May 5, 2020

Approval of Notes from February 11, 2020

Notes from February 11, 2020

The notes were approved.

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Guided Pathways Presentation - Meta-Majors

https://www.deanza.edu/guided-pathways/

Lydia Hearn and Kim Harding-Palmore presented an update on the progress of defining the meta-majors for the guided pathways initiative in accordance with the California Community College Chancellor’s Office  key goals of guided pathways. These key goals are: 

Transactional vs. Transformational.

Guided Pathways cannot be reduced to a list of transactional boxes to check off. To truly change the student experience, Guided Pathways must be transformational. We must allow it to:

• Shift our culture and drive us to analyze the processes used to help develop structures and programs that will support our students
• Become an iterative process, continually moving forward to allow both our future vision and our analysis of past decisions to motivate us in creating the best possible structures and programs.

Pillar One: Clarifying the Pathway

The first pillar of Guided Pathways is to create clear, curricular pathways to employment and further education. By offering our students clear information on program expectations, they are more likely to choose a program early on Less likely to take classes that don’t contribute to their overall goals. This will keep them from obtaining excess credits and reduce their time to completion.

Two Key Aspects in Clarifying the Pathway. Clarifying the pathway means organizing programs into meaningful categories, meta-majors, and providing clear direction on program requirements utilizing program maps.

Developing Meta-Majors - Students Need Direction. Many California community colleges offer a wide array of programs, which works well for students who know exactly what opportunities they want to pursue. However, many of our incoming students don’t have concrete goals about what they want to study or where they want that program to lead them in the long term.

Broad Areas of Interest. By organizing programs into meaningful categories, or meta-majors, we can help overcome this problem. Instead of offering students a drop-down menu of all 100+ programs available, they can initially choose from a list of broad areas of interest, such as Humanities, Technology, Education, etc.

The choice of a meta-major could then:

• Lead to the choice of a particular program associated with it, or
• Lead to an exploratory program that allows the student to get a good sense of the various programs within that area of interest

Meta-Majors Drive Informed Decisions. By hierarchically organizing the decision-making process into two choices of 5-20 options each, rather than one choice of 100+ options, students can better manage the information necessary to make well-informed decisions.

Making Sense from a Student Perspective. The term ‘meta-major’ is not one that fits with relentless clarity. As we design structures and support through the lens of a student, it is important that we label things in a way that makes sense from their perspective. Colleges engaged in Guided Pathways work refer to meta-majors in different ways, such as:

• Field or area of interest
• Career cluster
• Academic and career community

The key is to ensure that the label makes sense to the students of each institution so that we are providing clear program maps

Hearn and Harding-Palmore’s presentation will be taken to the other governance groups for review and then they will present the meta-majors to College Council in June for review and approval.

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Student Centered Funding Formula (SCFF)

Grey presented a worksheet compiled by the California Community College Chancellor’s Office which detailed the breakdown of 2019-2020 First Principle Apportionment for FHDA. The document reflected the amount of revenue FHDA is receiving directly from the new SCFF ($144M), the amount of 2019-2020 hold-harmless money FHDA is receiving ($13M), as well as the amount of funding FHDA would receive under "basic aid"  ($121M).

The SCFF is split into three funding sections known as 70/20/10. 70% of revenue is Basic Allocation (FTES). 20% of revenue is Supplemental Allocation (AB540, Pell & Promise). 10% of revenue is Student Success Allocation (all students, Pell & Promise students). The college is working on separating the Foothill and De Anza data to form a clearer picture of exactly which areas De Anza is doing well and which areas need improvement. This information will assist the college with forward planning within the framework of SCFF allocations.

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Annual Governance Reflection Questions

The team worked on the annual government reflections and approved the following statements.

1) Reflecting on the work of your governance group over the past year, how did this work help fulfill our mission, values, strategic initiatives, Institutional Core Competencies, and commitment to equity?

Last year, at the Board of Trustees’ directive, De Anza had to reduce its ongoing budget by a total of $6.3 million. The group spent the primary amount of their time on setting criteria and evaluating ways to meet this budget reduction directive. As well as referring to the college and team's guiding documents, the group also reviewed and approved the following documents during the year which assisted guiding the budget reduction decisions: - the Equity Plan; Updated Institutional Metrics including vision for Success Goals; the College Planning Committee Report on Student Equity & Achievement Program (SEA), and the college's carry-forward balance. The team also reviewed the profit and loss statements for the enterprise funded departments that provide core services to students.

2) Reflecting on your governance group’s processes and practices over the past year, please identify what has been working and what changes you plan to implement over the next academic year to ensure continuous improvement.

At the start of each academic year the group reviews the team's Mission, Role, Guiding Principles and Ground Rules. Any updates to the college's overarching guiding documents are discussed and, if approved by the team, improvements are made to the team's processes and practices and are published to the team's website. Improvements the team made last year as a result of reflection was the renaming of the division to better reflect how it serves the colleges. The team continues to review and approve any governance group items which will remain a core practice. This year some of the main agenda items in addition to the items listed in question (1) were the De Anza 2019 Update to the FHDA Facilities Master Plan 2016-2022; the Community Benefit Initiative (CBI) Update; the De Anza Event Center, Guided Pathways Presentation – Meta-Majors, and the governance handbook, new student-centered funding formula. Since Covid-19 has prompted a move to remote meetings, we anticipate discussions surrounding strengthening our virtual meeting presence. The team will also need to closely monitor the profit and loss statements for the enterprise funded services as these departments are dependent upon student patronage. These departments will face substantial fiscal challenges for the rest of this year and into next year.

 3) Reflecting on your groups’ ability to disseminate information to its stakeholders, what are some strengths and weaknesses in regards to ensuring that all stakeholders are informed of the committee’s activities, processes, policies and decisions? How can you improve your process for information dissemination next year? 

Meeting agendas and minutes are posted online. The dissemination of information has been considerably improved over the past years by the communications and internal relations division's complete review and update to the college's web presence. Included in this update were major improvements to the governance groups' websites. The sites are now easier to navigate and comply to accessibility requirements. Web sites continue to be an efficient and accurate information sharing medium.  Constituent team members choose their preferred method of reporting out to their members. Typically, this entails emailing their members or governance body. Each PBT reports out to College Council as a means to increase information dissemination. This process will continue next year. Since Covid-19 has prompted a move to remote meetings, we anticipate discussions surrounding our virtual meeting presence.

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 Quick News

The Administrative services division is severely impacted by the COVID-19 shelter in place as the division has a number of enterprise funded departments which have been closed and therefore not generating revenue but are still incurring expenses. More details will be shared on the status of opening the campus as it becomes available. It was noted that the opening of the district is dependent on the County of Santa Clara /State of California information.

Present: Chand, Fritz, Gerard, Gore, Harada, Harding-Palmore, Hearn, Varela, Yi-Baker. Notes Gibson.