Cowboys and Mavericks and Educators! Oh My!

This week, we’re in Dallas attending D.R.E.A.M., Achieving the Dream’s Annual Meeting on Student Success. We spent Tuesday with the 15 DEI colleges talking about the ideal pathway to completion for students that are underprepared for college-level work. Today, we went to several great sessions—and, sadly, missed some great ones because we haven’t learned how to be in two places at once. Here are some of the highlights:

• This morning, a plenary panel moderated by Eileen Baccus, ATD coach, focused on equity. Steven Murray, Chancellor of Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, shared how after several years of engaging the campus in conversations about race and class, Phillips is rolling out a community dialogue about racial reconciliation. Murray said that while the community has some significant tensions, and that there is no other institution as well-suited to start these much needed conversations about how to grow together.  Don Plotts, president of North Central State Community College talked about reaching out to a primarily African American and low-income portion of their community, by opening an Urban Center in a convenient downtown location. With feedback from students and community leaders, they developed the services of the center, which now include a business incubator. Tom Jaynes, executive dean for Student Development and Support of Durham Technical Community College spoke about how DTCC has been pushing for increased equity since they started their ATD journey. Jaynes noted that once you see the data improving, it can be easy to sit back and feel good about a job well done, but there is always more to do. DTCC is working to keep the wind in their sails with a new focus on connecting low-income students to financial aid and benefits. Finally, Millicent Valek, president of Brazosport College, said that because of ATD, her college now treats students as individuals with unique needs. This is a new way of thinking for them, and they are using the equity agenda as a driver for their student success work. Brazosport is sharing that message on campus with a video on equity featuring MDC president David Dodson.

• One of the first concurrent sessions we saw today featured Capital Community College and Housatonic Community College. These Connecticut colleges talked about how implementing the Statway program has given Connecticut community colleges a chance to take the benefits of the ATD core team model into a multi-college team to great effect. They’ve built on ATD data collection, enhancing it by adding additional variables and comparing across colleges; they’ve also seen how direct collaboration between researchers and faculty has enabled them to improve pedagogy.

• We spent part of the afternoon with five Ohio community colleges: Cuyahoga, Eastern Gateway, North Central State, Sinclair, and Zane State. These leader colleges have worked hand-in-hand with the Ohio ATD/DEI state policy and the Ohio Association of Community Colleges to convene regional and statewide meetings of ALL Ohio community colleges. They’re sharing Achieving the Dream core principles, committed leadership, data driven decision making, engagement, and systemic institutional improvement, in hopes that other colleges can realize some of the benefits that ATD colleges have seen. Some of those benefits have been changing the campus conversation, maintaining clarity about a student success agenda, and providing momentum  to pursue that agenda—all of these are particularly important as Ohio adopts a new performance funding system based on specific student achievement points. 

We know you’ll want more details and we’ll be providing them in posts in the coming weeks!