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Transcript of NTA Conference Call Presentation held on 06/26/97

The Role of Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) in Serving School-to-Work Youth both in School and out of School

Presented by

Eugene Piccolo
MN Department of Children, Families and Learning

Ken Dahl
Minneapolis Employment and Training

Eugene Piccolo (MN Department of Children, Families, and Learning): I'm the Assistant Commissioner for the Office of Lifework Development and the State Department of Children, Families, and Learning. Our office is in charge with the oversight of the school-to-work initiative in Minnesota. As we went forward, one of the major issues was community-based organizations (CBOs), and who it really was that we were talking about when we discussed CBOs. So one of the things we did was look back at the legal definition of CBOs. We found that it comes down to several kinds of groups. One is employer organizations that are focused on economic development, such as chambers of commerces, economic development agencies, the workforce center system in our state, and other kinds of organizations, such as United Way. In Minnesota, one of the groups that is very involved in school-to-work activities is Good Will Easter Seal Organization. And so how do we involve all those different kinds of groups in this whole process? In Minnesota, one of the things we require up front in the membership in each local partnership is the participation of a workforce center as one of the partners. So we have that as a basic requirement to ensure that the perspective of those who are focused on workforce preparation is involved as a partner up front. The other thing that we are doing as a state is talking with each CBO's state-wide affiliate or parent organization and asking the following: (1) how are you now currently involved in school-to-work activities, (2) what is it you would like to do, (3) who are you serving, (4) who are you participating with, and (5) how can we assist them. We are working with them to develop plans for their organizations and their local chapters. We're working with state level groups that have local affiliates to answer those questions, and often times to provide technical assistance and sometimes grants to assist them in those efforts to try to get them involved and to identify what they can be doing in that whole process. We're fortunate in Minnesota, because in terms of disability CBOs, we have one of the leaders in the field, the Parent Advocacy Coalition on Educational Rights (PACER) Center, as well as other kinds of organizations with various special populations. We are in conversation with these organizations to see how we can pull us all together on a state level and involve community organizations and then turn around and have those organizations work with their local affiliates, if they have local affiliates, in the process. So that is kind of the approach that we're taking to CBOs in Minnesota. I think Ken can talk more specifically about how, in Minneapolis, they've integrated their economic development sector, which is a CBO under the law, their workforce center system, and several other organizations that deal with young people with special needs. So I'll turn it over to Ken now.

Ken Dahl (MN Employment and Training): I work for the city of Minneapolis and my responsibility is to coordinate youth employment and training programs. That includes a very broad umbrella of services or dollars that come through the city that originate from different sources - federal, state, or local - that address the issues of young people, providing the support services, including Job Training Programs, or the JTPA Program. In Minnesota we also have comparable funding sources that mirror JTPA, called the Minnesota Youth Program. What we have been doing for about the last four years is working very closely with a group in the Minneapolis School District, called the Tech Prep Consortium. This was a group of different tech prep and magnet programs that were beginning to get involved in trying to build a system and share some of the resources through the different advisory boards that they had at their different schools. Consequently, the medical magnet, manufacturing magnet, business magnet, and so on, were beginning to work together to share some of their expertise and resources. Our Private Industry Council in late 1993 decided that they wanted to move into school-to-work and brought a new team on board early in 1994. The marching orders essentially were to begin a closer working relationship with the school district and to link up with building a school-to-work system in Minneapolis. I think we've got some real advantages here in building a system in that the Private Industry Council, which governs a lot of the job training dollars in Minneapolis, is the same staff as the city staff. So when the Private Industry Council - appointed by the Mayor - and the Mayor get interested in school-to-work, it's not too hard to change city policy and move things in that direction.

The other advantage we have is that our delivery system for services, whether it's job training or other kinds of support services for young people, are delivered by the community. So for the last dozen years or so we have been contracting those services out to a host of non-profit community agencies, including some very grassroots, traditional CBOs and larger, more nationally prominent organizations, like the Minneapolis Urban League. We've brought them along with us as we've been going through this change and converting our traditional funding streams to support the school-to-work effort. Consequently, we've been able to build a lot of these partnerships with the various schools and support them by bringing in the expertise that the communities have developed over the years and working with segments.

Traditionally in our job training programs we serve all youth and have not designated disabled youth or low income youth as separate entities. Basically, we look at all youth and develop individual service plans or IEPs, as they are called in the schools, for all the kids that we work with. The IEPs of students with disabilities just say different things. So it was not difficult to deal with the issue of inclusiveness in terms of building that part of our system or convincing anybody. To be very honest, working within the schools has been a little bit more challenging, because many of the in-school programs are still relying on more traditional funding streams. There's still that element out there that looks at school-to-work as a lot of program money and everyone wants to be involved in getting their piece of the pie. So we're still dealing with that, and we've got a long way to go yet in building our system. But, what has happened has brought in a tremendous amount of energy from the community into the schools in Minneapolis, including the 13 alternative high schools and some charter schools. What I've noticed is that it has brought the soft money culture - which is more of a "hit-the-ground-running, make decisions, and get things done" group - into the slower-paced and more process oriented school system, to help get some of these kinds of initiatives off the ground. I think that's been the critical difference in bringing these two worlds together for us.

The other areas that we have been working in have been linking city planning and economic development issues, like Gene mentioned. We have the Chamber of Commerce, who's been very active at piloting some of our school-to-work programs, but also in helping us look at economic forecasts. We have our local public agency, the Minneapolis Community Development Agency, that has done the same kinds of things. So as we're developing this school-to-work system, we're making sure that we develop career cluster programs that are in areas that we know there is some economic growth and vitality in. In that respect, we're able to say that we'll put a lot of energy into developing, for example, the printing or manufacturing sector, because that's where the large growth areas are here in the Twin Cities area, and the forecast for the future says that that's where a lot of the jobs are going to be. It helps us justify why we are focusing on those particular areas. I think the other main area that we've been successful in is converting a very traditional program that's been around I think 32 years, such as the summer youth program, into a true school-to-work type of model by taking it and really turning the summer jobs program into, what we call learning rich opportunities for young people. Hopefully to prepare the targeted 14 and 15 year olds here, all of whom work in the CBOs, we have the community help them learn about their first job and the relationship between school and work. We have a very high dropout rate here and we feel that a major part of our responsibility is to help those kids stay on track and understand the relationship between school and work, so that hopefully they will stay in school. And so we've put a lot of energy and resources the last few summers into developing a much better academic component to our summer youth program. We have both classrooms and teachers on work sites working with supervisors and kids helping kids develop, using a SCANS type of model, those types of skills. They found out that learning can be fun and that these kids show the same academic gains in the summers as they did when we did it the more old fashioned way. We are also able to target disabled youth during the summer to provide them some special services. About 25% of our summer youth kids are disabled students in the Minneapolis public schools and so we're able to keep those staff on board during the summer with the help of the school district to make sure that those kids are able to participate in these learning opportunities. They range from very mildly disabled to seriously disabled youth. It would be the only chance that some of them would even have to work, they couldn't work without that support system. We promote our whole summer youth program as accessible to all youth. There may be an individual work site that cannot make an accommodation, but as a large employer of anywhere from 800 - 1000 kids every summer, the city is considered, in what they call in ADA language, a "deep pockets" employer, so we can provide whatever it is that they need. If a particular agency can't, we can make sure that they have access to these same kinds of opportunities that other kids have.

Mary Mack: Ken, could you please describe a bit of your governance structure how that evolved and also how you got everybody moving on the same track? You've got a lot of CBOs that come from different histories in the school system, they seem to be talking the same talker, closer than a lot of places.

Ken Dahl: The steering committee is what we developed as a governance structure and we are still in the process of developing and institutionalizing that. What we had was this Tech Prep Consortium that we renamed, after it really started to grow and get involved in the real school-to-work effort, was the School-to-Career Transition Consortium. It became so big so fast that is was very unwieldy and it really wasn't a governance structure, so to speak. It was a whole group of partners from many different sectors. It was too wieldy to be a real decision making body and at the same time we were trying to deal with the usual issue of what are the implications of this entity or that entity being in charge. What we did - which actually grew out of writing an urban-rural grant that we did not get, but grew out of the visioning and writing process - we came up with the notion of having a steering committee which would operate as a committee of the Minneapolis Private Industry Workforce Council. The Council helped bridge the school district, the different multi-sector partners, and the private industry council. And to be very honest, what we did was we pretty much handpicked a group of people who we viewed as global thinkers, who didn't have any particular political or other kind of axe to grind, who we felt understood school-to-work and were committed or were believers, as we say, so that we wouldn't have to deal with those kinds of turf issues and we could get there and get to business. We've got members of the Chamber, Minneapolis Urban League, the disabilities group within the Minneapolis Public Schools, City staff, a number of businesses, some foundation people. We're still going through the process of trying to institutionalize this, but in terms of priorities, the first thing that we chose to go after were to change some policies that are very old in the Minneapolis Public Schools that we felt were an impediment to school-to-work.

As we all know, policy drives funding streams, and if we don't change the policies, it won't change the funding streams and folks won't change their behavior. So we're looking primarily at policies involving curriculum and making some recommendations. We are also looking at policies regarding what we now call work-based learning. The old work study program and policies of the '70s and '80s are still on the books and they are not really supportive of school-to-work. We're trying to get those policies changed to make them a little more rigorous and a little more tied to the school courses of study. We were hoping to have some of those through by mid summer, but we're going through a change in the superintendent right now, so we're not sure what that means - if things are going to be delayed or if we're going to be able to stay on track with our timing. But we see that as very critical, because that will change the way the schools do things, it will change some of the funding streams within the schools if we can do some of those things. The other thing that Mary mentioned is bringing in the expertise of the community. The community, for years, has been the service delivery area. They've been doing their view of school-to-work. Although they may not be talking the school-to-work language, the community has certainly been delivering through the alternative schools and through some very creative job development for disabled and high risk youth. They have been doing these kinds of things for many years, they've developed those relationships, and developed a lot of those skills in working with the employers. What we're doing is taking advantage of that. Those are skills that a lot of the school people don't have, and as I mentioned earlier, they're able to hit the ground running when they go into a school and not get as caught up in the process as school people often times do. So we're able to bring them in to help develop the partnerships with the private sector, develop the jobs for the kids, and maintain those connections. We have a case management model that we use in Minneapolis for our year-round youth programs. They've been able to bring those skills in to make sure that kids get comprehensive services that they need in order to sustain themselves. So they've really honed their skills over the years by working with the high risk youth and now they're able to bring those skills into the regular school system.

Participant: I have a question. I'm Roberta Ross from Southern California's Transition Coalition SWITP (School-to-Work Interagancy Transition Partnership) and I was wondering if people that work with disabled youth are concerned that the kids from the regular schools will take over their jobs and their contacts, and then they won't be able utilize them anymore?

Ken Dahl: We haven't run into that yet. It's not that I'm sure it won't happen here and there, or that concern won't come up, but I haven't heard it.

Participant: We have a school-to-work program here too. We're doing pretty much the same that you are. Here in Southern California we have a direct federal grant. That has come up, because we have several people from the different school districts who are job developers and have various contacts with industry.

Mary Mack: Has that come up with other populations, Ken, in Minneapolis?

Ken Dahl: There's always a little edge of it here and there and I think that's the trick of multi-sector collaborations. I suppose if there's a downside to having a community-based delivery system, it's that there are a lot of other agencies out there doing similar kinds of things and so occasionally they are going to bump into each other or employers are going to get a little bit irritated. "I talked to so and so the other day and I'm hiring a kid from that program or this program." So there's some of that. It hasn't reared it's ugly head to the degree that I thought it might. I think part of it is that we've got the youth unit in Minneapolis, which is a fairly good group of folks that have been working together that even though they are in competing agencies they've been working together as a team for a number of years now and they've developed good relationships with each other. One of the things that we did about four years ago was with our year round youth programs, we put it in their contract that they had to have monthly meetings. The purpose of the monthly meetings, besides the usual nature that the bureaucracy is working right, was to get them to start talking about kids, which is why they do what they do. Once we were able to do that, most of the administrators quit showing up after the first meeting and they were able to start talking about kids, mutually doing some problem solving, discussing how to deal with 14 an 15 year olds, and start sharing some resources. They've done job fairs together and some of those kinds of things. But a lot of it is just blowing right past and through the turf issues, and then some of those kinds of problems take care of themselves.

Participant: I'm a parent, also from southern California, and we are also involved in another group of developing interagency service coordination planning and with Maternal Child Health Grant for Healthy and Ready to Work. You mentioned bringing in the CBOs, but to bring them in you said they have to have a work center in place. Are you dealing with any issues of health, so that the population you serve is...

Ken Dahl: We're working with the clinics in the schools and with some of the community clinics. I think one of the struggles we've had, and we're still working on it, is within the school system. They've got some good programs here for teen moms and pregnant teens, but then they've ended up being isolated. They get good parenting skills, but they end up getting sort of a second rate education. They don't graduate getting as rigorous an academic background as they could. Our alternative programs, on the other hand, I think are a little bit more creative in getting kids involved, but then they don't have the burden of the school district and all those rules upon them, they can be a little bit more flexible.

Participant (Parent): I was thinking also of the chronically ill - the diabetic, asthmatic - kids that might be medically fragile, but are not developmentally disabled, per say.

Eugene Piccolo: In most of our communities, we have family service collaboratives that deal with a lot of the health issues and social service issues. One of the challenges that each community is facing right now as we try to move the school-to-work initiative forward is how to connect those two initiatives and the two collaboratives. One the things that we've suggested is that there be representation from those collaboratives on the school-to-work partnerships. So that there's at least some ongoing contact and so people start to see the light.

Participant: The PACER center has a similar grant to us and that's one of their goals.

Ken Dahl: We've been able to do it through our summer youth program by really targeting high support for those kids, but I don't feel we've been very successful yet in getting them involved in some of our more advanced programs at the high school level, we're still calling the magnet or the Tech Prep type models. We've been able to get some work-based learning opportunities in the summer and get some of the support systems they need to do that, but we've got that standards movement in Minnesota. People are still struggling a lot with that and there's sort of a knee jerk resistance and it takes a little while to get past that. So on a case by case basis, we're making some progress, but I don't think we've made much institutional progress yet.

Participant: This is Judy Hegenhauer in Arizona. I'm the evaluator for one of the school-to-work projects, and one of the things Arizona has done is insist that all the local programs have an evaluation person, an evaluation component. I'm just wondering, what are you doing in terms of evaluation? Are you doing anything along the lines of follow-up?

Eugene Piccolo: In terms of evaluation of school-to-work and the initiatives that are taking place in each community, one of the things the state has done as we fold out our initiative is to identify learner performance indicators and system performance indicators. We have nine learner indicators and ten system indicators that layout where they need to be going, so they give direction. They also serve as the basis of the plans of all the school-to-work partnerships and then they also are serving as the evaluation tool, the basis of evaluation basically, for all the partnership activities and therefore all of the things that the systems are supposed to be doing to provide learners opportunities in terms of the School-to-Work Act.

Participant (Judy Hegenhauer): Can you give me an example of a system indicator?

Eugene Piccolo: One example of a system indicator is one that deals with access: that partnerships ensure that all learners in the geographical area of the partnership have access to and have benefit of the school-to-work programs that are created. So that is something that partnerships are going to have to ensure. As we do evaluation, that is one of the things we're going to be measuring in terms of what partnerships have done to provide access to all learners.

Participant (Judy Hegenhauer): And how are you measuring that?

Eugene Piccolo: In terms of our federal initiative, we're in our first year, so we are still in the process of developing the evaluation tool, but it's all based on those indicators. We have eight federal sites that had federal direct grants through either as urban/rural grants, local partnership grants, or Native American grants and those eight partnerships are going to serve this fall as our pilots for evaluation.

Participant (Judy Hegenhauer): So are you going to use surveys, or what are you going to use?

Eugene Piccolo: That is something that we are still in the process of exploring. We have talked to the University of Minnesota about taking that project on as our evaluator. So we're still in the process of working through the system of how we are going to evaluate.

Participant (Judy Hegenhauer): It's a tough one.

Eugene Piccolo: It is.

Ken Dahl: We've been struggling with it for a long time.

Participant: This is Laura Love in Arizona, also. Can you give us an idea of who helped to develop the learner and system performance indicators?

Eugene Piccolo: Our initiative on a state-wide basis is an initiative of three agencies: the MN Department of Children, Families, and Learning, which involves K-12 education, the MN State University and College System, and the MN Department of Economic Security. The staff of those three agencies sat down and began working on indicators. The first draft was a mix-mosh of all kinds of things, and as we really looked at it, we saw that there really were two kinds of indicators that people were developing: learner and systems. So then we took it to the State Workforce Council, which is charged with policy development and direction for school-to-work, welfare-to-work, work-to-work or displaced workers, and so forth, they're the governing board on a state-wide policy level that's charged with setting direction. So we brought it there, and then after discussion with them, we brought in folks from local communities, business communities, labor, and community organizations - all involved in the process of looking at those and reviewing them, and then we got down to those nine learners indicators and ten system indicators. And then they were brought back to the Workforce Council and they approved it there. (See attached indicators)

Participant: I have a question. This is Heather Hotchkiss in Colorado with the Department of Education. We are in the process of trying to integrate content standards (inaudible) .... In Colorado, we're calling them Workplace Competencies, but they're similar to SCANS. I'm wondering what process you use for that integration?

Eugene Piccolo: In Minnesota, we have what is called the Graduation Standards. They are not standards that students are required to meet. They start at grade K, but they're called the Graduation Standards anyway. One of things that as those were developed, they developed task management skills, that correlated very closely to some of the SCANS skills. As the graduation rule developed and evolved, what has happened is that those have been incorporated into many of the standards, the Profile of Learning, as it's called, and so those SCANS skills are just incorporated in those. The other thing they decided to do just recently is to not have a separate set of task management skills, but tie the SCANS skills directly into the graduation rule. So our graduation rule and standards are now being integrated with the SCANS skill, so that will take place over the next few months, and we'll have it for all of our schools and partnerships.

Mary Mack: And how does this fit in with where you are at with portfolios?

Eugene Piccolo: Well in Minnesota, the Profile of Learning piece of the graduation standards requires that students demonstrate and document that they have the skills that are part of the profile. And so we have legislation that was enacted in regular session, but the governor vetoed the K-12 bill, and right at this hour, the legislator is in session and retasking it with the provisions, the governor wanted it in the bill. But one of the things that it does require is that students develop a portfolio of their work, in terms of their graduation standards that state law now requires every school district to develop policies on how to recognize non-school-based experiences and any educational opportunity as a way of demonstrating the profile of learning, and then also, the laws that give school districts the authority to require all learners to develop a life work plan and maintain that and continue to develop that through all their academic career.

Ken Dahl: On the community level, we're not going to be involved in the real technical end of developing the life work plans. What we're trying to do is help the community get used to some of the language changes and some of the different ways that they can do things, so that as these kids start coming through the system with their profiles of learning and looking to demonstrate their task management skills, the community is ready to do that, and that they're on the same page. That's a lot of the work that we have been doing. Some of it with private businesses, but most with our CBOs who are the primary employers for the summer youth program. So ideally some day the kids can walk into our summer jobs office with an idea in mind of what they need to do, and say what can you do for me. So that is what we're hoping...

Eugene Piccolo: And one of the things that we're doing on the state-level to help communities, it's in the development process right now, is this spring we had a colloquium on what life work plan means in Minnesota. From that colloquium, we are developing a community discussion guide and a video and a whole kind of process for each community to work through the discussion of what it means, why it's important that learners have and continually update their life-work plan that talks about their career aspirations, their skills, including whatever inventories and so forth they do over time. And so it will be a process instrument and an information instrument that has a video, a discussion guide, and some tools for partnerships, schools, parents, and counselors to sit down to talk about what it means. We are very concerned that in this whole school-to-work effort, that people have got to understand what this is about and take ownership at the local level, rather than the state saying, "Here it is, do it." That's not the approach we take in Minnesota to anything. We are going to provide tools for local partnerships, such as Minneapolis, to take it and run with it.

Participant: This is Katie Anise in Washington, DC. This sounds like a very good example of a comprehensive program with CBOs (inaudible)... and CBOs, not just CBOs doing alternative school programs. Are there any other good examples of good comprehensive programs that you know of?

Ken Dahl: Not really off the top of my head that I know enough detail about, I guess.

Participant: Hi, this is Susan Rabbitt, I'm from Springfield, Massachusetts. We have a fairly comprehensive program in Springfield that brings together nineteen CBO providers, we call it the CBO Provider Network. When we wrote our original school-to-work grant, we put in money to give out to providers so that we could get them to do school-to-work activities. We're doing mini-grants of a hundred thousand dollars a year to get people to the table, and this is our third year. The Provider Network has gotten very strong. I think somebody else mentioned it, when people get together and start talking to each other, they can really do a great job of addressing gaps in the system for target populations and also for out-of-school youth.

Participant (Katie Anise): And you said this is connected with the Corporation for Business, Work and Learning?

Participant (Susan Rabbitt): The Corporation for Business, Work and Learning funds part of the school-to-work staff in Springfield, so they're involved in that way. They're also involved now because the Provider Network is implementing Diploma Plus, which is an education model for out-of-school youth, and the Corporation for Business, Work and Learning is funding that, so I guess they are involved that way also.

Eugene Piccolo: I have a question. The nineteen CBOs that you are providing these mini-grants of a hundred thousand, what types of an organization are they?

Participant (Susan Rabbitt): We have Good Will Industry, an organization called Abilities Unlimited, which works with students with disabilities, The Urban League, several community centers, some vocational training facilities, one in the community colleges, Girl Scouts, and YWCA, which serves pregnant and parenting teens.

Ken Dahl: Is this something that you issued an for RFP for?

Participant (Susan Rabbitt): Yes.

Participant: Here in California, I wanted to mention that we have what may be considered a comprehensive system. It includes a CBO and the Southern California Transition Coalition, which works with students with disabilities. Of course, we have many members, such as CBOs in our coalition. So we sit at the table with the schools and the people that are the fiscal agents with the school-to-work grant. And one of the executive directors of the school-to-work grant is also the director of a CBO. So it means that we're all talking together, we're all trying to ensure inclusion of all students and working with all the resources within our various organizations. With the California funding structures, funds go to these other agencies separately, but the fact that we're all at the table talking with one another means that we can share resources and work together.

Mary Mack: I would really like to thank both Gene and Ken and everybody that participated in this call. I think it's been a great call. If you have any questions that you'd like to address to me, my telephone number is 612-624-7579. Thank you very much for participating.

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Posted January 20, 1998
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