001This webinar is being recorded. So, please know that uh once we get the right opportunity and all of the webinars have been completed, it'll be uploaded to the site. So, if you have a colleague who can't be here today, please know that you'll be able to share this uh uh this webinar with them or if you would like to go back and review it at a later time, it will be available to you. Of course, again, think thank you all for being here today. really appreciate your interest in our early college high school program and today we're going to talk about the LA lasso cycle 4 grant opportunity related to the planning and implementation grant of our early college high school uh models. My name is Darren Ford. I'm a uh part of the postsecary
002preparations program. Uh my title is statewide coordinator for our CCRSM and that's our college and career ready to school models which includes our early college high school model and also our PEK model as well. And again, we're underneath the college of career and military preparation division. If you have questions uh after um this webinar is is completed or at any time uh throughout the year, uh please please please use our ccrsm.ex.gov email because we'll uh take those questions in and happily respond to you as well. What's the agenda look like today, guys? Well, we're going to do an overview of Lasso for cycle application process and timeline. I'm going to do a quick introduction to the CCRSM network. Then we're going to take a deep dive into the early college high school model. And when
003you leave here, you'll know I hope you'll be introduced to knowing the components of an early college high school, the implementation of it, how it connects to the lasso4 grant. And then toward the end, the next steps as far as the timeline as far as getting the application in, etc., etc. So, we're going to do all those things in in 59 minutes or less. Couple of quick FI FYIs. Uh, submit all the questions that you have. You can just go ahead and submit them right now if you want to or as we go if they pop up, submit them into that Q&A, that Zoom Q&A. If we don't answer them today, we collect them all. We'll answer them all and then we'll publish all the questions and answers asked during this webinar on on the
004website and you'll have access to them as well there, too. If you have technical questions or follow-up questions about the lasso process or the lasso application, please connect with their team at lasso ta.t texas.gov. Great, let's get started. So, the overview of the lasso uh cycle 4 process. Lasso is a single application uh that includes uh around 500 million in total awards estimated uh services and supports while combining 15 opportunities for academic acceleration and innovation. A quick look at the portfolio as shown on the screen. Cycle four will be anchored in four of our learning acceleration strategies. The EC the ECHS opportunity is housed under the innovation the innovative school models strategy. A quick look at the portfolio from a numbers and years point of view. Lasso funding view shows the total multi-year allocations including
005continuations. It's a great look at how much is delivered per grant, the total number of potential recipients, and the allocations per year, and the the total uh life of that each grant. Our early college high school opportunity offers up to $800,000 in total for eight schools and up to $100,000 per school, again, gifted over two years. The early college high school program overview. The goal, the primary goals of an early college high school, as you may be familiar with, is to reduce barriers to college and career success, increase their readiness in college and career. And then by doing that and by providing the academic and social support services through dedicated staff, we increase the college and career readiness and we reduce those barriers to college. And so you'll see in a second here the total
006number of our uh network and some of the success stories that we have uh already accomplished over the years. If you look real general at our entire model which includes our PEK schools as well, you'll see that uh our early college high school program models uh uh incorporate about 43% of the total population of programs in our in our uh CCRSM network. PEK is about 57%. You may notice here too though that seven out of 10 about 70% a little around 70% of those students are in our early college high school models. So you can see that although PEK has more models our early college high school students are in greater numbers across the network. Total number of about 103,000 students that's grades 9 through 12. We have 260 plus district partners. Again, that's partners
007like you who have implemented an early college, high school, a PEK, or both at their high school campus. Those uh those district partners have 60 plus college and university partners. And for our PEK schools, uh they are uh required to have a business and industry partner. And we have over 200 uh in the in the uh network currently. So again, a really quick glimpse at the raw numbers uh and our early college model. Early college has been uh in the network longer uh uh almost 20 years total now. 43% of the total population of programs and then we have about 71,000 students total that early college model right now. What's the purpose of the EC grant? Well, it supports innovative high schools for post-secary success. We get those ninth graders in and we prep them.
008They're a college student right off the bat and we get them into the dual credit process. We get them uh prepared. We offer interventions and then they succeed. And as you can look here uh we have some success from our 23 24 CCRM graduates. This in particular is connecting back to the CCMR credit uh potential. Our PEK model is in orange. Our early college high school is in blue. And then we also compared to our non CCRSM uh counterparts across the state. As you can see, industry based certifications, our early college high school students perform well. Program study of aligned IBC's. Even though some people think that our early college high school is particular only to dual credit, please know that IBC's and program aligned studies uh program aligned IBC's or an addition and a
009lot of work is done in our early college high schools around these two components and those still students still succeed at high levels even in the level one level two certificate program even though our early college high school is slightly bent towards looking at dual credit and then looking at the four-year completion like get those kids into high school out of high school into college immediately. Even our early college high school kids are gaining level one level two certificates at a 3% clip. And of course uh since the early college high school is dedicated towards dual credit accumulation at the 36915 core and associate degree, our students are doing a phenomenal job at completing the 45% clip. 45% of our graduates across the state of Texas acquire an associate associate degree upon graduation. Compare that
010to our PTA counterparts in our network, but also compare that to our nonCCRSM student population across the state of Texas, and you'll see why if you decide to implement an early college high school, those results can be your results. those results will be your results because of this great network and the support that we offer. Additionally, I want to offer this to you as well. Uh in our 232 24 CCRSM graduate cohort, 83% of our early college high school graduates, 83% 8 out of 10 earned 15 plus hours of dual credit. So again, visually I'm highlighting the associate degree completion at 45. But also wanted to share with you that eight out of 10 kids hit that 15 uh plus dual credit hour marker as well. And why is that important? Think about that. That
011the savings alone for that family and that student, the accomplishment of completing basically about a a semester worth of college for free. And then we know we know that once those kids get in these dual credit programs, they become successful. they're more likely over time to acquire that two-year and that four-year degree to be successful in the college environment. And I think that is a key component of our early college high school students, components of our program and our students is that because of this preparation, because of the supports, because of the systems you may put in place if you decide to be an early college high school uh participant, these kids succeed at really good high rates and it changes lives. Changes lives. Let's let's peek in and look at the grant eligibility criteria.
012So, to be eligible for this grant, you must be serving students in grades 9 through 12 or or beginning or will begin to serve students in 9th grade or students in 9th and 10th grade in the first year of implementation of the grant, which is in year 2728. So, you have to be a current high school grades 9 through 12 or begin serving students in grades 9 or 10 in 2728. And then if you're beginning in that 9th and 9th and 10th grade in 2728 that you commit to progressively upscaling uh by adding at least one grade level grade level per year after the first year of implementation in 2728. Keep in mind that all current ECHS planning provisional and designated campuses are not eligible to apply. This also applies to any previous ECHS planning
013implementation grants are not eligible to apply. So any recipient of that, all recipients of a previous LASO ECH grant, again anything around LASO and before are now eligible to apply. And then any campus that is currently identified in our network as a needs improvement campus is not eligible to apply as well. Let's walk through some of the asurances just to make sure that you're fully aware of what the asurances are asking of you. uh both from a a broad lasso perspective but also uh from our early college high school application assurance perspective as well. You'll see in these in these bullets and again you'll have time to go back through them. the deck will be provided afterward in a sense of uh this is what you are um assuring that you'll you'll complete or participate
014in as well that the lasso funds will supplement not supplant of course state mandates that your application will not contain any information that we protected by furpa uh that you are sure to adhere to all statutory and TEA program requirements as noted in the program guidelines which are available on the lasso4 site right now. You assure to adhere to all performance measures as uh shared in the program guidelines and again the applicant assures that any electronic information resources produced as a part of this agreement will comply with the state of Texas accessibility requirements. What are some additional assurances real quickly? That the grantee or the subgrantee is subject to fingerprint requirements. They're subject to the equal treatment of all persons. And also, there's a biological sex and no preferred pronouns clause as of this year.
015particular to early college high school highlighted in blue and orange. These are asurances again that are located in our program guidelines but are focusing on the early college high school process. So I highlighted in orange one that we often forget but I also want to support is that just keep in mind uh if you're awarded and accept a lasso grant fund for the early college high school system that we need for you to regularly submit your expenditures. monthly is preferred but at least quarterly at minimum so that we can help you uh track and maintain. Again, this is not from a compliance point of view. We hope to offer guidance along the way to answer your questions in the moment if possible so that over the two years you've spent wisely and consistently across that.
016But the only way we can do that is that you're keeping up with the expenditures and submitting them um in a in a timely process. You have to maintain the ask TED information so that we'll be able to communicate with you if needed. uh please submit your recruitment plan. It's important your marketing materials around that and there's a variety of data data requests that we want you to be um adhere to as far as assure that you will be able to submit stakeholder inputs. The reason that we require that is that it's really important for us to see that you've built out not only it's a really good idea by a small number of maybe leadership, but also that that leadership took that idea for an early college high school and and took it out
017to the public, took it out to the families, the community, took it to the school board, uh gained a lot of momentum and synergy around why this early college high school is perfect for your school and your community. We also uh need to know kind of the the the cadence around leadership meetings just to see uh how those leader leadership meetings are are proceeding and again uh published record of your enrollment guideline. It's important for us to see the admissions policies and that you're in line with our blueprint requirements as we'll talk about a little bit later. Additionally, uh a data report related to stakeholder input methods. Uh at when you join when you join, not during the planning application. Uh we'll need to see a signed with your IC, your college partner who is
018going to offer those dual credit opportunities. We need for you to report on your wraparound strategies. As you know and we know that those interventions for academic uh counseling guidance, any of those things around mental health supports, behavioral mental health supports, parent outreach and connection to social services. It's vital to any student, but it's really important for our kids because we're asking them to be college students in nth grade. And and we know that you do a fabulous job right now. We just need you to share with us what your interventions are and then potentially if you have if you need some further guidance we can offer what's particular and and really good interventions around how an early college high school intervention may be a little bit different than the normal high school intervention for
019our students and dual credit um the dual credit challenges the the college challenges they may have. how to balance high school extracurriculars and college opportunities. Keep in mind that there is a separate and additional application uh through our CCRSM website. There's a link here that you can go to. Uh so there's both an Alaso Early College High School application and that'll be a part of whether uh the grant process and the funding related to it. Uh if you decide to apply and if you're granted the lasso funding, please note that we'll also need for you to complete the additional CCRSM application that is separate from this process as well. Now you can go ahead and complete that if you want to right now and that CCRSM application is open. But again, I just want to
020highlight that there are two applications and and if you don't complete the CCRSM application prior to the lasso deadline that uh if and when you receive and accept the the ECHS grant, there'll be an additional application requirement that we'll uh share with you uh later on uh in the next year. With this line, we hope to start and to invite you into the time commitment. And I think this is a really great idea from our lasso team. They asked us to explore and kind of summarize or estimate the time of of the commitment time from different uh points of view as a as applying and and creating a really good and quality early college high school program. So you'll see on your left there that we have forward um you know we have some different
021uh things that could be um related to what the commitment is for that. Uh you can see seuite district leaders, campus leaders, and the teachers as far as what's going on there too as well. Um I believe there's a mistake. So we'll we'll replace that SUP. I'll flesh that out a little bit more. But again, uh this is to show you the time commitments per group. And as you can see, what we're doing is trying to give you a better sense of the activities and the amount of time that are associated with each of the groups who will be involved in helping your students succeed um in the early college process. I want to highlight down toward the bottom that the time per week for teachers vary. So depending on your local decisions, depending on
022your relationship with your um IICH partner, the teacher commitment uh varies. And so uh we want to leave that open for local decision. But also just wanted to make sure that it's dependent on the the model that you want to implement that's best for your dual credit staff, your faculty, your support staff, and of course your I partner as well. How do we score your application? So again, if you look right here, there are 1, two, 3, four, five major components. If you look to the far right, you can see the maximum points available and then a brief description in the middle. So in general, what we're looking for in the first category is why do you want to be a part of the early college high school process? What challenges do you see? What
023stakeholder discussions have you implemented? What data do you have to support decisions that you're making, the choice, the dual credit opportunities, the relationships that you're going to create, and the sustainability over multiple years for your early college high school. The second component talks more about your IICH agreement. Really focusing in on your potential IIC partner. Remember I said you don't have to have anou yet, but what we're looking for in the application is identifying that potential partner and that you've had a conversation with them about the future partnership. You don't have to necessarily have any agreement set in stone yet, but we're looking for you to identify that partner and for them to supply a supporting letter um saying, "Hey, yes, we've had that conversation. we want to get on board. We support this ICE
024um application and we're going to offer the dual credit and the services related to college around that. The third component is specifically uh in detail uh more about the associate degree, the certifications a part of that partnership and the courses that you plan to offer you plan to offer in a more detailed study um or crosswalk. Again, looking at what you plan to do. We know that it changes over the years and it can change from your initial application into that first year of implementation. So again, what we're initially looking for is just what you plan to do knowing that it'll change a little bit over time. And the last component really talks about the key strategies of recruiting, how to recruit those students, uh, and the populations that are important to the program, and
025how to provide academic support tailored to that campus or those student needs. t uh tally all that up and you get a total of 50 total points. This slide shares the priority point uh possibilities for all the applicants. Rural schools will receive a priority point. At risk schools, one priority point economically disadvantaged component could receive a priority point of one. School systems that are uh identified and classified as TEA board of managers districts will receive a priority point. The enrollment size matters and so if you hit that that goal or fall underneath those guidelines, you could receive uh two two priority points. Campuses with 25% of graduates meeting the CCRSM dual credit criteria per the most recent DEA TEA data available will receive two priority points. So again, this is all contingent on the applicants
026hitting that 70% marker. So what happens with the priority points is that uh when an applicant hits the 70% marker, which in this scenario would be 35 points. So if you receive 35 out of those 50 points right there, then these additional uh priority points will be assigned if you hit these criteria as well. So think of as bonus points after you after you hit the minimum of those 75% of those 50 points. So again, additional points after that 35 points threshold is met if the school systems funding requests exceed the amount available. So if we have usually have more than uh 8 to 10 requests, all of these could be in play. Again, remember you have to hit the 70% threshold to receive the priority points. If we need to uh invite or arrange
027for oral interviews, we will put that in play as well. This again states what I just shared before. If we decide to do an oral interview, of course, they'll be by Zoom and you'll have the opportunity to elaborate and be evaluated on your planned partnership with your ICE, which is again the key component for early college high school, as well as answer any additional questions that uh we may have to assess your readiness for this program. So, uh if we get to that point, we have more than applications and we have lots of schools who had a similar range in scoring, we may implement the oral interview process. We'll set that up with you via Zoom. or teams. You'll be able to chat with us briefly uh about your partnership with your ICE uh and
028then of course some questions that are surround the application that are again basically relating back to uh how to build out your early college high school. If you're identified as a TEA board of managers district, you may be asked to attend an interview to determine your readiness for an early college high school model as well. A key component of our success is offering technical assistance provided at no cost through our CCRSM network. So once uh a program a school enters into our program, whether it be a PEK and early college high school, they're offered technical assistance at no cost over the entire lifetime of their participating in our network. Educate Texas is our technical assistance provider and each campus is required to collaborate with Educate Texas to receive and participate in services and events that
029include expert coaching support, site visits, a virtual community of practice, tailored CCRM resources and templates for you to succeed. Focused professional development both in person, virtually. And then a variety of local, regional, and statewide events. So again, offered at no cost throughout our network, every program, whether it be an early college, high school, or a PEK, receives free technical assistance from our educate Texas partners, as well as our TE TA group. Me, Mary, and Crystal uh continue to give you uh our technical assistance from the TA perspective as well. One of the cool things that I always want to highlight here is that our our virtual community of practice is a wonderful website that includes thousands of practitioners in our CCRSM network. They often go on ask questions, provide resources, share resources. So again, in
030addition to educate Texas, in addition to TEA, there is a virtual community of all of our early college high school administrators and leaders and support staff and they're interacting on a consistent basis, asking questions and sharing information and knowledge. So, not only do you have us to rely on, you have your colleagues who are operating early college high school as well. Whether they be really close to you or 500 miles away, they're here to support and offer you their their best guidance so that you can just borrow and make it yours as it connects to your local uh community instrument population as well. A couple key points and FYI for provider contract guideline uh guidelines. In accordance with the recent executive orders, if a grant requires districts to contract with a provider, uh, then we
031must include the following language in the contract. Equal treatment of all persons and again, biological sex and no preferred pronouns. Now that we've kind of shared the lasso overview, I've given you a really good start into the asurances related to the early college high school. We've discussed briefly the program application, uh the scoring criteria, the priority points received and other things that are related to that. Let's take a deeper dive into what it means to be what it means to be in a successful early college high school. So visually here what I want to show you is that uh there are multiple years that you'll have pl time to plan, build, make corrections, add things, delete things, offer interventions, create new interventions prior to be officially held to accountability standards that we call that we
032call designation. Right now you're in that part where you're considering to plan to become a planning campus. If you decide to submit a planning application uh with the lasso grant uh and additionally uh down the road potentially the CCRSM application if you decide to join us you'll uh we'll review that accept you into the program and your first year will be what we call a planning campus year and that'll be of course year 2627. In that planning campus sometimes you'll hear hear us call it planning year zero. You're not teaching students. You're receiving additional technical support. You're reconnecting with your original plan that you offered to us that was approved and you're building out your plan. And you're beginning to think about which students do we need to recruit that connect to our blueprint requirements
033so that we can start teaching them the following year. Once you get that following year, you'll become a provisional campus campus. You'll live in provisional status from years 1 through five. So think of provisional years 1 if you're building out from scratch that would be 9th grade only. Year two would be 9th and 10th. Year three would be 9, 10, 11. Year four would be 9, 10, 11, and 12. So again, building out your cohorts in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade is that provisional status. What happens there is you're building out your your interventions. You're offering your dual credit. you're looking at the blueprint and seeing what goals I need to meet in 9th and 10th and 11th and 12th grade so I can be successful both from a student perspective but also from
034a uh a program perspective so that when the designation time comes after completing the fifth year you'll become a designated campus in our network. If for some reason that doesn't happen you'll see at the bottom that we move you into our needs improvement process. This is a private uh uh consideration and what it is is think of as an extended time for you to get better at some of those things that you may have struggled with in those first five years. So if we didn't hit all the goals that we wanted to and you didn't hit the minimum uh pieces for designation status, we offered laser focused uh preparation year six through 8 so that we can move you back to designated status campus designated campus status in year 9. If for some reason that
035doesn't work out by that year nine and we need to transition you back to a more comprehensive dual credit model, we offer services for trans transition you back to again a more comprehensive approach and let you exit our program uh and go back to u high school uh and dual credit as as potentially your focus as well too. So again, you can see there's lots of time once you become a part of the network. We really want to create a long ramp so that you launch into success into our designated years after completing five years after completing five years of serving students. You will see here again visually what I've just shared with you uh in the previous slide but a little different format. What this slide offers I think is a little more information
036around what you need to do during those years to reach your outcomes based measures. And so we're going to dive a lot deeper into into our OBMs, but in general know that after that fifth year and as you're building during your provisional time, right, you're collecting data around who you're recruiting. You're collecting data on the success of your students related back to access indicators, which is our recruiting part, right? Our achievement indicators are our high school components. And our attainment indicators are our post-secondary. Think of those as dual credit opportunities in some senses. And then after year uh six potentially uh you could reach a designated campus status with distinctions. We're going to talk more about OBM. We're going to talk more about access to human entertainment. We're talk more about what the three of
037the six and the two and both and all those things are are um are about. But I just wanted to introduce you to it here as well. But keep in mind that there are there's lots of support and again there's multiple years for you to become successful in an early college model. Let's dive into those blueprints. I love this part of this because this this part of the uh presentation because it really offers you um the opportunity to see that we've thought this out. Again, our early college high school programs have been around for 20 plus years. We've developed blueprints from those best practices along those years to help you structure and meet certain um opportunities and guidelines and outcomes that we know are successful in creating students who succeed um as dual credit students
038and so they can get to that associate degree if they do desire that associate degree prior to graduation as well. The blueprints again are arranged around how to reach that. But they have outcome based measures um which again relate to that designation status as we get closer to that fifth and sixth year of participation. They're arranged in three groups again. Access, achievement, and attainment. Access is your student representation in the program. Who you recruit? achievement again is related to how successful am I at hitting those high schoolbased opportunities that we know are launching pads for post-secary success and then how those kids start uh how those students attain post-secary uh credentials and opportunities while they're in school for free. Again, all of these opportunities, all these services, all this attainment is free for every student
039in our programs. Benchmark one is related to school design elements in a really broad sense. Think of this as the school structures and the policies that are related to ensuring adequate staff capacity uh at adequate uh teaching capacity uh for successful implementation and sustainability of an early college high school program. There's also a component here that's related to convening leadership teams. Those leadership teams obviously create the structure, the opportunities and the hurdles and so the um the ramp so to speak for that adequate staff capacity to happen inside of benchmark one is related to there are components related to student cost, school location, student cohort, student cohort size. Think about that when you're working with your IIT partner. the scheduling that could be flexible of course that meets both your campus priorities and also the
040college priorities and how to bridge those two if needed. And then requirements of becoming a TSI testing site for the high school campus as well. Reminder that the student cost is no cost for a student in any way, shape or form. School location can vary. It could be uh on site. It could be at the college campus. It could be a combination of both. Again, that's open to a local decision and your relationship with your IICH partner as well. Benchmark two is about partnership design. Again, going back to that partnership with your ICE. Once you're in the system, again, once you're in the system, having a current signed or interlocal agreement with each institution that you work with, you can have more than one IG partner, but we just require that you have one primary
041IG partner. and also too that theou or the ILA is annually updated and agreed to if needed. Inside of benchmark 2, the goal of the higher ed partnership, roles and responsibilities for the campus and the college uh entity, funding, how to work out the funding sources, how to pay for some of these services as well, an academic plan that works for your students and the college, and the transcription of credit and how that happens between college and the high school campus. We do receive some questions typically around funding and just keep keep in mind that uh the theou or the ILA can identify how costs will be shared including the following. They'll credit courses offered through the program, instructional materials to be used and textbook textbook adoption. Think about transportation costs and fees if you
042need transportation a part of this as well. And then the eligibility of early college high schools, early high school students for financial assistance from the IICH. Specifically, when you're thinking about waiverss uh for a tuition and fee, continuing with benchmark 2, think about course delivery, staffing plans, instructional materials, and books. We mentioned before, student access to higher education resources. those high school students, what is a good way, what is a partnership to make sure that they do have access to some some college resources as well because remember they're a college student. But how to balance that effectively for your population? And again, like we mentioned earlier, the transportation costs, if any, um how do you how do you uh how is that paid in uh between the two partners here? If you're a rural school
043and your IIG is a little bit further away, keep that in mind that that transportation cost could be um something to really dial into if you haven't already with your current deal with your IG partner. This could not be potentially a cost depending on again the way that you set up the model that's best for you and your and your local IG partner as well. Collaborative outreach efforts, student participation, academic support, data sharing. Data sharing is really important. Of course, data sharing here, think of it as how does the college share back? How do you guys communicate the student success? Because we know that our students are challenged early. But the data sharing helps us inform of potentially what we need to improve on when you think about interventions or what additional supports we can
044offer. So working with your IIG partner early, getting really squared in on how we're going to share data, how often the cadence, what we're going to share because because it's needed for student support interventions during the semester. Family and students community loves not only you, but they also love when a college gets involved. And so partnering with colleges on outreach efforts, show them, invite them in, show them how their kids are going to be 14-year-old college students, right? Get that energy going, that positivity around the collaborative outreach effort is so wonderful because I think it just pulls in the entire community and it really cements the early college high school as something unique and special for these kids to be a part of. Benchmark 3 again targets our uh populations to recruit. The campus must
045enable students who are at risk of dropping out or those who wish to accelerate completion of high school to combine high school courses and college level courses. When you're making enrollment decisions, you uh shall not uh they cannot be based on state state assessment scores, discipline history, teacher recommendations, parent or student essays, minimum grade, point requirements, and GPA or other criteria that be that that creates a barrier for them. So really what we're asking for you to do is create an open enrollment uh application focusing in on those kids spec specifically uh who are at risk so that those kids can have an opportunity to participate, be challenged and grow and succeed and dual credit opportunities during high school. Benchmark three target population design elements recruitment and enrollment documenting the enrollment process stakeholder engagement and
046lottery systems. So again, the e ECHS when it's at capacity, right, when you get more than enough applications related to how you recruit must use a fair weighted lottery. Uh and and the and the district should standardize the practices of that lottery system. Let's move into benchmark four, which is about academic infrastructure. The early college high school must provide a rigorous study course of study that allows students the opportunity to earn a high school diploma and enable a student to combine high school courses and college level courses with the goal of earning an associate degree or up to or or up to 60 seme 60 semester credit hours toward a bachelor's degree. This is really good for uh when you're thinking about your students. So, a lot of times uh or the consensus that I've
047heard is that uh early college high schools equal associate degrees. That is a goal and that is a wonderful to have. But but depending on your student and their goal, it could be a little less than 60 hours or any accumulation of credit hours toward your goals is an achievement that should be celebrated. And so what I'm trying to emphasize here is that 60 hours, the associate degree is a great goal to have, but it's not the only goal that we have as a part of our early college high school system. And that you can design and implement that dual credit accumulation for each one of your students and each one of your families so that they can get the most out of it in an early college high school program as well. For some
048that'll be the associate degree. For some it could be 15, 30, 45 hours. For some, they may not reach the 60-hour minute, and that is perfectly fine because the goal here is again to get them dual credit access, get them dual credit opportunity, challenge them to be students early. When they succeed, we know they're more successful when they graduate, whether they have that associate degree or not. How do we get that done? Well, we look at regional need, post-secondary opportunities, course sequence, course offerings, and the delivery of the courses. So, regional need is sometimes we get a question around this because uh it's often times more connected to our PEK programs like regional need towards employment. What we mean here is for the ECHS to explore how the the ECHS academic plan and targeted post-secary
049credentials connect with local local economic needs. So how is your how are your dual credit programs your programs of study related to that college? Are they related and connected to the regional need of employment around your area? Also good to consider too is the delivery of courses. The campus may implement multiple dual enrollment delivery models. It could include college courses taught by college camp taught on the college campus by college faculty, college courses taught on the high school campus by college faculty, college courses taught on the high school campus by high school educators who meet faculty requirements, and additionally, college courses taught virtually via distance, online, blended or blended learning scenarios. So again, just a couple of little highlights here for around uh benchmark 4. Further into benchmark 4, of course, we need to pay
050attention to performance in high school, college readiness, against student data tracking, student persistence. Once we get them in, make it really hard for them to want to leave the program. How do we build a culture around that? And then those pathway supports that are vital for them to succeed not only in ninth grade but as they get into potentially some more of those challenging courses in 11th and 12th grade as well. Benchmark five is student support design elements. The early college high school must provide wraparound strategies and services involving stakeholders to strengthen academic, technical and individual support for student to be successful in your early college high school program. What does that look like? offering a bridge program. So, initially this was thought as a summer program. So, I think about you're recruiting your seventh
051eighth you're recruiting your eighth grade population, right? The the eighth grades graduate, those eighth graders graduate and prior to 9th grade in that summertime a lot of our schools implement a bridge program where they introduce them to high school, they introduce them to their college uh and think about some of those dual credit requirements. Sometimes they offer TSI training and development for those kids. But offering a bridge program, kind of a think of it as a a fish camp or an orient college orientation, right, for for kids, which a lot of our high schools do anyway, but but this is more focused on combining the college component as well. Advising services, student interventions that we've talked about multiple times already, classroom supports, which we've uh discussed to as well, and then again those wraparound strategies
052too. So again, benchmark five is really drilling in on how do we develop programs, interventions both at the broad level, the district level, the class level, the individual level, both on our campus, but also on the college campus. How do we provide all those student support so those kids can be successful in 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grades? Additionally, what do we offer outside of those typical student supports? And then of course focusing on college and career readiness. So when you think about enrichment opportunities, think about it as think of them as a potentially a structured program of community service, partnering with community businesses to expose students to a variety of potential career options and possible internship opportunities, establishing a mentorship program available to all students, parent outreach and involvement opportunities, and family engagement support
053rigorous course enrollment in college and career planning. Oftent times we know that our students are a little shy, maybe a little bit um intimidated by the college process. Engaging their family and letting them know that their supports that are offered both to the family, the community and the student helps again students to commit, engage and be successful in an early college high school structure. Now let's talk a little bit about OBM. So just to briefly review what I took you through was a really quick and hopefully good introduction into the structure we have set in place for you some really good blueprints and guidelines that'll get you to meeting these outcomebased measures over those provisional years as you approach your first designation year after that fifth year. So all that blueprints in place, you're doing
054all those wonderful things. You're in your provisional years 1 2 3 4 and five. You're accumulating data. Your kids are succeeding towards these outcome based measures. And what are they? Well, again, as you know, I mentioned there are three primary groups in the lefth hand column. There is an access group, an achievement group, and an attainment group. There are two data indicators again in the middle column column for access. Again, that's related to your recruitment. Think about how uh meeting those at risk recruitment percentage goals, reading uh meeting those economically disadvantaged recruitment goals. Hitting both of those markers each year is the goal that you have to reach designation in our achievement area. Remember, those are high school focused achievements. EOCC's in algebra 1, English 2, hitting those TSI markers in English and math, the
055high school grad rate, and then college readiness in math or ELA is important as far as the achievement goes. Now, when you're again, you're thinking about designation and access, you have to hit both data indicators. In achievement, you only need to choose three three of these six to reach to become designated minimum and minimum. Same thing for attainment. But remember, attainment is post-secary success. So, earning nine college credit hours, uh, earning at least three college credit hours in ELA or math, the 15-hour college credit marker, the core curriculum success rate, your associate degree, and then persistence throughout the program. Hitting three of those when you get to that designation year minimum at a minimum is going to be important to to meaning designation. So to become a designated campus overall after completing 5 years of
056serving students, you're two for two in access at minimum you're three of six at minimum in achievement and three of six at minimum in attainment. Your school, your faculty, your program, your students, your IG partner will help you figure out what are the best combinations of achievement and attainment data indicators that we can reach for so that we can become a designated campus and a designated distinction campus when our maturity level hits at that at those years. I wanted to show you here visually what that looks like as far as when you need to reach those goals each year. So again, the three groups along the left side are access OBMs, achievement OBMs, attainment OBMs. As you make your way right, the ninth grade column, the 10th grade column, the 11th grade column, and your
05712th grade column. Each year, you need to hit both at risk and economically disadvantaged goals. Each year, you need to hit three of those six achievement goals, right? in those years that they're under and each year you need to hit three of those six attainment goals to become designated. So really quick, if I'm designing a program, of course I'm hitting my at risk and economic disadvantage goals for my kids, I'm going to choose because I have a really good math program. I have great ma math faculty and staff. I know that we can hit those goals at minimum. For me, I'm reaching for achievement goals of algebra, algebra 1, EOCC early because we have a great junior high prep. We're going to go for TSI prep and math. That's two. And then I'm going to
058hit uh the college readiness. So again, that hits my three right at minimum three of achievement. Then I switch down to attainment. I've got a great partnership with uh my IE. I've got a great uh course of study, program of study. We've set up a great system of course credits and my kids are going to accomplish my students are going to accomplish nine credit hours by 10th grade. That's my goal. Of course, along the way, if we're hitting those nine credits, they're going to be hitting that three college credit hours in in math, remember? Because I'm good at math, right? That leaves me only one I have to do. If got if I have nine credit hours, man, 15 hours is really easy to get. So again, at minimum, I'm hitting those goals. Core completion,
059associate degree, persistence, those could be options as well. But I just want to show you briefly, this is how you can structure and make local decisions based upon your student and your staff and your IIG partner to design a program at the campus level that kids can succeed. So not only are your kids successful in meeting their goals, but your entire program successful hitting designation goals as well. And of course, you remember that we offer TEA assistance. You'll have technical assistance from educate Texas and then you have all those thousands of people in the community of practice to offer in question in addition to the local regional and state conferences that are all free for you to participate in. Again, remember access is student representation hitting two of those goals. What does that mean? Well,
060it means at risk grades at 25% under district. Real briefly, economically disadvantaged grades 9 through 12, 10% under district achievement, three out of the six. Again, those are algebra 1 goals, English 2 goals, TSI criteria, math goals, English goals, and TSI, TSIA, and your high school grad rate. Oh, in addition to, I'm sorry, college readiness in math and EL. I'm showing these percentages because think about this as use as an example too. You only need to hit 40% of your cohort in your 12th grade year to hit this achievement data indicator to to get the success that you need as well. So when you see percentages, think about I need 30% of my kids in my cohort by 10th grade to hit nine college credit hours to hit that attainment data indicator goal for the
061success of my program. college credit hours in ELA or math. 15 college credit hours by 12th grade core completion by 12th grade half of my student cohort by 12th grade. Remember, keep those percentages in mind. We're not talking about every student. We're talking about percentages to reach earn an associate degree. Half, again, half or above need to earn an associate degree to hit my data indicator by 12th grade. So we we think we we're pretty sure and we're confident by the success that we've had that we've shown you early both individually students but also in our programmatic um requirements that these percentages and these uh grade level goals are perfectly both in the rigorous department and the success department. We want to challenge students to become better. We want to challenge students to know that
062they can succeed at success but we don't make it too easy. Right? So we think this is a great combination of both challenge and success so that you can reach both your programmatic goals but also the kids get great access to to dual credit opportunities. Don't leave out persistence as well. 75% by 12th grade. Got about 5 minutes left. So I want to show you really quickly again these are all the goals that we just talked about. This is what you need to when you think about five and six years down the road. Remember that you have lots of time to prep. There's a planning year. There are multiple provisional years, but again, we're accumulating. We're having student success and you're hitting these goals as you plan out and you meet some of this really
063good and you meet these successes along the way. The path forward from here, this is a great uh visual of your timeline. So, you can see that uh currently we're in October and we're just starting our webinars as far as introducing the lasso and our programs. The application date is open. The application closes on December 3rd at 5:00 PM. We'll have multiple office hours if you have uh continued questions. And again, you'll be able to review the decks and receive and uh review the webinars, recorded webinars. uh once everything is complete there. But this visual just gives you a sense of if I decide to apply, how long is the application open, when is it closed, when is it scored, when will I be notified, and then that that NOGA time window as well. LEA
064must submit a lasso cycle for application by December 3rd, 5:00 p.m. Central Standard Time. TA emailed unique application links to the LEA superintendent on October 3rd. If you need an additional one, for some reason your your superintendent did not get it, there's the link to request an additional um unique application link. The PDF application is posted on the site, but remember to officially apply you have to use that unique link which gains you access to Qualrix, which again is the official application site. Additionally, once you complete the application, it must be be signed by the superintendent to be uh accepted. I mentioned this before, but we'll have additional office hours on October 28th. Uh application support on the 27th uh and November 3rd. There'll be a frequently asked questions review guide posted on November 3rd.
065And like I mentioned before, if you have technical questions about the application or just the lasso process in general, please email lasso.t texas.gov. If you have program specific questions, send them my way. Be more than happy to answer them at ccrsma.t texas.gov. Keep in mind too if you decide to apply uh and are awarded and then the change request and decline in lasso. So just as a reminder, lasso has an informal discretionary competitive grant process. Declines and change requests are not advisable in typical competitive process. If declines are requested, they will be considered on a case-by case basis and could raise the LEA's federal grant risk level in the coming year. So be careful um around change requests or declines. That's just our reminder to say we want you to be a part of this,
066but be sure be sure that you want to be a part of this that if you decide to apply and are awarded and accept that you're committed to any one of these last opportunities that are great for all of our students. Visual reminder and again I want to say all to the far right column, great great resources available. Our lasso team has one has done a wonderful job of giving you even more additional and helpful resources to help you figure out whether I need to commit my time and my resources to completing these applications for any of these last opportunities. So again I would direct your attention over to the right column the initiative one pagers the eligibility and prioritization a selection tool and role and responsibility insight tool. So, I want to again give
067kudos and flowers to our lasso team for continuously making your process a little bit easier by offering these additional tools. But also, here's a great visual of application window program webinars and next steps. So, again, if you have any questions related to to the timelines, webinars, and planning tools, uh feel free to go to the website at ta.t texas.gov/lasso. I want to thank you again. Thank you again for being with me this hour. I hope that you had time to drop in your questions and if we again if we did not answer it in the moment, we will get those answers and questions out to you as soon as possible. Um, we're going to leave this open until 3:03 p.m. So, if you have additional questions written down and you just had a chance the
068opportunity to insert them so they'll be answered in a more formal way at a later time, please take this time to do that now. We appreciate your day. We appreciate your time and have a good day. This is the end of our recording session.