in June. We don't have a set day in June, but it will be in June. All right. No more questions for now. Okay, so let's go ahead and shift our focus to military connected student programs with some updates and insights and how we can continue to support our military connected students across Texas. I would like to start off with a inquiry, if you would be so kind, share in the chat um any links, any celebrations, any social media posts, if you do have them ready at hand, um that you did for April month of military child. So, we just wrapped up uh Purple Up Month uh Purple Up Day and Month of Military Child in the military space. Um if you have any celebration, partnership, student voice, and
061you don't want to put it in the chat, that's okay, but we would still love to hear from you if you would like to share in our military connected uh students inbox. At this time, I will highlight um a link. Killeen ISD did a video link of Month of Military Child, and so uh after the webinar, if you have time, I would love for you to see um what they did as promotion. John is getting ahead of himself over there. But, he is showing all the pictures. You're fine, John. You're fine. Um this slide here um is courtesy of Jessica Up, our district military liaison for Judson ISD. Thank you so much for sharing your Purple Up Day celebrations. We have images here from Salinas Elementary, Judson Learning Academy, and Crestview Elementary School. On our
062next slide, these images are courtesy of Dr. Dean Gorrera, the amazing district uh military liaison uh uh among other things. He also serves many, many hats. For Waller ISD, all 11 campuses participated. I had the honor of doing a Purple Star site visit last year at his district, and they're doing amazing things um across all levels. And then on this slide here, this is pictures courtesy of districts' social media post that I was able to find. So, we have an array of United South High School, Calder Road Elementary, Wylie East Elementary, Veterans Memorial, Canyon Ridge Elementary, Legacy Traditional School, Mary Lou Fisher Elementary, and Wortham Oaks Elementary School. So, thank you so much for sharing with us um what you have been doing um across the state of Texas, and we look forward to um
063seeing more images. If you do, send them our way. Um on our next slide. So, we're going to get into suggested activities for May and the summer. So, as we begin to wrap up our 2025-2026 school year, we do have a few suggested activities so that we can go ahead and prepare for 2026-2027. We really don't get summers off, right? Cuz we are preparing for the next one. Um reviewing your school system's military student identifier or PEIMS uh coding process to ensure that your local process captures all six identification codes. So, if you're not aware, we do have more than two PEIMS code. It's six um PEIMS code. Um also, update your campus webpage for military families with enrollment and registration information. Plan PDs on supporting military-connected students, and also review your Purple Star rubric
064and annual calendar resources for military-connected um to identify opportunities for program strengthening. So, I'm going to go ahead and drop the link to our annual calendar. Um it's just suggested activities broken down by the month to kind of keep you scaffolding your support throughout the school year. All right. So, if you do not know, we are in the open window for the 26-27 Purple Star Campus designation. This designation was created by the 86th Legislature in 2019. It is a national program and it's implemented across many states across our United States. However, Texas is currently leading in this initiative and so we want to say that applications do run every spring and awarded um each fall. Once you are awarded, these campuses hold the designation for 2 years. I want to say that Purple Star Campus
065designation is an optional initiative that campuses may wish to pursue. However, it also functions as a practical framework and operationalizes many of the same commitments by translating our federal guidance of military Interstate Compact principles into consistent campus-level practices that support our military connected students and families. Why does Purple Star matter? Um it recognizes campuses for demonstrating support and commitment to meeting the unique needs of our military connected students and their families. Additionally, it helps to build the trust and enrollment appeal for military families. Um if you keep up with the data, you do know that military identified students in PEIMS. When we're looking at graduation and dropout rates, uh military students graduate at a higher rate than all Texas student um combined and they have the lowest dropout rates. So, there is an appeal for
066recruiting a lot of our military connected students and getting families to um relocate or transition into your school systems. Also, it it enhances the school culture and inclusivity. So, at a very high level, um this is our time frame for our Purple Star window. Our application window opens May 1st, which was last Friday. Currently right now, we have about 60 applications, so they're coming in. Um we have an office hour um that is scheduled for May 20th. We did have one earlier, which was on April 15th, um but that one has already passed. So, the the next one is May 20th. Come with any questions that you may have. However, if you do have questions right now, please don't hesitate to just send it to me. If those of you have who have been sending,
067you know that I I respond like very quickly within the hour. So, if you need help, please reach out. Um send me an email, and I will be able to help respond to that. Our application window does close May 29th. So, at 11:59:59, right before it hits midnight standard Central Time, it will close. So, if you wait until midnight, and it turns to May 30th, then the window is already closed, okay? So, make sure you get it in May before May 29th ends. Um the John, go back real quick. Yes. Um our application reviewing process is going to be in June predominantly. It will lag over to the first week of July. However, the month of July and August, I am working with different departments to be able to finalize the award list, but also
068press releases with the governor's office and any TAAs that will be released out. Um our award list will be announced in September of 2026. We do We currently do not have the capacity right now to reach out to every applicant who may not have received the designation, but if you receive the designation, you will receive communication. But as always, if your name your campus's name does not show up on the award list, or you did not get any communication, and you would like feedback on your application to improve for the following year, or to understand um where there's some growth opportunities with your application, please feel free to email me and I will be happy to provide the feedback that the reviewers provide to me. So, the next couple slides, I do want to highlight
069the significant training opportunities that have been delivered this school year that focused on building capacity, increasing awareness, and strengthening best practices to supporting our military connected students and their families. Collectively, these efforts have exceeded the total training that has been offered in the past 3 years combined. So, we've accomplished a lot by strengthening educator readiness, promoting consistent implementation of our military compact, ensuring equitable statewide support for military connected students across transitions, campus systems, and post post-secondary pathways. So, that includes our professional learning communities or PLCs and also the professional development that has been uh specifically curated by our grantee, MSEC. On the next slide, this just highlights our in-person and virtual trainings, conferences, or appearances that we have held across different stakeholders. We have touched into career and technical education. We made a presentation. We
070presented at the Texas Public Charter Schools Conference. We had a a special PD day for our ESC military champions. We held a first-ever uh military connected student support summit. And we did a Region 20 nurse roundup where we got to get in front of for the first time our nurse stakeholders. And then of course, we also have our interest meeting that was held last month. All right, on the next slide, this is just a reminder. Yeah, this is just a reminder. Remember at the beginning of the school year we released out eight videos, micro videos uh suites, and they were so impactful. They are being used by other entities um across the state, but also nationwide. We It's four videos, but um they are curated to family facing and also educator facing. So, this is
071just a reminder. Um I will be able to drop the links to where these are if you don't remember where they are at this time. Um and so that you can view them, you can link them, you can use them um to be able to promote your work um on campus. Uh also as a reminder, two special toolkits for Military Month um as a resource was released out um November Appreciation Month uh toolkit and also April Month of Military Child Toolkit. And I will go ahead and post that in the chat. Um and we also had our Military Champion Student Support Framework resource. This is a valuable resource. It does say ESC um Support Framework. However, school systems can use this to understand how they can utilize their military champions at the Education Service Center.
072And let me tell you guys, we have an amazing cohort of military champions. They are voluntarily designated or they volunteered to hold this position on top of the um many hats that they already hold. So, um they are giving their time out because they support the work that is there and they want to help you. Lastly, we also had that Statewide Military Student Infographics, which I will also drop into the link. And then Thomas is getting ahead of himself here, but that's okay. We are super excited. If you didn't know, we rolled out uh just in time for April as Month of Military Child on April 1st, a new Military TEA course titled supporting military connected students in Texas. Within 24 hours of release, we already had 65 enrolled. And so currently right now, 1
073month later, we have 218 who have who have completed um the course and it is a wonderful course. I'm going to drop the registration link here. And uh this slide here will tell you that it is free. It is self-paced. You explore academic, social, emotional, and transitional challenges that um our military connected students face. You also earn three CPE hours uh in the form of a certificate that you can keep for your professional development. And you can see here there are the five modules. Um I want to highlight that there is a module for military connected students with disabilities to help navigate between those IEPs and 504s and what you need as you are supporting uh our military champions through those uh additional uh challenges such as getting records um and uh matching uh comparable
074services. The QR code will also lead you to that, but I did drop the link to the uh course. And lastly, coming soon, um your ESC military champion will be receiving printed copies of these to distribute, so be on the lookout, but we are working on making it available electronically. It is first time ever state of Texas has New School, New Beginnings. This is a military family resource. Um it is a family-facing resource that helps military families navigate school transitions into Texas by explaining military compact, how Purple Star Campuses Matter, key education systems, and available statewide supports such as state assessments, uh CCMR, CTE, um and so forth. Um what is unique is this is there's a letter right in front um in the toolkit that is a sign, stamped, and approved by the commissioner,
075our wonderful commissioner Mike Morath. Um he uh is such a advocate for our military work, and so we're very excited to bring this out. It will be available as a PDF so that you can download and print, but we will also be rolling this out if you know the format, the issue um form where it's interactive where it looks like you're flipping an electronic book. So, we're very excited about that. That will be coming any week now. Um and then, yes, moment of reflection. So, I was so busy talking, I did not get a chance to go through the comment. Let me see here. Do you have a one-page flyer I could use to present Purple Star designation to my superintendent? I currently do not at this time. However, there is a what if you
076go into our Purple Star webpage, I'll drop the link in a bit. Um Purple Star webpage, there are uh several at a glance uh resource that may serve um uh what you need uh in order for your superintendent to kind of view it. Um but yes, we are super excited that you would like to uh work towards Purple Star designation. Um let me see. Oh, uh Donna, thank you so much for sharing. I will be looking at that uh link um for your Purple Up. Do we have to reapply for Okay, that one's touchy. Um yes, uh Yadira, uh you do have to reapply for the continuation grant uh cuz it it will be a new grant period, and so when it rolls out, there will be uh eligible applicant list and uh your program
077guidelines, and then uh your e-grant. It will be through an e-grant, so you'll need to apply through an e-grant. Um do we have a Oh, this is also another touchy one. John, I'm going to read it so you can I don't want to speak for you. >> [laughter] >> Do we >> Okay, do we have a specific date for communication about TETY and continuation grant in June? There there's no there's not an actual set date yet. We have internal dates that we're anticipating, but I do not want to release those right now. Uh I I'm hoping that we move faster than our dates. So, we we are working. I will tell you that um our team has worked very very diligently and and expediting a lot of the processes. Um Shout out to Dr. Lay.
078Her leadership and our team during our transition. We really streamlined a lot of our program. I don't want to release the date right now, but do anticipate that it will be expedited. I did drop a link um Circling back to military, I did drop the link to our Purple Star Campus Designation webpage, and there is a question from Tanya. As a military champion, can I get a list of districts that have applied for Purple Star in the region? Tanya, I will reach back out for the specific, but anyone who is interested in knowing which campuses were awarded Purple Star on the Purple Star webpage that I had dropped the link to. If you scroll to the very bottom, there is a section called Archived P- Purple Star Campus Designation Awardees in Communication, and all the
079years of Purple Star is available at that and through a link there you can access who was awarded. All right. Can you drop the link to the law that says we have to do military support? Texas Education Code 33309, I will drop the link to that. Now, I will say Purple Star is an optional initiative that you can pursue. However, there are mandates and statutes around military connected support, which I will provide. Bonnie Hahn, who is the TEA contact for PRS services, if you are asking about program, then it is going to be Ms. Ann Caldwell. Um and if you're wondering about C high services, then attendance, you can also contact Ms. Caldwell and she can can connect you, but the person overseeing that is Christina Page. All right. And Clara, I will drop the
080link as soon as I am able. We do have another question. Will the slide deck be available? Yes, it's already available on the website right now. Our webinar, since we are at the very end, I will go ahead and get to the next section and I will drop the link to the slide deck into the chat. And thank you so much for staying on and attending our full webinar. Um so, as a reminder, please subscribe to any of our updates. We have highlighted here at risk and highly mobile, our foster care, McKinney-Vento, military connected, and pregnancy programs. Whenever we send out good delivery announcements, listserv announcements, it does go through this. So, if you are subscribed, you will receive it. If you no longer want to be subscribed, you can unsubscribe at any time. Um
081on the next slide, we have our HMR program emails contact. You can also scan the QR code to get to our HMR website. From that QR code, you can scroll to the bottom to where it says webinar and then you will get the link to the PDF of the deck today. And that will be where the recording of this webinar will be uploaded, but I will need a couple days to get it processed and posted on on YouTube channel. But anytime you have a program um inquiry or technical assistance request, please email our programs uh email uh address there. And lastly, we have our um key takeaways. So, we do share a lot of information and some audience members will hop in uh at random times um and may not be able to stay. So,
082we do uh try to do at least three little um summary key takeaways. So, our guest speaker, thank you, David, for sharing about our Texas Challenge Academy. Um and his contact information is there. For Tech Chi, remember that end-of-the-year review of systems will uh will need to take be taken place. We have professional development on the Tech Chi web portal. And then Tech Chi grant reminders for the 25-26 grant deadline um is uh August 31st, 2026. Now, you have until November 27 to be able to send in your expenditure your final expenditure reports and any uh end-of-the-year uh annual um submissions that is uh aligned to the grant that you are wrapping up. For at-risk, we have our transition assistance for students and families. As a reminder, begin planning for upcoming school year and May
083is um National Foster Care Awareness Month. And lastly, for military, we have our Purple Star application window that has opened. We have a new TEA uh learn force for military and a new family transition tool that will be rolling out um any day, any week now. Um but, I'm pretty sure it's going to be in the next week. Um and at with that, I will