What’s Up with DEI: Virginia

For the past month and a half, we’ve been sharing some of the DEI state policy team and college accomplishments from the last year of work. We’ve made our way (alphabetically!) through the six DEI states, profiling the DEI colleges in those states as we go. This week, we’re finishing the series with Virginia, the Old Dominion State.

The Virginia Community College System (VCCS) serves as the state team lead for Virginia’s ATD/DEI state policy work. Two of the state’s 23 community colleges participate in DEI, Danville and Patrick Henry. Three others were Round 1 ATD colleges (Mountain Empire, Paul D. Camp, and Tidewater) and Northern Virginia became an ATD institution in 2007. In the last year, Virginia has moved forward on all three DEI State Policy Framework levers:

Data-Driven Improvement

• In August 2010, the VCCS college presidents accepted the report and the recommendations from the developmental math redesign team, The Critical Point. VCCS also published its first annual Developmental Education Annual Report in February 2011.

Investment in Innovation

• VCCS has established a campus implementation team comprised of faculty from all 23 VCCS campuses, to work on the implementation of the new developmental math modules. This group will meet regularly in the coming year to address issues related to learning resources, scheduling, teaching load, delivery, and other topics that arise in the process of implementation.
• VCCS has designed two developmental education professional development opportunities:
• Developmental Education Symposium: An annual event held as a pre-conference to the system-wide professional development conference. This year, 175 developmental education faculty came together for a day-long working meeting.
• Developmental Education Institute: This event was held in June in partnership with the National Center for Developmental Education. The one-week summer institute for developmental education faculty is modeled after the nationally recognized Kellogg Institute.

Policy Supports

• In September 2010, the chancellor convened the Developmental English Redesign Team to examine the existing structure of developmental reading and writing in the VCCS and to make recommendations on how the model can be changed to increase student success. This is the same process that was undertaken for the developmental math redesign. The charge of the redesign team was to review policies and practices and make recommendations on what steps the system should take to redesign developmental reading and writing to improve student success and implement more streamlined and efficient ways of delivery. The report and recommendations were unanimously accepted by the college presidents at their April 2011 meeting and were endorsed by the State Board at their May meeting. The report was published in June 2011.