Assembly Standing Committee on Education

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you very much for being here today. We have today's Subcommitee No. 3 on Education, Finance and Education Committee Joint Hearing. I'm your Chair, Assemblymember David Alvarez, and I'll allow colleagues to introduce themselves. We have the Chair of the Education Committee, Assemblymember Muratsuchi, with us. Today is mostly an informational meeting.

This is an opportunity to allow us to dialogue between each other, to hear from the public, certainly, and interest holders about the governor's master plan process and the intended outcomes of the master plan, as well as their existing major career technical education programs that we have. There has been some great strides in recent years. I think we can really all reflect on that. The focus has been on increasing career readiness funding and capacity at our schools.

And in addition to generous one time investments in dual enrollment, regional CTE systems and various other CTE programs, California has over 600 million in ongoing dedicated CTE funding at our K-12 level. We are serving a record number of students and certainly look forward to hearing about the outcomes of those programs that we are delivering. The master plan is an opportunity to get smarter with our major investments and to make sure we have the accountability tools in place as well.

We will take public comments after the completion of all the panels and any discussion from Members and of the Committee, I would encourage public comments to include feedback on the master plan process. We'd like to hear your thoughts and on the programs that are covered today. So with that, I'll turn it over to Chairman Muratsuchi.

Thank you very much, Chair Alvarez. Good afternoon, everyone. It's good to see all of the CTE statewide leaders in the room. I am a big believer in the power of career technical education to change lives. I sat on the board of trustees of the Southern California Regional Occupational Center, which is a wonderful program that celebrated over 50 years of providing what we used to call vocational ed, now career technical education.

But I've seen how it changes lives, how students, they get bored in traditional subjects, light up suddenly when they have an opportunity to take well designed career technical education programs that prepare them both for career and college. And so I'm very much looking forward to learning more about the master plan proposal today, but also to hear from all of the direct providers of career technical education in terms of what are your biggest challenges that you continue to face?

A lot of my attention for today's hearing is going to be focused on-- because I'm such a big believer, I've heard over and over again from career technical education providers that there is a very cumbersome grant application process. And that in particular I'll be asking Mr. Ferguson to address why is it that we can't combine the CTIG program with the K-12 strong workforce program, given that so many of the frontline CTE providers supported my bill last year that was proposing to do that?

So I look forward to exploring that as well as many of the other issues to make sure that we can provide more of our California students with opportunities for career technical education. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Fong.

Thank you so much, Chair Alvarez, and good afternoon, everyone. As Chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, thank you so much for inviting all the Higher Education Committee members to join. I know what will be a robust conversation and similar to my colleagues, as a former trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District, CTE and workforce development were big priorities for myself and for our organization.

And as a former trustee, I had the opportunity to Chair that HOC Committee on jobs in the economy for the district, bringing together industry partners to the table, to look at best practices, to coordinate with the LA Economic Development Corporation, to coordinate with the workforce development boards, and looking at regional opportunities and regional growth sectors and different industry clusters. So I'm really looking forward to today's conversation. Thank you so much to Chair Alvarez and Chair Muratsuchi for inviting the different panelists.

And as we have the conversation about the Governor's executive order, alignment and coordination and really looking at those opportunities to really weave career education in the K-16 landscape, this is critical work to look at the future of California, the future of jobs. And I know that there's also the overarching goals of career pathways, hands-on learning and real life skills, and also universal access and affordability in terms of guiding points in this executive order.

Look forward to today's conversation, and thank you so much for keeping the Legislature prize of these very important priorities and opportunities around dual enrollment programs and CTE programs going forward. Thank you so much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. With that, we'll get started. It's exciting hearing today. And for our first panel, we have Kathy Booth with WestEd. Welcome. And Chris Ferguson from the Department of Finance. Welcome back. We're looking forward to both of your presentations. And whoever would like to go first, please go ahead and get started.

Certainly. Chris Ferguson with the California Department of Finance. So as we think about the master plan on career education and the process around building out what that would look like, I think we view it as a very interest holder centric process by which we're going out both on a regional basis.

We've had some statewide meetings to try and get input from our local interest holders around how we better engage with industry, how industry better engages with students, how we're better aligning both our segments and our processes around that sort of skill focused, industry focused approach. We certainly view this as critical to coming forward with a plan that we can then have a robust conversation around how we get to those North Star items in the report.

At this point in time, we don't have a specific proposal before the Legislature indicating a specific direction. Rather, we're really trying to work with interest holders to build out what that report will look like. But we do have some overarching goals that it is about alignment. It is about trying to make sure that we're enabling students and adults to access the programs necessary to be successful in seeking economic mobility in our economy.

It's about trying to make sure that we're as aligned as possible between our schools, our community colleges, our university systems, our workforce development systems, and that includes our adult education providers as well. I think we want all involved. I know a lot of the conversation is focused around career technical education, but we view career education as much broader than just career technical education. We view it as skills that industries need. It's building the programs around those skills, and it's universal to all programs.

It's providing things like experiential learning opportunities for students that may not otherwise have natural connections to the industries in which they're studying or they seek to study. Excellent examples can be you may be studying, say, chemical engineering at a university, but you may not necessarily have a natural connection to the employers in that industry. And oftentimes what we see is that student then ends up being employed in a different sector of the economy because they don't end up with that natural connection.

Certainly we also view this as an opportunity to also enable students to access as many of the available programs as possible when it comes to providing support for their educational journeys and for their workforce opportunities. Excellent examples can be making sure that we're enabling as many university and college students to access CalFresh as possible. As you may recall, that's a federally funded program.

So the more students that are eligible that we can get onto that program, the more benefit those students would have and the more resources, therefore, they would have to complete their educational journeys.

Certainly there are other opportunities to look at some of the systems around which we convey skills and what skills students are learning in different areas of study, whether that's in your schools, whether that's in our colleges or universities, and that's to try and make it much easier for businesses to understand the skills that students are receiving in those programs, but also for students to be able to convey the skills that they've learned in different programs.

We have various programs of study in the state that we wouldn't necessarily think about certain types of skills being earned, but if we look to, say, an English course, you learn critical thinking, you learn other aspects in that course, and it can be at times difficult to convey to an employer the skills that you've obtained in those courses.

What we can say is, as we look at this, that also helps with systems alignment, because if you're able to convey the skills that you have learned or are learning, you can then also help advance your educational focus or your workforce development focus as well. So we see a lot of benefit overall in this planning process. We know that it's a little bit of a robust process. We know that it's a very ambitious process.

But we know that a lot of the items we're trying to figure out and work through have been historical challenges. We know it's been historically challenging for industry to engage with our schools, our colleges and universities, because there are so many of them throughout the state. We know that it's been difficult for some students to be able to convey the skills that they've learned in their course of study or in their training programs.

We know that there are, on occasion, difficulties translating what has been learned in one segment to another segment. So we're really trying to address some of those systemic challenges that we've seen in the past and do so in a way that's as thoughtful as possible and really create sort of that North Star vision. And we do so knowing that our economy is changing rapidly right now. We know we have returning adults that have some college but no degree.

We know that that population is only growing over time. We know that generative AI is rapidly changing the way we think about work, the way we think about education and what students and employers and employees will be capable of doing moving forward. So there's a lot of interest from the Administration and trying to have a robust process around how we think through these challenges, how we create a north star to get or to focus our efforts toward building toward.

But with that, I'll turn it over to Kathy.

Thank you so much, Chris. And if you could put my presentation up, that would be great. I'm Kathy Booth from WestEd, and I'm here to talk to you today because WestEd is supporting the governor's office in the community engagement process to co-design the master plan for career education. So next slide, please. I think that one of the things that's really important to underscore right now is that this is a career education master plan.

Often when I'm describing this to people, they're like, oh, you mean CTE? And my response is, it's broader than that. And that's not to marginalize CTE in any way, but to recognize that there are many different systems by which Californians train for work and for life. So that might be a linked learning program they do in K-12. It could be an apprenticeship program that they access through the community colleges. It could be their majors in CSU, UC, or an independent or private college.

It could be a training program offered by the labor agency, or it could be a specialized program such as one offered by the Department of Rehabilitation. And right now, all of these systems are independently trying to solve the same problems.

And what that means is that if you are a Californian who's trying to navigate these different places where maybe you learned skills that are very directly relatable to the career aspirations that you have or the life that you want to live, we have to go through a process of translation. Every single one of these systems has a different language. It has a different funding architecture, it has different accountability metrics, it has different timelines, and they generally don't recognize each other's work.

And so as a result, we leave it up to individuals to figure out how to navigate these complex bureaucracies, to explain to employers what they know how to do. So the career education master plan is really looking at those underscoring structures, and how is it that we can make them work together more effectively so that we make this more seamless for the people being served?

And also, as was mentioned in the introductory remarks, for the people that are trying to provide the education and training that rather than putting the burden on practitioners to braid various funding sources, we can take the incredible investment that California has made to create equitable opportunities for learning and make it so that teachers can teach and they don't have to worry so much about filling particular conflicting grant application processes. So that's really the point.

The other thing related to that is that we really want to do this in a manner that is not just the governor's office coming up with a bunch of ideas or legislators doing this, or advocates, but really bringing together the knowledge of a wide range of constituents to design the solutions. So there's a fairly-- Go ahead to the next slide. There's a fairly complex map here. And what I'm going to do is just summarize what we're doing.

So when the Governor put out the executive order last August, he basically named the diversity of funding sources that we have created in the state and identified some issues that needed to be resolved. And then there were eight agencies that were listed that needed to provide written recommendations to address those issues that were laid out in the executive order. So last fall we had a scenario where those eight agencies pulled together written recommendations that were delivered in December.

But the Governor also invited other interested parties to submit their own written recommendations. And WestEd went forward with a series of more than 30 interviews with advocates and practitioners and even some members of this Committee to understand better what the issues are that we could possibly address. So we took all of that input and we created a document that was shared in January and then is currently available on the career education master plan website.

I don't want to interrupt you, but we don't have this slide and it's difficult for us to see. Can you point out, at least generally, what you've mapped out here? We really can't read it from the dais here.

Absolutely. So what I'm talking about right now is, in essence, the first column that goes from October to December. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to narrate the intention of what's in this slide. I'll make sure that you have it afterwards. The specifics are not as important. What's important to recognize is that during the fall, there was a robust process to gather input from a variety of sources about how to address the issues that were named by the Governor in the executive order.

The next thing that I'm going to talk about is that time period from January to March. So what happened here is that we had a webinar in January where we took all of the ideas that we had received over the fall and we put them into a single document.

It's about five pages long, and it covers the major issues that the master plan is going to be addressing based on where we saw a consensus in the issues that were being raised in the written comments and the interviews that we received to that point. And I will go over some of what those core concepts are so that we all have a chance to look at them together.

In addition to the fact that you could go to the website and you can download that document, and you can also download a recording of the webinar where we provided a lot more illustrative examples than we have time to do today. So based on that, we are now engaging in a process that's going to run through May, where we're going out and gathering further input about ways to operationalize the preliminary concepts that we articulated in January. So I'll give you an example.

There are four different domains for those concepts. One's about coordination, one's about skills based pathways, one's about work based learning, and one is about supports necessary to access learning. So that third category, work based learning, has an item in it about how difficult it can be for employers to be able to engage in work based learning.

So rather than coming up with a definitive solution as part of the draft that was released in January, we're now going out and gathering input from people who have struggled with being able to engage employers or employers that have struggled to deliver work based learning. So we are doing seven regional convenings around the state that are being attended by a broad array of people.

So we've got employers there, and we've got labor representatives, we've got educators, we've got training providers, we've got constituents, we've got advocates. We've got families and students who are all coming together, and we're asking them, okay, if you wanted to solve this issue of how to make it easier for employers to engage in work based learning, what would you do? And from that, we're gathering some very specific suggestions.

We also have specific suggestions that came in during that input gathering that we did in the fall. So, for example, a number of people pointed to a particular regulation that has to do with how 17 year olds need to be treated in a workplace. And many people have created ideas for ways that policy could be amended that would open up opportunity. Another idea that we heard quite often is that access to work based learning is inequitable because it's often based on personal relationships.

So then, rather than leaving it up to whoever happens to work at the high school or college that you attend to find those relationships with employers, what if we had a regional convening or coordinating body that helped to broker relationships with employers to make that more equitable? So those are examples of some of the ideas that are up for consideration right now.

What's going to happen between now and the end of June is we're going to be pulling those into discrete proposals for actions that could be taken, that are tangible actions. They could be a change to policy. They could be a recommended change to practice. They could be an idea that would be shared with the Legislature about a bill that could be passed.

We're looking for a variety of ways that these ideas could be implemented, and then you're going to see those in the first draft of the master plan, which will come out in July. So that is where we're going to be putting forward those specific proposals. But we're going to leave it open for discussion for a further period until the fall before it gets nailed down.

And we're going to have a number of structures where we're going to be getting feedback, both from the agencies that would be responsible for carrying this out and from the constituencies that would be affected by these policies. And I'll talk about that more in just a second. So go to the next slide. All right, so this is actually, I probably should have gone to these slides originally.

This is the listing of all those particular activities that we did in the fall that articulates the interviews that we did, the ways that we gathered written recommendations. And then if we go to the next slide, this is where you can see information about the particular regional convenings that we have coming up. So our first regional convening was last Friday in El Centro for the southern border. We'll be in Long Beach this Friday.

And what you can see here is a list of the other regions where we're going to be holding these convenings that are co-design sessions. So people can go now to the website for the career education master plan, and you can fill out an interest form for people who would like to attend those convenings.

Unfortunately, we only have room for 150 people at each session, so we actually review people that have expressed interest to make sure that we have a range of perspectives in the room, so that we do have employers and we do have advocates and we do have families in addition to people that might be more commonly engaged in these conversations. We'll also do a final regional convening, sorry, virtual convening that will allow for more space for others to be able to share their input.

Once we have that first draft of the master plan in July, we will then convene a series of five advisory groups that will look at the totality of what would be in the master plan. So there's one for students and families, one for policymakers and advocates, one for employers and labor representatives, one for workforce development entities, and one for educators.

And what they will do is they will look at the whole thing and make sure that what's been proposed is going to make sense in their individual context. And their input will then go into the revision of the draft of the master plan. That will happen in the fall before it's finalized. Next slide, please. So what I want to do is talk through what those four preliminary concepts, the major domains are. So you have a sense about the kinds of ideas that are being discussed.

So the first area is coordination. So one of the issues we heard loud and clear is that it's very difficult to coordinate these diverse funding streams without having a body that can bring people together to be able to talk about all the investments that California is making with both its federal and state dollars. So in the past there's been experiments with California having a coordinating board for just a particular segment, such as higher education.

And what we heard from a variety of places is that it would be valuable to have a coordinating body that represents all of the different education and training providers, so that you would have education, but also labor, you'd have employers represented that would be able to look at ways to best use California's investments and set priorities. But this would then need to be paired with regional coordinating bodies that could adapt those priorities for local considerations.

So, for example, if at the state level, we said we need to figure out a way to address how artificial intelligence, AI, is affecting jobs, it might be very different in the Central Valley, where AI could be a tool for being more efficient in water usage and more of a threat in Silicon Valley for jobs related to coding occupations going away because AI can do it. So we'd have regional coordinating bodies that would adapt those statewide ideas to the specifics of local consideration.

In addition to that, we heard a lot of people saying they really needed better information to advise such decision making bodies, both related to labor market information as well as consistent measures of progress for people in getting education and moving into living wage work, so that we'd have to have some bodies that would be providing that information. And finally, that we would need to be coordinating technical assistance to make sure that people on the ground were able to implement these ideas. So that's the first area.

Next slide, please. The second has to do with skills pathways. So one of the things that we would need to do if we were bridging these different education and training providers is to understand what is the evolution of skills that you would need over time as you're building toward particular occupations. So coming up with maps that we could develop that would look at the ways skills are built across a variety of venues, which could then be used in a variety of ways.

One is that it could be used to improve the college and career exploration opportunities for K-12 students, where we're really digging into the artificial divide between CTE and college that sometimes happens despite our best efforts and really helping people understand the pathways they could get to jobs that they would find interesting, including having more work based learning beginning in middle school.

And that those maps could also be used to inform guidance that could be given to adults when people are wanting to go back and engage in education and training to meet the evolution of what they need related to their jobs. In addition to that, there's a real focus. This builds on the AB 928 recommendations that we need a mechanism for establishing equivalencies between learning that might happen in one venue that could then be applied to another.

So you could imagine a framework in which we've got a clear way to evaluate the experience that you learned as a field medic in the military, relate that to EMT coursework that you might take in community colleges and have that recognized toward a bachelor's degree in an allied health related pathway. But we need a mechanism that would do that, and in that, we need to make sure that we've got the ability to pass information about relevant skills between education providers.

And so we're looking at scaling eTranscript California, which is an existing state funded platform, to do that. Other ideas are that we would need to coordinate offerings at the regional level to be able to respond to labor market demand, so that if we know that we need a certain number of people with a particular skill set, that the region could determine how it would allocate the delivery of that services.

And that finally, one of the issues that was also raised that is very specific to a particular pathway is the need to strengthen teacher preparation opportunities so that we can attract and retain more folks in the teaching field. Next slide, please.

The third concept is work-based learning, and here are a couple of different ideas. One is creating stronger incentives both for employers and for education agencies to do this work.

The second is to make sure that we can give more opportunities for people to get either academic credit or payment for participating in work-based learning, which is important because right now, doing work-based learning is often treated as a volunteer opportunity that puts it out of reach of low-income folks who have to have a job in addition to going to school.

And finally, we need to be making sure that other types of applied learning, like fellowships, research projects, that we're clearly linking those back to career opportunities. And then our final area has to do next slide, please. Has to do with those ways that we can generate more access. And here, we've got a variety of different concepts. Some of this is about making sure that we're more fully taking advantage of the College Savings program that the Governor has introduced.

Another is looking at ways that we have better financial support for adult learners who may not be currently eligible for some types of aid. We do see that short-term Pell is moving at the federal level. We could maybe take that as a model for California having more ways to support undocumented students, having more ways that we are recommending people into public benefit programs, and finally making sure that we're using sort of universal design principles as we're designing access to make sure that everyone can participate.

So, I realize this was a very dense amount of information for me to deliver in a short period of time, but that's basically the concepts that are under consideration for the career education master plan. And we look forward to being able to provide more specific proposals when the first draft is ready in July.

Thank you. And unfortunately, we did not have your presentation, and so we followed along as we were able to see the slides. I know I jotted down some questions and I might be jumping around as I asked them because I didn't have, again, your slides here. But maybe I'll start with the last slide that you had up on the concept of access.

And there's two that caught my attention, work that certainly is of interest to me and that I'm trying to do some work around, which is one was financial supports for adult learners.

I'm just curious what kind of feedback you've received around that and whether the conversation has at all been around Cal Grant reform, which certainly focuses on financial supports for learners who aged out of the current Cal grant system or who skipped over a year between high school and college and are also perhaps not eligible for financial aid. Is that at all part of the conversations or - I don't know if you've been able to, how much you've tracked, all this feedback that you've had, the specific issues.

That you raised were raised in the comments that were sent in to the Governor's office. Okay, so you're naming things that are very much aligned with the types of problems that we're looking for solutions for right now.

Okay. And then the other one that caught my attention, something else I'm working on, which was financial opportunities for undocumented students. And on that front, the opportunity for potentially our college systems to employ undocumented students. It's a policy I'm working on, but certainly found that interesting. What is the feedback that you received for that specific bullet point that you outlined?

Again, most of what we heard were people articulating the fact that this was a real challenge and looking for solutions to be able to make it possible for people.

So there were no solutions proposed or ideas. It was more, this is an issue and a concern.

In the original set of recommendations that we got, it was more just raising the issue. So what we're currently doing is researching possible solutions in addition to recruiting in the field for folks that might have solutions.

Okay. On the skills or the concept of skills, but then you also have the concept of work based learning. I noted that you talked about beginning as early as middle school, which is certainly the right age group to begin that with. But what about in communities where we don't have large employers who are the ones who typically participate in those opportunities? I certainly represent vast majority of my district.

Most people commute to go to work because you don't have the employment centers that other parts of the state have. And so what are some of the ways that people have expressed the ability for people to have those types of, or for students to have work based learning, especially like at a middle school age where traveling is not really an option for those students.

So, we both heard from a number of people that access to work based learning, especially in rural areas, can be very difficult because of the nature of employment. So, that was an issue that was flagged related to the middle school participation.

Some of the other suggestions that we got was to look at the broad definition of work based learning, which doesn't always mean being directly on a work site and coming up with other ways that you could provide exposure to the nature of work in various contexts, to provide opportunities for students to learn about different occupations that they might not be aware of.

So, I think that as we're fleshing out what it might look like, one thing that was crystal clear is so many people said that this has to start in middle school. And so as we're looking at exemplars from around the states, I know that there are leas that are already moving forward on this, that we can bring forward potential models and look at ways that those could be scaled.

Okay. Yeah, I'd be interested in seeing those. I know there are also some alternative education models, such as there's one national network called the Cristo Rey Network of Schools, which I think we have one in Sacramento. Actually, we have one in San Diego, where I'm from, where students spend at least I think it's one day a week at a workplace. I know I have a student in my office down in San Diego and getting exposure to different. Certainly, I think it's been done. It's possible.

So, hopefully it can become more available. I also just wanted to make a comment that I noted that you're convening in the south border area was in Imperial County. I make a plug to having some sort of invitation for San Diego's to participate. There are two very different border communities. There are a lot of similarities, but in terms of being able to participate and the issues that each communities face are different.

And so I'd ask that you think about how you engage the San Diego community in future conversations. And then I also heard you mention now getting to just the overall master plan. I think that's where my colleagues will have a lot of questions and I'll just kick it off with two and then pass it on. You talked about in June, implementing ideas is what I think I heard you say.

But then I also heard you say the first draft of the master plan in July with again, that difficult for us to see chart of your timeline. I think you had feedback and, at some point later, in a few months after that, having the actual master plan. So I guess the question now more directly to our work as a Legislature, do you think, and maybe, Chris, you might be able to be more helpful answer this: will there be proposals in June when know time comes around, legislative proposals that we should be expecting in June or should we expect any for end of session given that the draft will be in July or do you anticipate legislative action maybe for next year? What is your thinking at the moment?

Yeah. I would likely say that it would be next year. I think the final version of the report won't come out until October, which is after the end of session. So, we really would be looking at the next year's budget cycle, the next year's legislative cycle.

I know you're reviewing, and you have a public process, which I appreciate, but can you give us a flavor of perhaps what the legislature would be asked to do both on policy and obviously for purposes of this committee I chair on the budget side? What kind of implications are we talking about?

Yeah, I think it's a bit too premature to get into specifics of what we might bring forward or what we might propose for the legislature's consideration, but they really would be focused on some of these broader concepts of "How do we try to embed work-based learning opportunities; how do we better enable coordination between the segments and employers and training providers; how do we focus on trying to ensure that students have as broad access to available programs and supports and benefit programs that are out there?"

So those are sort of the broad concepts, but I don't think there's any one specific idea that we could know expect this to occur or to be proposed by the administration in a given time period. They defer to Kathy as well.

I just simply wanted to share that we've been engaging the legislative staff from the various ed committees from the beginning of the process, and we are going to be holding quarterly meetings with those folks to make sure they're aware of the ideas as they begin to develop steam. Our intention is to have the process be as transparent as possible. So, we will begin shortly to post the ideas that are coming out of the regional convening so that they're visible for everybody to take a look at.

And I think that the intention really is to have this be a true partnership. So we're talking about legislation, but there's also ways that we're engaging the particular agencies that would be affected by this, some of whom are already moving things forward. So, for example, eTranscript California is a product of the California Community College Chancellor's Office, and they are already moving all sorts of things to make it possible for us to be able to transcript learning.

So some of this will happen in the legislative process, but because this is deeply tied to the compacts and the roadmap, I would expect that we would see actions coming from a variety of places.

Okay, I'm going to turn it over to our colleagues for now. Chairman Muratsuchi.

Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Booth, for emphasizing partnership. I know that Ms. Luke from the Education Committee has been involved in some of those briefings, and I look forward to continue to engage. I come from the perspective where I think I'm one of the few in the legislature that saw the transition from the categorical CTE programs to the Local Control Funding Formula that was adopted in 2013.

I know not only as a former ROCP trustee, but from my experience here in the legislature, that the funding drives a lot of the realities that the providers see. It's good to hear that you're going directly to the providers to work with them, hopefully to have almost like a bottom up approach to inform the master plan. But given my experience, I'm very concerned about how the master plan may define top down what the providers have to deal with.

Specifically, one issue that I believe there was a slide that you didn't provide on the screen but that you had provided to staff earlier. You identified several issues and Ms. Booth, and one of the issues is that education and training programs with similar goals are funded through numerous agencies funding and grant programs, which ties into my earlier comments about why is it that the K 12 CTEIG program is split up from the Community college administered portion of the K 12 strong workforce program? It sounds like the master plan is going to be addressing that, as well as many other issues to try to streamline the overall process. But could you either Mr. Ferguson or Ms. Booth comment on?

I think, you know, certainly, we'll look at some of those particular specifics, but it goes into a much broader realm in that we can often see in the budget we will put in resources in, say, the health and human services arena, for workforce development and for workforce training. We may do something similar in, say, the public safety arena, the labor and energy and resources arenas, the education arenas. And I think that's sort of what we're thinking along the lines of is it's that broad concept of we're all trying to address similar problems in multiple areas of the budget.

It's not just education focused, and it's how can we make sure we're aligned and coordinated as best we can be in how we're offering those opportunities, how we're incenting the program developments, how we're trying to make sure that we might not be duplicating a particular focus between, say, healthcare through human services or health and human Services program versus healthcare programs that are offered by our community college system, our independent universities and colleges, or the CSU and UC.

And it's really some of that broad thinking that we're trying to have a focus on. Let's just make sure we're as coordinated and focused as we can be, knowing that we have a plethora of programs.

But I can also say to your point, we are aware in, say, the community college system, we hear this quite often from our presidents and our administrators, that it is difficult when they have 70 different programs, to try and blend and braid all of those programs together into one cohesive approach that best serves the students on their campuses. But I will say all of those programs have been established and funded because they were well intended.

They were intended to address specific problems that we were seeing on campuses. But in doing so and addressing those challenges and trying to best serve the students, it also creates some administrative hurdles that can be difficult to work through.

All right, thank you. Well, I look forward to the master plan continues to be developed. And again, I would urge that you keep front and center the perspectives of the providers who are actually implementing the programs. And the example of Mr. Ferguson, you talked about how they were well intended. But then there's what's well intended and what is implemented.

And one of the challenges, as you may recall, Mr. Ferguson, that I saw in terms of the change in the CT programs from categorical to the LCFF programs, was that it undermined regional - I know that Governor Brown was championing the regional workforce development perspective that workforce needs are regional, and so we shouldn't be having these siloed approaches. We should have a bigger regional approach to addressing workforce needs, which completely makes sense on a theoretical level. But when the CTEIG grants were going to.

When individual school districts were eligible for the CTEIG grants, that incentivized the school districts to create their own CTE programs at the expense of the regional programs, like the Southern California Regional Occupational Center that had, using the combined economies of scale, of six school districts participating in the regional program, they were able to buy expensive CTE equipment that individual school districts would not be able to afford. It doesn't make sense for each separate school district to have expensive CT equipment.

Again, I hope that you'll keep in mind the actual lived experience of the impact, going from the categoricals that supported the regional programs to basically balkanizing these separate efforts. Because there's a reason why silos exist, right? I mean, silos exist because people want to get their own funding, and then they want to protect it from everyone else from the competition.

I would urge the master plan development efforts to think about how the funding drives that kind of balkanized effort versus how do you incentivize the regional so that you get beyond the natural inclination for separate leas to balkanize, to go back into the age, familiar silo effect? That's my questions for now.

Thank you, Chairman Muratsuchi. Ms. Bonta.

Thank you, Chair, and thank you for pulling this together. I think I have a potentially pretty basic question, which is, to what extent did we start with the end in mind, if the overall goal was there, an overall goal that was ever articulated that said, from a workforce pipeline standpoint, in order to be able to make sure that we have a thriving California, we need 26,000 TK teachers by 2030, or 79,000 healthcare providers annually in order to be able to ensure that we have enough healthcare providers to be able to support our system. Was there any kind of projection around workforce needs over the next decade that drove the master plan deliverables?

Yeah, I don't think there were any specific data points that we looked at. Rather, we know within the labor market right now, in multiple areas and multiple sectors of the economy, that there are workforce challenges. There are workforce needs.

We tried to articulate them as best we could when we were developing the compacts with UC and CSU and the roadmap with the community colleges, in that we know there are needs in healthcare, we know there are needs in education, we know there are needs in social work, we know that there are needs in resources in computer science, that we know that there are needs in multiple industries throughout the state.

And I think one of the overarching things that we're trying to do here is to say, recognizing that we have these needs, recognizing that it can be challenging for students and employers to understand what skills they have or what skills they need, and to rapidly adjust to meet those needs and to be able to display that you have those skills to meet those needs.

That's sort of the premise where we're coming from, and we've heard many times over the years, it is challenging for schools and colleges and universities and our employers to work together because there are just so many schools. There are numerous community colleges. We have 23 CSU campuses, 10 UC campuses, and it's hard to engage at a level where you can do it campus by campus or school site by school site, even district by district.

So we're trying to be as student focused and employer focused as we can to address a plethora of needs that we know are out there. But we didn't have a specific data point for each one. We just knew globally that there are workforce challenges.

Right now, I'm pretty concerned about that response, to be honest with you. I think particularly in human centered design, you often need to be able to start with a great amount of specificity around the problem that you are trying to solve. And I think getting a clear sensibility around the specific workforce pipeline issues that we have by industry in order to be able to drive a more coherent approach to essentially workforce development so that California is essentially growing its own.

To be able to fill the needs that we have would seem like the starting point of what we would want as a deliverable for the master plan. And that would then allow us to be able to be able to prevent the kind of balkanization that I think our chair was talking about, which I fundamentally agree with.

If you have the ability to essentially say UCSU based here, can focus on this particular area or emphasize this particular area as a way to be able to grow a particular population, specialize in cognitive behavioral therapy or whatever the thing might be, so that we actually have the ability to leverage the assets of every single region in a way that is much more thoughtful and deliberate, to be able to address our overall need.

So I'm not really seeing, even in the stakeholder listing, the ways in which our CSUs, our community colleges, our educational systems, are being driven towards a particular goal, as opposed to just a broad sense of children starting at the age of middle school, need to be connected up to the idea of work.

I think that one of the challenges is that trying to condense a fairly complicated document may have caused me to focus more on some use cases more than others. So, I can totally see why that would be a concern.

I think that the underlying issue that is driving this is that there are an enormous number of Californians who are adults who do not have a postsecondary credential and that, unfortunately, despite the hope that we can use skills-based hiring outside of several industries, that's not really a reality.

And that if we want to create equitable pathways to living wage jobs, that we have to move away from the silos, where people get sorted early on into categories from which it is very difficult for them to ever escape. And so I don't think that we did that sort of sector analysis that you're identifying as part of the opening to it.

However, the focus on having a stronger entity to provide usable labor market information is part of the engine to drive the solution that you were describing, that basically, you would end up with a system that would have a better understanding of the gaps between what the good jobs are and what the training opportunities are, and where various populations sit relative to access to those. And that you're leveraging these interlocking set of systems, statewide coordinating entities, regional coordinating entities, to do things like regional enrollment management.

So in the solutions that have already emerged is this idea that if you understood what was needed in a particular region to, for example, build out the advanced manufacturing sector, that you could have open conversations between CSU and the community colleges and the workforce boards to say, "What are these jobs? What are the skills? Who lives here? How could we help them learn, and what is the right format?" So I think our hope is that we would drive towards something like you're describing.

But I certainly hear loud and clear that if we're not really understanding the reality that many Californians are facing about lack of access to living wage jobs, whether it's what they're told when they're 14 years old or what they're told when they're 48, then we're not going to design the appropriate solution. So, I really appreciate that insight.

You've raised a secondary concern. I do really think that the primary issue is that I was always taught that you start with the end in mind; if you need 100,000 workers of a particular type in industry, and we need to build a coordinated system to be able to address that, I think we should have a sensibility of what the original target is as we're developing out a master plan.

So, I am curious to understand whether that approach can, at this point, still be folded into the process. I worry about that happening after the fact, once you're already at the level of regionalization, to be able to do that, because then you've kind of lost the goal, kind of in the weeds of what any particular region is shooting for trying to do. I do have another general question around the level of coordination that needs to happen.

Having worked, there's a very important issue too. My mother spent 25 years in workforce development, and so this was our dinner conversation annually or daily, I should say. Coordination: So, to what extent is there going to be a serious asset mapping around the agencies and existing bodies that are already doing aspects of this work?

I think I heard, and I'd love for some clarification, that the intention is to essentially establish another coordinating body that perhaps has a kind of a statewide view, and then regional coordinating bodies that would be focused on this plethora of issues. But I also know that there are the regional occupation centers, there are workforce investment boards. There are all these different efforts that are already in place.

So is our plan to build off of the existing infrastructure, or is our plan to superimpose a new infrastructure on what's already there?

So, another part of the process. So we're going out, we're saying, what are the big issues so when you were citing, for example, that there was a bullet points that you had access to, when we presented this, we named the problems first and then identified the ways that we thought we could address those with these preliminary concepts. So what's happening now is that Westhead is in the middle of a large review of related policies and existing practices and systems.

So, for example, if we're looking at the question of regional coordination, we are absolutely going out and documenting all the different types of regional coordinating bodies that are currently out there. The goal is not to throw them all out and start over. There are times I'll take, for example, I come out of the community college system. There are regional consortia that are just mission critical for the abilities of community colleges to work together to make decisions about how they solve problems. This wouldn't erase that.

It would just say, "How do we have a stronger mechanism to make sure that they are coordinated with parallel efforts that might be happening with the workforce development boards?" And so what we would be doing is looking at what's already there and then suggesting a tangible solution, and that's going to get shopped with all the relevant parties.

So, we would start by engaging the labor agency and the community colleges and others that already have regional systems in place, the Rops, and say, how could we make this work better together? And the solution will be co-created with those entities rather than having it be a top-down solution.

We are really working as much as possible to talk to the folks that have to deal with these challenges day to day of coordination, to say, what is a system that would work the best for you to be able to coordinate across these entities without adding 16 more meetings to your calendar that are of limited value. So that's our hope.

I won't harp on the issue again. I think if you don't have clarity around what the overall target is in terms of the workforce pipeline that you're developing, then those conversations become quite murky. If you're talking about, for instance, just transition and making sure that we have more green jobs, issues of coordination, skills based pathways, work based learning, and access to work based learning are different for that particular sector than they would be for the healthcare sector.

And without having a broad overview of what we actually need, I don't really understand how we're actually working towards that deliverable. But I will seed my time. Thank you.

Thank you, Ms. Monta. I want to continue on the thread of that because let me acknowledge that different collaboratives, programs, groups of people that are focused on pathways and career, we could all fit under an umbrella, I think, of career readiness. I think that can happen. But I actually falsely assumed you actually were utilizing data of where we have significant shortages in the different industries to help guide this conversation. I assume that was what was happening.

I think it's going to be important that we do acknowledge those shortages as part of whatever the master plan ends up being because otherwise, what are we planning for? Or maybe there's a different perspective than what maybe some of us are thinking and you are looking perhaps to create new clusters of industries, and that's what the master plan may be more focused around. Maybe it's around. I heard you mention high wage jobs, which is good, but I think that still is a little murky for me.

But then you've got, I was on the Workforce Investment Board and sort of what we had to focus on was what are the jobs we need to train people for? And then there's the 21-22 Budget Act with $250 million on K-16 regional education collaboratives to create pathways. Again, maybe it fits under a master plan, but what are they currently doing, and how are they coordinating with questions and then I also recall the governor's announcement, and Mr. Ferguson, maybe you can help me better understand.

I believe the Governor announced, like regional economic zones or something like that. I specifically remember him mentioning a southern binational zone. That's the area I come from, and that's why I remember that. And I don't really know what that initiative is, but how does that also fit into this? To make sure that if we're going to have these zones throughout the state, are we creating then a master plan that reflects those zones?

Those are all questions that I have at the moment, and I'll give you an opportunity to respond.

Yeah, unfortunately, that's not my area of expertise, so I'll have to get back to you on the specifics of how that would be integrated. I would say, though, that within our thinking around the master plan, certainly, we need to harness and make sure that there is a focus on the data sets that we do have that tell us where we have workforce shortages, where we have needs in our economy so that we are focusing those statewide and regional efforts toward addressing those needs.

That's certainly part of what would have to be considered within the master plan. I think we're just not starting from having that data set drive all of the different components. Rather, it's how we integrate that to make sure that focus remains. And we have examples of that today, correct? We have our workforce development centers or one stop centers that you're referring to.

We have the centers for excellence at the community colleges that are designed around trying to help ensure that our programs are focused on the areas of need in our regional economy. So, certainly we have examples of how we can utilize those data sets. So, absolutely agree; that's something that we need to think through as part of the master plan.

Yeah. I would also just point to locally in San Diego; we actually just did some of this mapping. We looked at all of the industries, we looked at where the gaps existed in terms of we're not producing a prepared workforce. And then, we looked at why are there degrees that are not being offered at our local institutions of higher education. And if so, then in my brain, it's a Venn diagram. That's the sweet spot, right? That's where the three circles come.

So then we're now talking about, okay, how are we going to develop or provide opportunities for a workforce like this in San Diego? And again, I guess maybe I had that in mind when I started to learn about the master plan, and I just assumed that was the same type of exercise that was done for this. But maybe, again, it is a big picture item, and so maybe it's how do you incorporate, yes, all of that but then more. Right.

Like, what are the perhaps areas where we want to create, like I said, new industries? And if that's the case, I think as you produce my feedback, given that, I think you're talking to education staff, but you're definitely maybe not have the opportunity to talk to all policymakers.

Is my feedback would be is as you produce from your draft to your final report is identifying and tying all of your recommendations to this will help us meet the goal of ensuring that we have enough ex-educators or practitioners in health or in social work and all the other areas that we know that there's a need or this is going to help us create a new industry, whether it's AI or whatever it is that perhaps we're still developing.

And so I think, at minimum, an extra column to your recommendations as to what will be accomplished with that recommendation is my feedback now. But maybe I'll have another opportunity in the future. I'll stop my comments there and see if there's any other from colleagues. All right. Thank you both. Appreciate your time. Thank you for making time to share with us. And we will move on to the next panel. Going to ask our panelists to please come forward.

We have listed Pete Kallis from Department of Ed, Anthony Cordova from the Chancellor's Office, Community College Chancellor's Office. Michael Watanabe from Public School Construction. Office of Public School Construction. Chris Ferguson is back with us with Department of Finance. And Edgar Cabral from the Legislative Analyst Office. Yeah, I see you all here. We're going to try, for the interest of time, to give you five minutes, and then we'll see where you are at the five-minute mark. I will let you know.

Why don't we start with Department of Education?

Good afternoon. It's an honor to present here today on behalf of Superintendent Tony Thurman. My name is Pete Callas and I'm the Director of CDE's Career and College Transition Division. We house all of the career education, career technical education programs at CDE. Actually, this week we just had our statewide CTE conference here in Sacramento. We had 2800 CTE educators here along with administrators, counselors and so on. And this conference has been going on for close to 2528 years.

We started it with the California Partnership academies over 28 years ago and it's evolved into this major conference that we have every year. And I've been part of this for over 30 years as a teacher, site, principal and now here at the Department of Education. So the programs that I'll talk about today within the 5 minutes will be. I'll be brief as I can. There's a lot going on at CDE with our CTE programs.

Currently, some of our funding sources are Perkins, which is our federal funding. We get about $142,000,000 a year with that, and it's a split between us and the chancellor's office. So we get administrative funds along with leadership funds. Currently at CDE, we Fund 352 grantees in grades five through 12. The chancellor's office funds about 72 of their community college districts with that funding. Prickin supports all aspects of career technical education programs, from exploration to internships to youth apprenticeships with the Department of Education.

The Career College Transition division supports 15 industry sectors across the state. Some highlighted ones we have are agriculture and natural resources. Our largest one is arts, media and entertainment. We have over 230,000 students participating in courses across the state. In that one, construction trades is one of our other growing areas along with health, science and medical technology. We have 56 different pathways within those 15 industry sectors and we serve over a million students in grades seven through 12.

I know in the previous conversation middle school came up. We actually have 70 middle school academies across the state right now that feed into their academies at their high school level. So we've developed feeder academies at the middle school and we've started career exploration at the 6th and 7th grade level and at the 8th grade level they actually take a CTE course within that pathway and we hope that most of them do feed into their high schools into those pathways.

Perkins funds can be used to support core curriculum instruction. So if they're partnering with the CTE teachers in their CTE programs, their language arts teachers, long history and science math can actually partner with those and integrate the CTE piece into their core curriculum classes, which allows them to share that funding. Most of our schools braid Perkins along with CTIG to support their programs and all their CT programs.

So the federal and state funding programs serve hand in hand and have created a highly successful program across the state for CTE onto CTIG, which started back in 2015 as a one time funding program of about $900 million over three years. In 2018, the Legislature established a CTIG program as an annual appropriation and k through 12 education trailer Bill AB 188 CTIG transitioned to an ongoing $150,000,000 a year annual grant. In 2021 it transitioned and we actually received another 150,000,000 a year.

So currently we're at $300 million a year for our CTIG funding. Leas received the CTIG funds to do the following expand the availability and support the ongoing provision of high quality industry valued career, technical education and workforce development opportunities. They improve coordination and alignment with post secondary and we have actually done a lot now with the community colleges. We just built out a statewide plan for regional planning and regional pathway planning and identifying some of the previous comments that you made and questions that you had.

So we're actually partnering with the community colleges now to do that. In the fall and September and October, we had 10 convenings across the state and actually rolled out our plan at that point. And we got a lot of positive feedback on really looking at developing this on a regional basis. CTIG has grown over the last three years. With 2122 we had 342 grantees. We were able to get $241,000,000 out that year. Current year we are at 399 grantees.

So we've gone up by 47 grantees in the last two years, and our dollar amount going out is $285,000,000 this year. So we're getting closer to that 300 million a year. One of the barriers to that is the match. Right now it's two to one, which makes it difficult for us to get the funding out.

Some of our data results we work closely with one of our data teams at CDE and what we looked at was a graduating cohort of 2122 those seniors, and as they went through high school, we had 497,000 students in that cohort. 20% of them completed a pathway CTE pathway during their four years in high school. And then we started looking at graduation rates and what the differences were as we looked at CTE programs and as they were CTE completer pathway completers.

The average graduation rate for that group, 84% graduated from high school. If they completed a pathway that high school graduation jumped to 98.4% so it went up almost 15%. And then we looked at attendance of those students because as you know, attend class more, you have a better chance of graduating and going on to college or going on to a career. Attendance rate for that class was overall 81.5%. Our pathway completers, the attendance rate was 98.5%.

So it makes a difference and we see what it does for our CTE students. That's that as we call it, that hook on getting them into class and getting them to stay the whole day. I talked about braiding of funding and we have a whole list of how we have 550 Las across that have Perkins, CTIG and K, 12 SWP and they braid their funding and developing their CTE programs and so on.

A couple of examples that I have of successful CTE programs and they come out of our partnership Academy programs Coachella Valley Unified School District students beginning in 7th grade register for a California College guidance initiative so CCGI account and are guided through lessons on how to use the self assessments and they explore links to learn about industry sectors, careers, colleges offering majors related to the career by the end of 8th grade, students work with counselors to create their four year high school plan to be updated annually and eventually include postsecondary plans.

The school district has done an excellent job combining this comprehensive strategy to career focused academic planning with unique work based learning opportunities within the regional employers committed to training and retraining the regional workforce. By way of example, I actually have visited the district and visited the work sites where these students are working. They started out with two Marriott resorts and started them out with paid internship programs in the summer between their junior and senior year.

If the students wanted to continue working at the resorts, they found jobs for them and continued the internships throughout their senior year. Pandemic hit so it kind of knocked the program down for a while. It's back up and running. Actually. We've expanded the program throughout Southern California. Now we're at 20 resorts with this model, not just Marriott, and we were able to visit the students while they were working.

Positive input from the employers and the teachers and we actually had one of the students up at our paid internship forum that we had for Superintendent Thurman and one of the students came up and spoke at the forum. The other one is to hatch a Unified School District. They've developed a work based learning program with pre apprenticeships and intern opportunities. They conduct monthly industry panels for the students to learn about the local industries and network with professionals throughout the region.

So we've been doing this for a while. We also have, through our partnership academies, we have 11 pre apprenticeships that focus on construction trades and they use the multicraft core curriculum known as Mc three. And what they do is they get them OSHA certified and first aid certified. And I'm in the process of meeting with the Iron Workers union. They would like to start bringing some of these students in to their apprenticeship programs right out of high school. And there are 3600.

Currently there are 3600 apprenticeships across the state at nine facilities with the Iron Workers Union. So we're building that relationship with them along with currently we have 30 green technology academies across the state. As you look at the data that we've looked at from 2122 it's promising regarding ct alignment with postsecondary institutions and workforce agencies.

So we've worked through all of this and now we're working on the Golden State pathways program that was rolled out two years ago, July 2022500 $1.0 million program that runs through June 302029. We've already selected our Ta centers, the regional Ta centers and the lead Ta center. We're working on the contract development with them along with the RFA just went out in January for implementation grants, planning grants and consortium grants.

So we have about $475,000,000 in grants to go out this year to support those pathway programs and pathway development.

I'm going to ask if we can go on to our next speaker. I know I have questions for you, so you have a chance.

Thank you. Community College Chancellor's office.

Go ahead.

Hi, good afternoon. Anthony Cordova, vice chancellor of workforce and economic development, representing Chancellor Sonya Christian with the California community colleges. I'm going to give you a little bit of a brief discussion about some of the K-12 Strong Workforce funding itself. Give you some updates in regards to what the program has really been able to perform and that is the promoting of the collaboration between the schools, the local organizations, some of the workforce organizations, community based organizations, and then also the community colleges.

Bridging that pathway that provides a guided pathway for CTE students that are exploring into their specific programs. It also enhances the opportunity for skill building and workforce readiness for our CTE students. We've talked about enhancing the innovative programs and the innovation to be able to provide the funding to help support the local employers and engagement aspect of it as ties into some of the work based learning. I know we mentioned a little bit about that earlier, give you a little bit of update.

Some of the work based learning is also what we talk about the career exploration. So K-12 Strong Workforce has been able to engage in support on career exploration expos and also like symposiums, symposiums focusing on some of the engineering pathways and the different STEM programs itself. And then at the same time it also enhances the opportunity for middle schools and early college and dual enroll students to be able to engage into their programs as an early completer as well.

Give you a little bit of update of some of the program coordinators, what they call them as pathway coordinators themselves. I look at them as being able to be the individuals that are the conduit between the workforce and the students themselves. So the conduit allows them the opportunity to bridge that gap that has always been there and provides a seamless transition for continued support and assistance to be able to provide students the resources that they need to be successful as their journey proceeds down the pathway.

And I'll try to be quick about that one as well and then give a little bit about some of the recent audit there's been K-12 Strong Workforce program was audited the evaluation and the effectiveness of the implementation of the program itself. The audit identified recommendations and policies that was able to enhance the programs and impact some of the outcomes itself.

Right the chancellor's office, along with the eight regional consortiums, which also include the fiscal agents, they successfully implemented these recommendations resulting in improved processes and transparent and clear guidance for the selection Committee to be able to provide applicants and the improved and quality information itself. With that being said, I'll go ahead and turn that over because I know we want to be able to be attentive to the time.

Thank you. We'll move on to the Office of Public School Construction.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chair, Members of the Committee. I am Michael Watanabe, deputy Executive Officer for the Office of Public School Construction. The 2021 Budget act provided 250,000,000 in one time General Fund proceeds for the Department of General Services to establish and administer a competitive grant program to support regional K-16 Education Collaboratives that's created streamlined pathways from high school to postsecondary education and into the workforce.

OPSC, as staff to DGS, contracted with the foundation for California Community Colleges Foundation CCC as a third party administrator for the program. The regional K-16 Education Collaborators grant program require collaborators to meet all the following criteria. They must include at least one k 12 school district, one UC campus, one CSU campus, and one California community college district. They must also establish a steering Committee of which 25% of the Members shall be local. Employers commit to participate in the California cradle to career data system.

Commit to implement at least four of the seven recommendations from the February 2021 recovery with equity report to promote student success. Commit to create occupational pathways, including accelerated degree and or credential programs that incorporate work based learning and at least two of the specified sectors based on their regional needs for their targets. By June 30 of 2024, they must implement two of the targets for the recovery with equity report recommendations and fully establish one occupational pathway to demonstrate progress towards the final two targets.

The final goal by June 302026 they must fully implement both occupational pathways and all four targeted recovery with equity report recommendations. To date, the full 250,000,000 has been accounted for towards the Administration and funding of the awards to 13 collaboratives, one in each of the Community Economic Resilience Fund regions. With that, I'll turn it over.

Thank you. Who do we have next? Department of Finance.

Chris Ferguson with the Department of Finance. I'll keep my comments brief. The Governor's Budget maintains the investments in all of the career technical education programs that have been mentioned. That it includes the partnership academies, that includes funding for the K-12 Strong Workforce Program for the Community College Strong Workforce Program for the Career Technical Incentive or Career Technical Education Incentive Grant Program. It does not pull back any resources that have already been allocated through the K-16 Collaboratives Program.

So we've definitely tried to structure our budget in a way on the education side of the house, where we've done the best we can to protect the progress and investments that we've made in prior years.

Thank you. Legislative Analyst Office good afternoon.

Edgar Cabral with the Legislative Analyst Office. I didn't have any prepared remarks here. I'm just here in case you have any particular questions I could help with.

Thank you. Appreciate that. I'll give just response to hearing from all the programs as a new sort of a newbie. There are a lot of programs in a lot of different places and that sometimes purposefully, to make sure that there's a focus on programs being implemented correctly. But sometimes it can lead to the lack of coordination that really is required to making sure we're efficient with our dollars. And in a year like this, the word efficient is going to be used probably at every hearing.

Accountability of where these dollars are going and what are the outcomes related to those expenditures is going to be something that you'll hear a lot of questions around, certainly from me, but I think from other Committee Members. So I'm actually going to ask our more tenured Committee Member, maybe help us that are newer.

We all came in within a few months of each other, the rest of us that are here, you can kick us off, get us thinking about this, and I think there'll be some more questions. Chair Muratsuchi.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair. So I guess as the old bee on this panel here, Mr. Ferguson, so I heard, and I believe the following panel, we're going to be hearing from a lot of the career education. I got the memo. I guess we're trying to rebrand career technical education to career education now. So the career education providers have been complaining that it's an extremely administratively cumbersome process to apply for grants from CDE from the community college chancellor's office.

So last year when we tried to consolidate it, it's my understanding, and please correct me, community college, if I'm wrong, but the community college chancellor did not object to consolidating the K-12 portion of the Strong Workforce Grant Program with the CDE. But as if that wasn't enough, next, you brought in the Office of Public School Construction to administer a new career technical education program, which doesn't make sense to me.

I know Mr. Watanabe is good at funding the School Facilities Program, but for the Office of Public School Construction to now be administering a K-16 Career Education Collaborative Program. Exactly the chair's point. Where are the efficiencies that we are achieving here? Why are we splitting up the Administration of these career education grant Administration or the career education programs?

Yeah, certainly. I think each have had a slightly different focus. Each are administered by different entities. I would say on the K-16 Collaboratives, that is about regional collaboration. So I think it actually goes a bit further than just career technical education. But what I would say is, from our perspective, both have slightly different design elements within them. Both are, when I say both CTIG and the K-12 Strong Workforce Program, both are almost fully subscribed.

The K-12 Strong Workforce Program has been fully subscribed from the start. If I recall correctly, we know that on the CTIG side of the house, that the program, as Mr. Callas mentioned, has been ramping up toward full subscription of those resources.

I would note, though, that, for example, on the K-12 Strong Workhorse Program, in terms of data analysis, front end data, a lot of the notes and comments that Member Bonta mentioned earlier are core components of that program around focusing on data analysis, focusing on workforce need, focusing on that regional aspect of that workforce need. Those are components of the program. So from our perspective, I think we see value in all of the programs that are being operated.

We understand that there may be differences of opinion, but I think we view all three as having different values.

I completely agree. I would hope that there are different values for the different programs, but it still doesn't make why not combine achieve efficiencies by centralizing the Administration of these programs? I would think that the CTIG program and the K-12 Strong Workforce Program would want to should be aligned with the regional collaboration model that the now Office of Public School Administration is public school construction is administering. Again, why not combine them? They're valuable programs. Why not combine them?

Yeah, certainly. Again, I'll separate out K-16 Collaboratives as that work is underway, and it was one time in nature, it's not an ongoing funding source. The other two programs certainly have been ongoing. We do think that there should be a level of coordination and collaboration between the agencies, between our schools and community colleges. We have viewed both programs as being successful.

But I think what I can speak to relative to the Bill last year is just the public comments that we did have on that Bill. We did believe that that Bill would repeal a career technical education program that is designed to support k 12 local educational agencies in creating, improving, and expanding career technical education courses, course sequences, programs of study, and pathways for students transitioning from secondary education to post secondary education to living wage employment.

And I'm hoping that Ms. Luke understood what you just read off there. But I.

But why?

Okay, well, yeah, I'm still struggling. Perhaps if we can receive in writing, why is it that we cannot? You emphasize collaboration, but instead of three separate entities collaborating, why not bring it under one roof? It seems to me like the Department of Education would be the logical place to consolidate it under. Any final thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think what I would say is some of the history between the two programs. So definitely respect where you're coming from and understand that it's not a direct answer as to, well, why are there two programs? The history of the budget decision to have those two separate programs was a budget agreement several years back, and at the time they did have a slightly different focus.

One was much more toward collaboration between our colleges, our college programs, and our school programs, trying to have a little better alignment there, as well as also aligning into industry needs and workforce needs. So that was sort of the history, but certainly I can take back your comments.

Thank you.

Yeah, maybe these are more comments than questions. Appreciate Chairman Tsuchi providing some context. I would think that it's something that we value so much. We would want to be as effective as possible, and that means really strong collaboration among the different entities that are doing similar but acknowledge that it's not the same, but similar programming with goals that are the same, which is to provide people with opportunities in career and pathways. So I certainly don't feel much more comfortable that we are heading in that direction.

And I think that's the direction that we should be heading in, just maybe for sake of being more basic. And as a newbie here, I heard five different programs mentioned, but I think there was more. There's a K-12 Program, the Strong Workforce Program. There's a career technical incentives program. There's a K-16 collaboratives. There's partnerships. Which ones am I missing? There's a CTIG, CTEG Perkins, that's six. If I missed any, please shout it out.

So there's also the Golden State pathways program, which is a one time grant that Mr. Kalis from the Department of Education mentioned. There's currently the RFA process for. There's also several smaller programs. So there's specific categoricals like the Partnership Academy, agricultural vocational education, and probably a couple of other ones that I'm forgetting, that most of them I believe are less than $10 million, but that the state has retained. They did not get consolidated into LCFF when we merged.

Most programs are those small ones ongoing?

Yes, that's right.

So the only ones that are one time are Golden State pathways, K-16 Collaborative. And that's it. Those are the 21 times. Let me ask about what one time means because it's clearly an investment. That's an important one. Otherwise Administration wouldn't have put it forward and the Legislature wouldn't have approved it. What does that mean for long term effectiveness and success of those one time initiatives?

How is one time creating these collaboratives at the K-16 level going to give us more than a one year, five year benefit?

One of the things we've emphasized in working with all 13 collaboratives, they each prepared a proposal before they got the grants from our program. And as part of the proposals. That's kind of one of the things we emphasized is it is for long term. So while our grant may last approximately four years, we wanted to make sure in their plans they wrote into what their sustainability plan is to keep it going.

But they're not required to maintain the collaborative beyond they're not required as part.

Of a program, but it's something we evaluate and determine the longevity.

Can you give me a sense of who is funded? Who is the fiscal entity that received from the 13 collaboratives? You don't have to give me the whole breakdown. But are they community colleges? Who are these?

Yeah. Well, each collaborative is required to have. Well, from a fiscal lead, there's one for each region that gets the money, and it has to be a k 12 school district, a community college, a UC, or a CSU. So it varies by entity. Each collaborative does have one of each entity type, though, as part of requirements for the program.

Okay. And tell me again what the collaborative is expected to accomplish in the four years that it's funded.

Yeah. So they have to cooperate. From the recoveries with equity report, there was 11 recommendations that came out of that. Four out of seven of those they're required to complete by June 30 of 2026. And they're also required to create two occupational pathways. Some collaborators are doing more, but two is the minimum.

And this is at a cost of $250,000,000 for the 13, correct.

Roughly, that comes out to just over $18 million per collaborative.

So, out of $18 million, we are expecting them to produce two new pathways.

Correct.

Okay. And that has been fully. You had the request for proposals or whatever the process was in this case?

Correct. The money has been encumbered for all of them, but we have a four year release process. So, once a year through 2025, or 25% of their funds each one.

What are the terms of the release on an annual basis? What metric must be met in order for them to achieve?

They provide quarterly narratives to us expenditure reports. So we're just looking for forward progress, really, to keep them moving as far.

As creating pathways, which, at the end of the day, to the average person, that's where you're creating pathways, you're creating new opportunities. That's what people want to see. When are they required to create their two pathways? By the end of the four years or one by the end of the.

First two years, one by June 30 of 2024, and the second one by June 30 of 2026.

If they do not meet those, will they be reawarded grants?

The award has already been made. What made to be delayed is the Future Fund releases until we see the more forward progress.

The Golden State pathways. Who is administering that CD? Yeah. Can you tell me about that, where that is in the process? Tell me about the full amount.

Full amount was 500 million over the course of seven years.

And there's an RFA at the moment.

There's an RFA for the implementation grants, the planning grants, and the consortium grants. We already did the RFA. We completed the RFA process for the technical assistance centers that we're to start for this program.

Okay. And what are the deliverables that you're expecting from this program?

From the planning grantees? We're expecting them to, if they don't have pathways currently to add pathways to their schools districts for implementation, it's either growing pathways or adding new pathways to their programs.

So only K 12 agencies are eligible.

They can partner with community colleges. So what the goal is of this is one of the opportunities that they're supposed to create is students have the opportunity to gain 12 college credits during the four years in high school. So partnering through dual enrollment programs or early middle college high school programs to assist students with that.

Okay. And there is no requirement on a number of new career pathways to be created? No, there is no requirement on them creating dual enrollment programs.

The requirement of giving them opportunities to gain 12 college credits, it could be through dual enrollment, it could be through advanced placement or international baccalaureate programs.

So their performance will be measured on whether or not by what year students are attaining the 12 units.

So the first report on this is 2027. So five years. And the reason for that was originally when we started talking about this program, it was going to be a one year and I said it was going to be impossible to create pathways in a year. And fortunately, Mr. Ferguson agreed to seven years with me just because of our experience with developing pathway programs.

And how many awards do you expect to go out?

We're expecting at least 500 applications to come in.

Applications, but not awards.

Not awards. We don't know yet because it's not due till March 19. So I'll have a better idea in a few weeks.

So we still don't know what the cost of each one of those will.

Be because it's up to $500,000 per pathway.

Okay.

Sorry.

Annually or total?

Total.

Got it. Thank you for the background. Appreciate that. Perkins and CTIG, that's also CD. Let's see that one can't. So Perkins is, can't be combined.

Perkins is federal dollars.

Okay.

Right. And CTIG is state dollars. So they can be used together to support pathway programs. And that's what normally we do with those. School sites and districts do that.

So a normal awardee receives both if they apply. Typically.

Typically.

And are there federal limitations to that program being essentially combined with CTIG?

No.

So it can be combined.

I think, well, there's some remaining questions, but we're sort of short on time. I don't know. Ms. Bonta, please.

Thank you, Chair, for trying to figure out how much we are spending. There are just, there were a lot of numbers thrown around without any backup material, but I think I see about 1.2 billion dollars a year going into these various pathway programs. I'll let the LAO kind of figure that out. And I think I heard the responses be that we are primarily creating pathways as the deliverable for these. The only student-centered numbers that I heard was from CDE, where you mentioned 497,000 students.

That's the cohort, the four-year cohort of graduate--of students in that cohort.

When did that start?

So that's twelfth graders. So they start the cohort in ninth grade and they follow those students through twelfth grade.

And this group is already--what grade year is this cohort in?

Oh. Their graduating year is 2022 of the data that I mentioned.

Okay. So these 497,000 students have graduated already in 2022?

Correct.

And the information you were sharing, 20 percent completed a CTE pathway, 84 percent graduated from high school. If they completed a pathway, the graduation rate was 98.7. The attendance rate was--a pathway completed was 98.5.

Correct.

So this was 2022?

2022.

What percentage of students have a job now in their pathway and what number?

That one's a difficult one because we don't track that data. We do survey data on that, and it's not completely accurate.

So, for the amount of investment, we actually don't know? We don't have a clear return on investment in terms of whether this actually resulted in students holding--

Not yet. We usually have a--

Getting a job, keeping a job, the level of that job in terms of their ability to thrive.

Correct.

Okay. It's kind of very similar to the first panel. We are going to be making some very tough decisions, and I try to be very student-centered in our approach to being able to do that.

And as a state, I think at the end of the day, if our goal is to make sure that people are working, that people are being trained to be able to work, and that they are thriving because of the work that they are able to get through the educational programs that we provide, then we should actually be able to report on that data point when we're making hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars of investment.

What I heard from the presentations was we very successfully executed the administration of these grant programs. And I heard the reporting data that you all received to be very process-oriented. They created a pathway, they met the requirements of forming a collaborative. All of these things are wonderful in terms of process, but if we don't have the information about the impact it has on students in our overall workforce, in total, I think it's really hard for us to understand the overall return on investments. So I'm hoping that at some point we'll be able to, through the Chair, get this level of data to be able to support the justification of spending for these programs.

Yeah. A question that arises from Ms. Bonta's questions and comments, the Cradle-to-Career data system that I've heard a lot about--and it seems every time I talk about it, it seems more and more distance instead of closer as time passes--who is implementing that?

That's the Office of Cradle-to-Career Data under the Government Operations Agency.

Okay. And what is the status of that?

I would have to get back to you on the status. I do know that the work is underway by that office, but I can certainly work with the director to provide a status update.

Okay. I think certainly would be interested in that.

Chairman Alvarez?

Yes.

Anthony Cordova. I just wanted to make a quick address to Assembly Member Bonta in regards to some of the reports that you're talking about. I agree with you in regards to the data outcomes. We've got our strong workforce program that's going to be finalized in our report here shortly. I could get that information over to you.

I'd appreciate that. Thank you.

No problem.

And I was reminded we do have a Cradle-to-Career hearing, so we can definitely have that information for us at that hearing. That'd be useful. Not that we need to add more workload to the LAO, but I do think that this one, this is a very heavy subject with a lot of moving parts. All of your reports are obviously helpful.

If you could help us all figure out everything that's happening in this space, including the consolidation efforts in the past that I know have existed and perhaps your recommendations going forward.

Yes, sir, and we can provide a quick summary of some of the ongoing, maybe splitting up between here are the ongoing programs that we have, and then here are some of the one-time spending that we've had over the last several years to give you some context.

Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you all. Appreciate your time and your answers and your information that you've provided to us.

Sure. We'll see you soon. Thank you. We will move on to our other panel, our final panel. We've got a number of individuals from different industries and different sectors, I should say, that are here to share their thoughts, their response, their comments on this conversation in general, regarding career readiness and some of you obviously do this work on a regular basis, and we thank you for that, and some of you may be hoping to do more of that.

Thank you.

And we are interested in hearing from you. So I believe we have Linda Granger from Eden Area ROP, Dr. Barbara Nemko, Napa County Superintendent, Anne Stanton, President of Linked Learning, Lance Hastings, President and CEO of California Manufacturers and Technology Association with the Get Real Coalition, and Alyssa Lynch, Superintendent of Metropolitan Education District. Are you all here? Great. Let's get started with Ms. Granger.

Noon. It's a pleasure to be here today. I am Linda Granger, the Immediate Past President of CAROCP, the Association for Career and College Readiness Organizations. In my 31 years in education, I have served as a CTE teacher, high school principal, and ROP superintendent. I am currently the Chief Operating Officer of the Eden Area ROP, representing four school districts in the East Bay, Castro Valley, Hayward, San Leandro, and San Lorenzo Unified, serving roughly 22,000 students in grades seven through twelve.

We appreciate the state's recognition of the value career education plays in preparing students for their first career. Within this system, the Eden Area ROP in our partner districts have been able to expand several pathways, including engineering and health, as well as develop a work-based learning system to connect CTE students to the world of work. We also appreciate the state's recognition of the importance of the students starting their career path prior to entering into postsecondary education.

This is important because we know that students who complete a CTE pathway while in high school are more likely to graduate and are more likely to be employed full time eight years after graduation with higher median earnings than their non-CTE counterparts. We have also developed a strong working relationship with Chabot Community College to support students transitioning to postsecondary education within this system.

If our goal is to provide students with the skills and the knowledge they need to earn a living wage and be productive members of society, the state is correct in recognizing investing in CTE is the way to make this happen. Now, we know CTE is important to student success and workforce development, yet here is what we are asking of CTE providers: develop high-quality CTE programs that include all research-based elements supporting student success.

You just need to be able to do that without knowing how much funds you're going to have from one year to the next to make that happen. In fact, this year, for our CTEIG application, we had nine million dollars in match for CTEIG and we were awarded 2.7 million dollars. There are six separate initiatives, more when you include the apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship program grants. All of these initiatives have separate timelines and reporting. These multiple programs provide the potential to braid funding across programs to meet student needs.

Yet, the competitive nature of these grants create more of a focus on one-time projects over cohesive system development, and it's challenging at best to braid funds you may or may not receive each year. It's difficult to focus on long-term planning in this environment, much less creating systemic change. Even with these challenges, we appreciate the state's commitment to CTE, as without this funding, ROPs would have to eliminate programs and fewer students would be served.

The potential impact of the Master Plan became very clear to me when Eden Area ROP was awarded a grant from the California Air Resources Board or CARB. This grant prepares the future workforce with the skills and training needed to work on zero-emissions vehicles. Industry experts will provide guidance in developing the curriculum, and we will be able to purchase the equipment needed to start the pathway.

We are hoping to braid funds with the Golden State Pathways Program Grant to hire staff to address the K12 curriculum requirements, like developing the outline for the UC A-to-G approval submission, aligning to the Community College Alternative Fuels Program, and developing lesson plans. It's exciting to be able to develop a pathway program for an emerging market in this manner.

It is the first time that we have worked with the state agency outside of education to develop a pathway, and it is the first time that CARB has worked with the K12 institution. Yet we are working to develop a pathway that will meet an emerging workforce need. This is what the Master Plan for career education could do: provide us the opportunity to reimagine how education supports workforce readiness. Imagine students exploring their first career interest while in high school.

Imagine a system in which timelines and reporting requirements are aligned to support continuous improvement. Imagine our educational system being flexible enough to respond to labor market needs. Imagine a system that supports and funds regional delivery of career education. Imagine CTE and academic teachers connecting course content to careers. Imagine a system with better student engagement, attendance, and academic outcomes. Imagine a system designed to connect students to their career goals and shape their education around those goals.

Well, I can't imagine it, as this is what ROPs do: provide high-quality regional CTE programs in partnership with postsecondary education. And on behalf of the ROPs throughout the state, we look forward to sharing our expertise in developing a Master Plan for career education that centers on opportunities for students to identify and prepare for their first career while they are in high school. Thank you.

Thank you for that testimony. Dr. Nemko.

Thank you. I really appreciate you being here. It's been more than two hours that you've been sitting. I wish I could get you up to do a GoNoodle exercise. Thank you. I am so happy that we are here talking about CTE because it feels like for about 40 or 50 years, we did not talk about CTE, except for those kids, those kids who were not going to college. And that's not what CTE is.

CTE is for all kids, because we expect all kids to go to work after they leave school, whether it's right after high school or community college or college. So we are grateful for this newfound emphasis. A couple of things that I would like to ask for in the Master Plan, and Assemblyman Muratsuchi, you asked the right question: why can't we have one funding source? Why do we have two funding sources and we make everybody jump through all these hoops twice?

I'm sure it's an administrative hurdle to find a way to get them together, but that would be one administrative hurdle of two agencies. We're all doing it down at the local level, and so we're all going through this administrative hurdle. If there's any way we can fix this, it would be worth the time to do that. The second thing, of course, we would hope that we would keep the same funding levels.

Right now, we're at about 450 million, with 300 million in CTEIG and 150 in K12 Strong Workforce. That would be good. But again, as someone else said, it has to be multiyear. This is not like an English class where we buy some more paper if we're going to go an extra year. This is big equipment, it costs money, and if the program is to be viable, it's got to be up-to-date and it's got to be real. So, yes, we want to see that.

Those are the two biggest things. Obviously, we need to do something about the instructor pipeline. We've lost them. The people who used to teach it are gone, and it's hard to find new people who want to go into teaching today and have the skills that you need to be a CTE teacher. So whatever we can do to make it easier, that would be great. It would be nice if the funding were not entirely competitive. We're funding on K12.

We are in a competition, and then there's just too much. Make it simple. I'm a simple person, and our people want to make it simple so that we can serve our kids better. Work-based learning: fabulous idea. Kids need to actually get to work so they understand why they need the other stuff that we're teaching them, where it fits in, and what they're going to do. They need to have that North Star in their life so that they understand why they're going to school.

And I'm really excited. Former State Superintendent Tom Torlakson is working on a pilot program for middle school kids to take them to see apprenticeships in middle school. Two reasons. One: they get to see what the possibilities are before they get to high school and have to start choosing electives. And two: their parents find out that if you do an apprenticeship, you can be spending five years, but you're working during those five years and you're earning money.

Your academic stuff is happening at night, so your school daytime is working money. Then you get the academics, and when you graduate, instead of having a debt, you have money in the bank. So if kids start thinking and their parents start seeing how much money they can make, it takes away the stigma of CTE. So this is a wonderful program. We absolutely appreciate the governors having a Master Plan, and those are the big things we want. Put the funding together, keep the funding at the same level it is and make it for multiyear, and we'll be so happy. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Anne Stanton from Linked Learning.

Hi. I'm Anne Stanton, the President of the Linked Learning Alliance, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with you today. The Linked Learning Alliance began about 15 years ago as a movement of educators, employers, and communities that set standards for excellence and equity through integrated college and career pathways. As we know that blending academics, rigorous academics with real world learning and strong support services helps young people discover their purpose and inspires them to succeed in college and career. Evidence proves it.

And this is critical because research also shows that between ages 14 and 24, young people develop their identities, their dispositions, and their lifelong aspirations. For adolescents, this is a decade of difference that we cannot gamble away. We also know that chronic absenteeism among California students is still double pre-pandemic levels, and there are no signs of this trend abating.

Community college enrollments are still down 16 percent, and four-year colleges like Cal State are seeing a 6.5 percent enrollment decline, all while California businesses struggle to find qualified talent and our young people struggle to find the kind of jobs that can help pay the bills and provide opportunity for educational advancement. Too many young people are disconnecting from learning and from their potential during a critical decade in their lives. And our state cannot afford to lose this talent.

We need to reengage them by offering meaningful, relevant learning experiences that connect them to purpose, to a community where they feel seen and supported, and to opportunities that smooth and accelerate postsecondary transitions and lead to fulfilling careers with family-sustaining wages. If we're going to build back better from this pandemic and see our economy thrive, fueled by a diverse and talented workforce pipeline, we need to do for students what our experience and evidence tell us. We need to lead. And we are.

Together with many of you in this room, we're ushering in a new era of opportunity for young people. California continues to lead the way, and I want to recognize our collective leadership because it has inspired the field to go out and to create CTE's Strong Workforce. K16 collaborative programs laid a solid foundation. New investments in Golden State Pathways, Dual Enrollment, and community schools will take this work one step further to enhance the entire whole child experience. What we're creating is truly remarkable.

From Imperial to Humboldt Counties, these integrated programs are coming to life, and so we want to invite you to come out and see this work in action because it really is inspiring. We're also working hard to create coherence between our K12, postsecondary education, and workforce systems and the streams of funding meant to fortify them. But we need to connect these dots to clear the way for our hardworking students, their families, and our educators. Specifically, we need to streamline existing grant programs.

The system of funding for all the programs we're discussing today are siloed, making them less effective than they could be. For example, CTEIG and K12 Strong Workforce operate on separate, often dueling systems that require different local investments, have different timelines, making long-term planning and sustainability very, very difficult. And this also creates administrative strain and redundant work at the local level, pulling focus away from the high-quality learning and earning experiences that we know lead to greater outcomes for our young people.

California's Master Plan for education can help us address these issues in key ways, by number one: breaking down silos. We applaud the state for identifying opportunities to align and coordinate across segments and sectors, making way for more career-building opportunities like the ones we've described. Strengthening career pathways: this plan encourages all students starting in high school to discover and explore high opportunity careers with guidance on pathways to those careers.

It prioritizes hands-on learning, especially paid learn-and-earn opportunities that prepare students with relevant skills that they can be certified with and reflected on academic records. And it also advances access and affordability by streamlining bureaucracies to reduce the cost of career training and simplify access to supports. The investments in Golden State Pathways and Dual Enrollment remain central to the success of the Master Plan, and its strength relies on its ability to achieve the coherence that the field is ardently seeking.

There's certainly more work to do, but strides like these move us forward to advancing new levels of equity and excellence in our education and workforce systems because of the funding, and not in spite of it. It all comes down to implementation. We really appreciate the leadership it takes, not only to protect these investments, but to stay the course. As we look and work ahead, it's important to be ever mindful that success will depend on fully funding this effort and closely integrating each element.

The opportunities and experiences we're cultivating together should inform and reinforce one another to produce the results we want to see, and status quo silos will not suffice. We can and we must act with intention to bring it all together for students and for our shared and worthy goals. Thank you.

Thank you. Lance Hastings with the Get Real Coalition.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity today. Well, I do wear a hat, as the President and CEO of the California Manufacturers and Technology Association. Today I'm here on behalf of an informal coalition that was formed more than ten years ago called the Get Real Coalition, and the real stands for relevance in education and learning. It's a consortium of industry and labor leaders. In fact, our co-chair is Jeremy Smith from the State Building and Construction Trades Council.

So we do sit down regularly and talk about these issues. And I've found this hearing particularly interesting in that a couple of things are fairly obvious. There is a lot of money at stake. There is a lot of discussion about the need to prepare every child for their future in this state, but there still seems to be a disconnect between how we're going to do that.

And I would argue that the most important day in a student's life in California is the first day of kindergarten because that's the day that we make a commitment to them, that we will see them through not only their education, but into a lifelong learning opportunity here in California.

The sad part is, it's not happening at the moment, and the manufacturing sector does own part of that narrative, and we have a responsibility to change the narrative because it should come as no surprise to anybody here that often it's told, 'oh, you don't want to go into manufacturing.' And that simply is a misnomer in reality, that the opportunities to make money progress your career and support yourself and your family is vast within the manufacturing sector. But we keep telling students that that's not the case.

Parents are to blame as well. I have one of my members who opened up their days on manufacturing day and had school children with their parents come through the facility. And as the children were wide-eyed and just interested and intrigued with what they saw, their parents were whispering into their ear, 'you don't want to work here.' And how unfortunate is that to tell a young person, 'yes, you're excited about it, but you don't want to be here.'

And let's break down why that parent would say something like that. What have we told ourselves over the years about how everything is made? And I think a couple of you have heard me say this before: manufacturers make everything. Everything that we rely on every day is made by a manufacturer, and we pay wonderful wages and have great opportunities for those that work in the sector. Right now, California has 1.3 million employees in the sector. We have 30,000 manufacturers in California, small, medium and large, and our 300 billion economic contribution to the state's economy.

We need to support that. And here's where it all comes together. The thing that keeps manufacturers up at night, that I hear all the time--which, of course, keeps me up at night--isn't energy, it isn't supply chain, it's workforce. Literally workforce. We don't have enough people in California interested or trained to meet the needs of the future. And when I say future, I mean immediate future.

Five to ten years with a retirement ratio that our sector has never seen because the jobs are so good that people hold on to them for 35 or 40 years. That's what we need to be supporting. And I agree with--in fact, I was going to say what she said for all three of them before I started my testament. I'll say it again for you.

We need to change that narrative and that focus and stop talking about that as being separate, but rather, as Mr. Muratsuchi said, lump together, because that's what it's talking about. That is our obligation to the State of California and every child that comes through the educational system, not to stigmatize them.

The way you do that, if they're interested in something, let's support that because the career opportunity is there, and we will do our part in manufacturing with my counterparts in the Get Real Coalition to make sure that there are opportunities at the end for anyone when they become 18. I got personally very anxious during Covid, particularly November of 2020. I felt we were going to lose an entire graduating class to something other than gainful employment in the trades. I thought they were going to get lost.

And then again in June of 2021, the second graduating class during Covid. We need to give opportunities for them, and the best place to do that, selfishly, is in the manufacturing and the trades because we do make everything, we are integral to the state's economy, and we feel we deserve the support for that. So I think this panel would be more aptly named 'the Catalysts and the Customers of CTE.' We are it, and we really want to be supported.

It's more of a rhetorical question, but one I want to put before everyone here today. I was at a conference two weeks ago where I heard--and I'm not sure how accurate it was because it shocked me--that only 30 percent of California students go to four-year colleges or that graduate from college. I don't know the answer to that. The fact that it's less than 50 is really the point. What are we doing with the other 70 to 50 percent of the students?

We're telling them, 'you didn't go to college, so you're not going to make it.' We have to pivot that narrative, and it starts with us because we're in the sector and it continues with the Legislature and the Governor to really reverse that and assimilate everybody into the same bucket because actually, at the end of the day, we all are. There are numerous programs in the state that are private-public partnerships, that if they are replicable and scalable, they ought to be pursued.

There's two in your area, Mr. Alvarez: Rise Up Industries and Workshops for Warriors. Doing wonderful things. And if we can support that more with the positive attitude, I think we'd have a lot better outcomes for the entire State of California and a lot more gainfully employed workers in California as well. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Our last panelist will be Alyssa Lynch with the Metropolitan Education District.

So, good afternoon. My name is Alyssa Lynch, and I'm the Superintendent of Metropolitan Education District in San Jose. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you again. I was here in 2017, and on that date, I said I hope to not have to come back, because I said, 'I've been a teacher for 30 years, and the first week I was asked to walk to the fax machine and fax to Sacramento that we want direct, dedicated, ongoing funding.' But here I am 31 years later.

I was a teacher, an administrator, and I've been a superintendent for 11 years. Today I'm representing Metropolitan Education District, Southern California Regional Occupational Program, the two largest centers in California, along with all the other JPA ROPs and centers. We offer hundreds of career programs on high school campuses and at CTE centers. I'm in agreement with Ben Chida of the Governor's Office that the career education SHIP was built in the 60s, and has had many leaks, has been lopsided, and has had a storm brewing.

The last 11 years have been tumultuous for me and all of my colleagues with career tech education. However, there's a structure in place that needs to remain the backbone or the whole of career education, the career education SHIP that we are driving forward. I will address three key areas and I will bring to you solutions to feed the Master Plan for career education. The key challenges with existing career tech ed I will address, a response to the Master Plan, and then some key recommendations.

The challenges with the existing CTE programs: since the implementation of LCFF 11 years ago, career tech at the K12 level has been dependent on grant funding for survival. There has been over 350 educators applying for grants year after year. When you combine the dollars spent on that time, it's well over one million dollars. We apply, as you heard today, for the CTEIG Incentive Grant, the K12 Strong Workforce Grant, the Perkins Grant, and now the Golden State Pathways Grant.

Some of us also apply for the K12 Collaborative Grant, but in most areas, K12 districts or ROPs, are not included in the K12 Collaborative Grants. We have had grant fatigue for seven years. It's been exhausting to maintain our staff. We are constantly retraining and training our employees on how to apply for the grants. We are dependent on the grants to operate.

For K12 CTE, it's difficult to provide multiple year budget projections when you don't know what your funding is, and it's almost like living paycheck to paycheck. ROPs were founded in the 60s after the Vietnam War because there was a labor shortage, much like there is a labor shortage today. They opened programs in manufacturing, electronics, dry cleaning, newspaper printing, and construction. Today we have mechatronics, electric vehicles, nursing careers, and we look at the data in order to open programs.

ROPs respond quickly to opening programs and closing programs that are no longer relevant to the labor market. ROPs are regional. We serve districts. In my city, in my area alone, I have Mountain View, Santa Clara, San Jose, Milpitas, and Campbell. Those are all cities. It's very regional. There's 40 miles in Santa Clara County from Palo Alto all the way down to Gilroy, and we can serve those students.

We hire industry experts as teachers and we can house programs that require a lot of space and large equipment, such as diesel buses. We serve the underserved. We serve the neediest students in California in our county. 87 percent of our students, though, go to college, and they go to college because they find a career with us. ROPs in adult schools serve the underserved population. Our students also attend two-year colleges, four-year CSU and UC.

That's really quite different than the notion of what it was and the stigma that people see and think about CTE and ROP students. We've transformed. We've changed. We have new programs. We have UC-approved programs. Our centers offer over 60 certifications. That's what the Master Plan is looking for, something that we already do and we have done, and we do a good job. We have dual enrollment. Our students can leave with many classes with 12 units and save money. I have the data.

I have the data in my annual report right here. I have the data on my website. Over 400 of my students have engaged in work-based learning. 300 students in internships. I'm very proud of the fact that last year, 26 of our students earned 168,000 dollars through our partnership with work2future, our workforce development board. Ten years ago, I had 150 employees. Today I have 104. Ten years ago I had a 14 million dollar budget.

There's something wrong with this picture when I tell you today I have 11 million dollars. It's going backwards, but I do have three million dollars from these grants. That is the only reason that I am open today is these grants.

So again, I'm here to bring solutions to what I read of the four key core concepts in the master plan. Number one, I'm in agreement that the state needs to create a new plan that recognizes successful systems that are in place. It's not wise to throw out the good with the bad. The master plan indicates that 30 people were interviewed and nine agencies.

I ask you, will the leaders of the K-12 CTE programs that work with adults and high school students and workforce development boards be provided a seat at the table? That would be us speaking to you today. We agree with braiding the resources into one funding formula. We don't want to apply for five large grants every year. Readers of grants, let me tell you, are not always trained. Funding the grants are subjective. Grant funds have been returned to the state.

Because I want to jump on board, I'm going to say the cradle-to-career system would not be subjective. Utilizing a state-local workforce development board to provide the labor market data will save time for hundreds of educators mining for the same labor market data. The state has made ethnic studies a requirement. They can make career awareness in the elementary grades and career exploration in the middle grades a requirement.

To jump on board with the new eTranscript system, you can document that too, in the elementary and the middle school. We need to make our young people aware of these careers earlier. Make work-based learning required for all. Remove the stigma. Require job shadowing in middle grades. Make it a high school graduation requirement. Hire an influencer such as TikTok Millennial influencer, Madeline Mann or Mike Rowe. Enlist Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Netflix, and other corporations by industry sector. Companies can provide scholarships to go to work for them like colleges provide scholarships to go to their institution.

Incentivize businesses to adopt a school, adopt a career program, adopt a career training center. I'm going to tell you that I'm being very brief and very short, and I'm going to give you my closing recommendations. Number one is to continue to explore the successful models. Number two, follow up with the leaders that entered information on the Council for Career Education website. They have been waiting years to fix the ship. Again, I'm one of them. I went on that website twice so far.

I know I will hear from them, but I have not heard from them. While inventing the new ship, return to direct funding for K-12 CTE so we can plan on a reliable budget. Math, English, science, history, social science, PE, all of those classes have never been grant-funded. We are as important as those programs to filling our economy in California. All the temporary patches to the ship have forced many educators to retire early to jump off the ship. We're losing state history.

Some of us are here today on this panel. I ask you to come and visit us in San Jose or any other one of the JPA ROPs, where we have a successful model with data and internships and work-based learning. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate all the panelists. I wanted to say one thank you for the work that you do. You are great ambassadors of career education, career technical education.

And certainly I'm glad we ended with you because you, at least to me, give us a lot of hope that this conversation that we're having today and that we'll continue through this master plan conversation will have voices like yours at the table to ensure that the innovation that you've gone through over the years and certainly the experience that you have is taken into account.

And so I think I want to start with that in mind and ask each of you, I got a sense almost from all of you as to what would be your one major feedback, if you will, if this was your opportunity to provide feedback on the master plan.

I heard a few ideas, but I want to just maybe ask you to prepare to give one thing you'd like to ensure that the master plan addresses, because I also kind of heard, especially towards the end, that maybe that opportunity to provide that feedback hasn't been as robust. But you could correct me if I'm wrong on that as well. If you have been participating actively, then correct me on that. But it sounds like this might be a great opportunity for you to share something. So I'll start from the beginning and then work my way down.

Sure. I think that I'm echoing the voices of everyone also on this panel, too. The master of plan for career education is really important, and I think understanding how we utilize that opportunity to also not start from scratch. We have a lot of wonderful things that have happened in this state, histories of crossing segments of education, understanding how we use funding differently to get to the "and" of college and career and not the "or". Right.

So I think it's really important that as the work is continuing and people are listening and gathering information, as everyone has said, let's look at what is working, because there's a lot working and what are the new investments going to do to build on what we know, the evidence we have to take us even further for the young people of this state and for the educators who work every day to provide inspiring experiences for them.

Please.

I will say, yes, I've been able to participate in a webinar about the master plan, and we have submitted an interested in participating in a regional convening. Yet I have no idea how anybody's being picked to participate in that and whether or not we will be asked to participate in that. And I would say for me, a lot of what I'm hearing today throughout this hearing about the master plan was, this is what we do. This is what we do. Oh, we do that.

I really appreciated the oh, we're rebranding career education and taking out the technical, because as I heard, the definition of career education, I was like, that is us. So I think we have a lot of expertise to offer, and that in creating the master plan, we really recognize the value that ROPs have played throughout the state for over 50 years. And how can we utilize this regional model of CTE delivery to improve career education for all students?

Thank you.

I would like to go with get real and the idea that we have got to do a better job with parents because parents are whispering in their children's ear and parents are not always aware of the great opportunities that are out there for students who take a career technical education pathway. It absolutely is for everyone. I'd like to see us start in elementary school. No reason why we are waiting even till middle school, which we don't do well now anyway. Let's start from the very beginning.

Let's have a public relations campaign. When we want to sell something, we put it on the airwaves. Let us show what great careers are out there. There's a lot of materials discovery education has put together career materials where they show diverse populations doing very interesting jobs that don't require a four year college degree. Somebody who's a mechanical engineer for Boeing who talks about he started with Legos, and it was so interesting to him. And actually putting a plane together is just like Legos.

You have to put all the pieces together. And he says, this plane isn't ready until I put the last bolt in. And we know that's true for sure. So we need to make sure that everybody understands what the opportunities are. And then, of course, one funding, one application, one reporting system, one data system. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. We submitted a get real letter to the governor's office at the end of the year, but I'm just going to quickly paraphrase the priorities we put in there. What I heard today is great. We want to see greater state leadership in support of CTE education and it does start here with us having the conversation. We want to remove that stigma that I think all of us had mentioned as well, between the four-year track and a non-four-year track.

Make sure that there's CTE exposure, at least by middle school. If we've waited that long. We've waited too long, and that there are transitions between high school and whatever the next chapter of that person's life might be, whether it is the community college, the trades, or four year university, it has to be more seamless. We do need to have the standards. I love the question of the committee members earlier, what are we doing with all of this money and where are we seeing the results?

And then finally, and most I think importantly, the sustainability of funding coming back every year with anxiety about what the future might look like for what is clearly an identified long-term problem for the State of California, and that is workforce. We need to get off that, I'll call it, the crazy train, because you can't build an economy based on year-to-year hope on funding for a very critical part of our economy.

Thank you.

Well, I'm sticking with my original, which was the career, making it a requirement to have career awareness in the elementary grades, career exploration in the middle grades, and one funding stream. Thank you.

Thank you. Let me ask now more specifically on one-time funding that you're having to go after. Well, you go after grants for multiple types of funding. Some of it is potentially ongoing and maybe more than one year, but some of it especially, there's two programs we heard about today that you're very well aware of, the Golden State Pathways and the Collaboratives. Those are two one-time funding sources.

Anybody feel strongly about sharing their thoughts about either of those two programs or the concept or idea of one-time funding in nature? But if you can feel particularly strongly about these two and what they are allowing you to do, or maybe not allowing you to, I'd like to hear that feedback.

Can I say something very provocative?

What if we had a situation where 9th grade is not going to be funded next year?

Sure.

Right. Anything else?

And I just want to say, while there is an annual allocation for strong workforce in CTIG, those are competitive grants. So I can't even look at those as ongoing funding. I'm grateful for the opportunity each year, but in terms of planning and developing a cohesive system, I can't rely on that funding to do that.

So I'm very fortunate that our district partners are committed to CTE, but our work based learning system, the expansion of CTE has all happened through these grant dollars and trying to say, how am I going to continue this becomes a problem. So take even the ongoing that does not, at my end, feel like ongoing funding. And now add two more grants that are one-time grants and say, okay, work your magic. I'll do that.

Braid these funding in hope that all these grants come together because I can have one piece of the puzzle through Grant A, another piece of the puzzle coming through Grant B, and another piece coming through Grant C. Now, if I get awarded all of those, I am going to do amazing things. Now, if I don't get those now, I have to go to plan b and say, how can I still be amazing? So that's what we're being asked to do.

Let me ask you about the, again, back to the process of feedback to the master plan. There was a new, I think at the end, council for career.

The governor's website for career education.

Do you know to what extent, if any of that's built into the master plan? I think you mentioned you haven't heard anything in response?

Not in response like, we requested to be one of the sites that they would come and hold the convening. And then we provided information and input to the plan. Have not heard back twice.

How long ago was your first input?

Off the top of my head, I'm going to say somewhere around January 24. Right around there.

Okay.

Whenever they released the first webinar earlier this year.

Got it. Okay. And then there was, folks, maybe a couple of you mentioned about retirements and the gray tsunami that we all hear about and how once again, like in the 60s, there's this new, you probably heard the exchange led by Ms. Bonta, but that I also was intrigued by in terms of starting with the end in mind. I mean, let me just acknowledge that I am probably the least familiar with ROP and certainly learned a lot today on career education generally.

But it sounds like to me from your testimony that you are responding to those industry needs, that is what you're doing. Yet we just heard about a master plan for education that, at least in the exchange that I heard and maybe you witnessed you were here, is maybe not being driven in the same way. Please provide your thoughts on that.

I think it's a wonderful question and I would like to commend us to think about that in the master plan for career education, there are key elements of it, right? Golden State Pathways is a large part of that vision. Right. And it's a 500 million dollar investment that is tied to the priority industries for our state education pathways, healthcare pathways, technology, climate related STEM careers.

So there is connection to, I think, where do we need to go for the future of this state's economy in the elements, the core sort of funding elements of the master plan, I would say we also have to be mindful of how we coherently put those pieces together, the dollars that are tied to dual enrollment again. And I just feel that one of the things we want to note is that the dollars might be one time, but they were also supposed to go out two years ago.

Right. And a seven year span of dollars with an evaluation tied to it allows us to get the data we need to say what is working and what is not working. And so I think there's a lot of promise there. I think we also just need to move forward with the innovation that is with the component parts of that master plan and understand how we move those pieces together as well.

The other thing I think I learned today that was tremendously valuable to me is that the funding, one, your message is loud and clear, and I hope we will continue to have this conversation about why are there so many places to apply for very similar work that clearly you're all doing within your programs. I know that the Chair has been working on that, and I certainly value that, and I think there's much more merit in continuing that conversation and moving forward. You are the practitioners.

You are the ones on the ground. You are the ones who clearly believe and identify this as a need. I kind of am a little bit lost as to why this has not progressed more. I'll just say that. But more importantly, what you've opened my eyes to, as we've talked about LCFF and now 10 years later, and the programs that used to exist that were funded, in your case the CTE programs or the ROP programs, were dedicated.

And now what you're clearly making a point of is it's not as dedicated, it is grant funding. And one of the things that's of interest as we are trying to create more accountability on our school funding is why do we not require our LCAPs, our local plans, to identify how much funding is being set aside for your programs from our school districts? Because my understanding is that when we got rid of categoricals, we didn't say do not, no longer do that. Right.

We still expect you to do that. And clearly we're having this conversation today. There's a conversation about a master plan. We clearly believe that the work that you're doing is important enough that we're spending three hours of a hearing today of your time, which is much more valuable and you could be doing so much more back home in your districts, but also, again, in the master plan conversation, that we value it so much, yet we make it very unpredictable.

And so that is something that I take away from today. I want to make sure that you understand that you communicated that very well. The unpredictability is a problem.

At the minimum, we should be making sure that our local districts that are making the decisions on funding because we've given them that authority, that they are identifying how your funding for programs like the ones that you've talked about today are, how that's being dispersed in order to achieve the accountability that this Committee is seeking to accomplish this year. So I think there's more work for us to be done on that. And I'll give you a chance to reply to any of what I stated, and I'm going to turn it over to Chairman Muratsuchi. Anybody want to share anything?

As part of the CTIG application, districts are required to submit the portions of their LCAP that are addressing CTE. So I think that what the CTE incentive grant has done is incentivized districts as it intended to, in that sense, in which, if you're going to invest in CTE, there's an opportunity through this grant to get additional funding for CTE. So I think there is an element of that in the LCAP currently.

One of the things that our consultants made me aware of is that perhaps programs that are funded one year and are proven to be successful, maybe there's a different approach, as opposed to having you go back and request funding again. If you've demonstrated success, if you've demonstrated outcomes, then perhaps it's a program that's warranted to continue funding as opposed to taking you through a grant cycle. But I think that's a conversation, again that will continue. Mr. Muratsuchi.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I appreciate your emphasis, your recognition. I think I, along with you, are hearing loud and clear that the number one challenge is that we talk a lot about how much we value career education, but we don't show it with our funding. We don't show it with our dedicated, ongoing funding.

Instead, we used to have a system of direct funding for career technical education, but we replaced it with this grant program, grant approach, which has led to the frustration that all of the providers have shared.

In fact, I wished that perhaps for future hearing purposes, I feel like we should have started with the providers to hear the ground level realities so that we make sure that the Department of Finance and their consultants heard the ground level realities that they're facing, because despite their representations that they were going all throughout the state to be listening to soliciting the input of stakeholders, it doesn't sound like any of you have been consulted. Am I correct?

We were all able to submit written input.

Okay. But they haven't invited you to join any kind of a discussion group or a work group to inform this master plan.

We're waiting to hear if we're invited. Yes.

Okay. All right. Yes. We also hope this combined hearing of the budget Subcommitee and the education Committee have recognized the five of you as longtime leaders in this space. And so we certainly urge this master plan work group to include your perspectives to inform this master plan. Ms. Lynch, I believe it was exactly 10 years ago that we worked together to introduce an assembly bill to try to restore direct funding for joint power authority career technical education programs.

And I hear you loud and clear that your budget, your staff, it sounds like it's decreased by about a third, about 30%, 33%. I just want to acknowledge that. Mr. Chair, I don't know if you know, but we used to have, just like we have the ADA funding for our K-12 schools, we used to have an ADA funding formula specifically for the joint powers assorted the career technical education programs, which is how they were guaranteed that ongoing funding instead of the grant based funding. But I wanted to push back a little. Know the comments, know us not having PE or biology.

Governor Brown championed the local control funding, and his basic argument was that every school district, rather than the state, through the Legislature or even the governor's office, mandating to local school districts what programs you should provide or not provide, that we would give the money to the local school districts, and the local school districts would decide what are their priorities.

And so clearly, they could be setting aside more money for career technical education, but they are not doing, and for a wide variety of reasons, which is why we need to supplement the per pupil funding with the Career Technical Education Grant Program. Ms. Lynch, would you agree with that?

I'm not sure if I made myself clear. What I was saying was that math, English, science, history, all of those classes are not grant funded. That's what I was trying to say. And so why are we grant funded? We are as valuable. That was my message.

You are as valuable. But my point is that school districts could be devoting more dollars to career technical education, but they are not largely in general, at least out of their Local Control Funding Formula dollars.

I'm going to give you a response for us specifically. Well, in the LCFF, there's 2.6 that is sent to schools that is flexible and they can spend it on CT if they would like. And then specific to my center, I want to say that, like Linda, I feel fortunate that they fund us. So they fund us at a $10 million level, but they have to choose between their budget or my budget to send me more money. So that's why I'm at the $10 million level.

Yeah. And it's the same situation as, you know, with the Southern California Regional Occupation Center and other regional programs. They'd rather keep their dollars in their own school district rather than give the money to any kind of a JPA or a regional program. I wanted to segue to Mr. Hastings. My favorite example of a successful career education program. It's not K through 12, but it's with one of my community colleges. We're proud in my region to be global leaders in the aerospace manufacturing.

We're building rocket ships at SpaceX. We built the James Webb Space Telescope at the Northrop Grumman facility in my district. But there's a critical need for sheet metal workers and welders. And so what Northrop Grumman did was that they partnered with El Camino College to design to train their workers so that they can take their graduates and immediately plug them into the urgent need for more sheet metal workers and welders at these companies.

That just highlights the fact that, again, how we can coordinate the model of working educational institutions, working with local employers to specifically train their workforce to meet the most urgent workforce needs. I would just suggest, Mr. Hastings, that you represent the manufacturers. You're working with, the State Building and Construction Trades, one of the most powerful labor coalitions in the state. We should all combine forces to advocate for the restoration of that direct funding for career technical education.

Because if we're going to pay all this lip service on how important career education is, we need to demonstrate it with the ongoing dedicated funding. Okay, I got to get off my pontificating here, and I do have some specific questions. Yes. So, to any of the providers, I know one of the critical, the basic model of a career technical education program is to be nimble, to be able to meet the workforce needs of your local employers.

There is a proposal to provide career technical education educators with permanent status, similar to permanent status, for your regular K through 12, the rest of the K through 12 system. Do you have any responses in terms of whether that would allow for that necessary nimbleness to be able to meet the changing workforce needs in your communities?

I think that's hard because one of the advantages we have is that if that career area changes, that we do not have a permanent employee who then we have to decide what is he going to teach? PE, English? But there should be some other incentives to bring in the employees that we need. Right now in Napa County, of course, we're our County of hospitality. So we have really ramped up our programs, our culinary programs and students are getting jobs while they're still in school.

We have a young lady who's working at one of the top restaurants in Napa on Saturdays, baking. She's a middle school student and it's an internship program. So we have a lot of possibilities. But I think we need to maintain that flexibility as the career areas change.

I think there's also an issue with the current credentialing system for CTE because you are awarded your credential by sector and so there is a lot of pathways within those sectors and you can take any sector and there's going to be issues. So take healthcare. We have a dental and a medical program.

And if we don't have enrollment and we can't continue to keep the dental program, but that dental teacher has more seniority, well, that person then is eligible to go teach in the medical program, but the experience is not relevant for that program and does not really have the skills to teach it. But on paper they qualify. So how do you rectify that becomes a challenge.

I would just add that I think one of the goals of the master plan for career education also has to look at the workforce issues. Right. And what are the barriers and when people are just entirely inflexible about how people can use their credentials or how academic teachers teach with CTE teachers and how that's funded, I really think that's an area that is a huge barrier.

And I would imagine that it would be a worthwhile investment to look at the research that's being done, look at the many task force that's been focused on that and come up with some solid recommendations for the state about how do we build a workforce to do the both and as opposed to just the OR, because I think that's the future.

So when you say "both and," how do we make it more attractive? How do we attract and retain more career technical educators?

And how do we look at credentialing academic teachers with some CT credentials? I do think we have to find some flexibilities here because we have a lot of good research, we have a lot of task force that have focused on the issue and I think there are some good recommendations that have come up. The issue is not going away. It's actually getting more, I think, of a challenge, particularly as we try to expand the work. Right. So I do think, again, there's a lot of research that has been done and a lot of good recommendations that have come out of it that we could act upon.

Okay.

Any further comments?

I'll just add to it just simply that I oppose that. We oppose that. You would not want my forensic science teacher teaching firefighting. You wouldn't want an airline pilot working on my car brakes. And that's what it is. That's what you would be passing. Thank you.

All right. Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

Thank you. One last question. I'll ask Mr. Hastings. You from the industry side, and then all of you from the practitioner side. I have heard about some of the challenges about bringing employers to collaborate, for example. Well, I guess maybe none of you are community college, so if you don't have an answer, I understand, but like bringing someone with expertise or having an industry partner with a school, typically a community college school, to provide training on a particular skill set.

You heard what is happening in the aerospace industry in Mr. Muratsuchi's district, but that sometimes gets complicated. I haven't been able to really understand what people mean by that in terms of, let's say, you've got someone in a particular industry that needs to train up workforce because they just need more employees, and they're not going to create an educational pathway or program because that's not what they do. They'd like the community college to do so. I've heard that in some instances, it's difficult to do that. Have you heard of any of that at all?

What are the challenges?

It is difficult, but it can be done.

Just administrative. When you have multiple entities, you have private corporations, public institutions, and the local community. I'll use the intech center as an example. It's down in Fontana. It's a California seal dedicated to land and the property. Chafee College provides the education instruction.

We had Secretary Julie Sue down there when she was secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency to see this wonderful program that's turning out electricians, welders, and the like on a routine basis, and they are snapped up immediately upon graduation, if not before. And the whole effort after we took that tour was, is this scalable? Yes. Is it replicable? Absolutely. But the needs in Northern California may be different than the needs at the Intech Center. So it's not a duplication thing.

Let's just take that exact same model and the outputs and bring it up north. Let's find out what the northern needs are. But we do have a model for it to work, and with so many things, unfortunately, with government, it becomes a pilot and the exception rather than the rule. We would like it to be a rule, at least in practice, that community colleges and corporations are working together to provide those local needs for workforce can be done and it can be done very well.

And it doesn't sound like any of you are community college level, but you probably do want to do or do exploration internships. Do you find any challenges with being able to create those partnerships that just stand out and we should know about?

I think we have done a tremendous amount of work as a field, really looking at what a high-quality work-based learning continuum is. What does that look like for a young person from 9th grade up through community college and beyond? I think it really has been difficult to get big engagement from industry at the scale we need. Right. To deliver on work-based learning opportunities for young people under the age of 18.

And obviously employers are not in the business of education and educators are not in the business of business. Right. So I think it's really important to understand the intermediary structure that allows that connection to happen. That said, we still would benefit at a statewide level from a powerful message to employers that we are building the workforce of the future.

And we need you to help us do that by providing work based learning opportunities, to provide internships, to provide a full range of exploration, to exposure opportunities for a young person throughout that decade of life. Right. It doesn't start at college or community college, it should start earlier. And I think the state and all of the leadership could really come together around a common message for why this matters for our state to have our businesses, small to large, be part of this social compact for young people and for the future and the health of our workforce and economy.

Didn't we used to give tax breaks? There should be something. There has to be an incentive. Having a young person come onto your workplace is a disruption of sorts. If you're going to do a good job and there's got to be an incentive for you to stop and take the time and have your workers take the time to explain things to this young person and give them an opportunity to spend time and then we also have to give the flexibility for how much time the student spends off campus.

Well, it seems like to me that if we want to be successful, we've got to figure that out, right? That's a call to the industry; that's a call to the partners. I'll just end with a personal note. Many things in my life went right in order for me to be where I am today. I've shared more than enough time, so I won't be long with this.

But the opportunities I got as part of my public education coming from where I came from, I would not be where I am today without that support. What I will say is, though, that I never really grew up wanting to be something. I never had the opportunity to explore careers or to be even exposed, to be honest, where I grew up very poor.

And that is one place where perhaps, personally, I feel like our public education system certainly, again, very thankful for where I am, but certainly was never really exposed and didn't have that kind of a long-term vision. So I know that there's still a lot of Californians today who live in communities and situations like the one I grew up in where that exposure is critical. Certainly, the exploration phase is important because we don't have some of these careers in our communities.

Some of our communities, the only corporations we see are fast food restaurant corporations. That was the case in my personal life. So I think it's important and clearly there's work to be done. And so I thank you all for the work that you're already doing, that you've been doing, and that I think we will need your voices at the table for sure.

And I look forward to having hearing news that you are participating in those 150 individuals limited to these hearings that are happening throughout the state so that you can provide that input from the ground up so we can get the master plan continuing to go in the right direction. Again, thank you very much for the work that you do. Thank you to all the panelists. That brings us to the end of our panels, but we will now take public comment.

If I can get you to line up. If you're a member of the public who like to speak, give you a minute to share your thoughts. Certainly interested in your input, and we will get started. Welcome. Thank you.

Great. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Mr. Chairs, I should say plural. Thank you. Dawn Koepke with McHugh Koepke Padron on behalf of the California Council for Adult Education and California Adult Education Administrators Association, both organizations representing adult education providers in the K-12 system, serving some of our most marginalized adults in California, especially working with immigrant refugee populations on everything from citizenship, English language, basic skills, and also doing a lot these days improving English language acquisition programming with short term career training.

So really appreciate this hearing today. Really appreciate the efforts of administration around the master plan. We are as well, hoping to be admitted to one of those slots in those coveted positions to participate and just really want to encourage the administration, certainly the legislature, to keep adult education in mind when looking at these issues. And importantly, they are an important pathway for some of those marginalized students, also providing support for our K-12 students and their education as well. So thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. My name is Jewel Alderson. I'm with the San Diego County Office of Education, and I support CTE and career readiness initiatives for our half of a million students, 42 school districts, and over 150 charters in our county. I actually spent much of my teaching career in Sweetwater, starting the medical pathway at East Lake High School, teaching medical chemistry, and building that program. Career technical education and other K-12 postsecondary career readiness initiatives are an investment in the future economy of California.

Developing skills in our future workforce through these programs provides equitable access to high-wage, high-growth jobs, and economic mobility and ensures students today can afford to live and work in California once they enter the workforce. As you've heard today, pathway completers have higher engagement in school, higher attendance rates, higher graduation rates, and higher college growing rates than their peers, particularly in special populations. As these students transition into our economic workforce, those skills lead to the high wages that bring in the funds that we will need to run the state of California.

Thank you. One last comment? Yeah.

Okay, great. As you look to make tough decisions about the state's investments, remember, just a few years from now, the students we prepare are headed for the workforce. I invite you to come into our CTE classes and see it in action. You see the many different agencies involved, and that single person at a district has to work with each one of these agencies individually, and instead of working with their students, they're stuck applying for grants, managing grants. And hopefully we will see you in our schools. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Anna Mathews. I'm the Advocacy Manager of the California Community Colleges Faculty Association. FAC appreciates the uplifting of career technical education programs at the California community colleges, which stimulate local economies and promote socioeconomic mobility among our students. The Chancellor's Office's Vision 2030 calls for the supporting of adult learners and their various learning goals and paths, including CTE certificate attainment, acquiring skills, and being lifelong learners, especially as this economy continues to change, especially with AI.

So we ought to support the pursuits of all these different students, especially through bolstering career technical education programs. And we appreciate the focus on this important thing that the California community colleges do. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi, Mr. Chairs. My name is Darby Kernan. I'm representing It Takes a Village. They are comprised of 16 cradle-to-career, sorry, networks located from Del Norte all the way to Chula Vista. They are place-based initiatives, as you guys talked about today, that serve children at every stage of life, from before birth to college and career. And just so you know, in Chula Vista, it specifically supported the system involved youth from Learn and Earn to Achieve Potential program.

And you guys asked questions earlier about success in the program. And just so you know, 94% of the Chula Vista program participants enter into college or training programs, and 78% obtain employment for at least a year that we've tracked. And so this program is all funded through human services. And we are working with Assembly Member Bonta and Assembly Member Jackson on additional funding through the Human Services budget. And we wanted to raise it through here today, though, to make sure you're aware of that, because they do cross paths. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Hi, my name is Molly McGuire. I'm with the Campaign for College Opportunity. At the most recent education finance budget Subcommitee hearing, you asked a very basic question, which is, have the compacts been effective? And the inability to answer that basic question to understand the impact of a $1 billion investment speaks to the dire need of a higher education entity that can plan, shape, and evaluate policies and investments, and, candidly, that can hold the segments accountable when they don't meet their goals.

We would argue that the segment's progress in meeting compact goals has been uneven at best, and the master plan marks a significant shift and holds promise. But its legitimacy and its success will require this entity to be embedded with adequate authority to direct planning, set and actualize goals, share, analyze, and disaggregate data, and coordinate complex intersegmental challenges like transfer. And finally, we urge policymakers to keep one thing in mind. Coordination is not an end goal. It's a starting place. And student-centered alignment begins with collaboration, but will ultimately require a fundamental shift in culture and in accountability. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good evening, Chair and Chair and Members. Thank you so much. Rachel Mueller here on behalf of NextGen California. Thank you so much for having this Joint Hearing today.

While we center the numerous career education programs to meet the state's workforce needs and strengthen our communities and the economy. We also thank the governor for putting forth an ambitious proposal and support concepts around the need to establish a state career coordination body and developing a skills framework while ensuring that career education and training is affordable and accessible to all Californians. We look forward to working with the Legislature and engaging in the career education master plan process to ensure equitable access to career education. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. I'm Amy Schultz. I'm the Dean for Career, Continuing and Technical Education at Sierra College, a California community college. I wanted to share a little bit about the power of the strong workforce program and how it has been a game changer both in the community college system and with our partners at the K-12. So the consistent funding every year and the flexibility to use it as needed to respond to industry needs with the caveat of the metrics baked in.

So we always keep an eye on what are our outcomes going to be. Are we responding to industry needs? We bring employers to the table from the beginning, and actually now they come to us. So that question earlier about is it difficult to find employers? If you have a strong program, they come find you. And then building programming around that.

The K-12 Strong Workforce program has really strengthened our partnerships with our K-12 partners, both in dual enrollment and to make sure that our programs are aligned. So when students are in high school, they're getting the start, they come to us, they finish up, they go straight into employment.

So having the metrics and starting with what the workforce needs, using data to do that, we work closely with Center of Excellence to get our workforce data and with our regional consortium and collaborate with our neighboring colleges. So thank you for having this conversation and for your investment in career education.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Gina played on behalf of the Opportunity Youth Schools Coalition, a group of schools that is representing at promise students that operate in partnership with WIOA and more specifically the US Department of Labor, Conservation Corps, and Youth build. We appreciate the opportunity to weigh in regionally on the master plan, and we want to associate ourselves with a couple of comments made here today. First, we encourage you to provide incentives to LEAs for high quality work based learning opportunities and track that return on investment.

Separately, we encourage you to offer incentives to LEAs that leverage creatively across their funding streams and hold them accountable. We heard from Dr. Nemko and others that it's happening at the local level in some places. And finally, I want to say thank you for the clarity that we are anticipating in the ALT pathway to diploma that will help us get some consistent implementation across the state. Thank you for your work and the opportunity to weigh in.

Thank you.

Hello. Shane Wagner. I'm a Director that oversees CTE in the Roseville Joint Union High School District. I just wanted to share as the guy that oversees CTE, how awesome it is when you go into these CTE classrooms and you talk to kids and you hear about the amazing experiences they have and just, they are effusive in their excitement and they tell you about what college they're going to go to, what career they're going to go to, what job they're going to get to.

We've heard today a lot about adult perspectives today. I think it's really important that we also keep those student perspectives. We know that we're getting these kids prepared for college and career because they tell us, they report back to us years later. CTIG and Strong Workforce, they challenge us to grow our programs, expand our opportunities for schools. So through those programs, we've expanded from 17 to 41 CTE programs in our schools.

We now have over 200 students a year going out into internships and working with municipalities and local businesses. We've gone from zero to 10 pathways at our alternative ed sites. So we're creating more opportunities for students that are usually underrepresented. We've strengthened our partnerships with Sierra College. We have over 50 dual enrollment courses now. So we feel like we've risen to the challenge of meeting the goals that the state has set out to help students prepare for these future jobs and workforce placement. It's really vital that we continue to have these funds accessible to us to continue to grow these programs.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

Good afternoon. Barrett Snyder, on behalf of a Junior Achievement, working with youth and schools around the state around entrepreneurship, financial literacy, career readiness, support the governor's effort to rethink this master plan.

Rethink how we're educating kids really from middle school on, and would encourage you to think about also really embedding some of the financial literacy, entrepreneurship, and skills building into the curriculum across grade levels as you rethink this and look forward to working with you and your staff as we have this conversation. Thank you.

Thank you.

My name is Jim Kanova. I serve on the Santa Clara Unified School District, which is actually one of the Member districts of the Metro Ed Silicon Valley Career Tech Education campus, which Alyssa is a Superintendent of. And actually, in 2017, Alyssa and myself were with co-Chair Muratsuchi and Governor Brown's office, speaking about the impact of LCFF at the time. And we had a great conversation, a great meeting of the minds earlier. Both chairs spoke about, really two issues, balkanization and then also efficiency.

And so I want to first of all say the CTIG funding formula, because, as you said, we had direct, stable funding before for decades. That was a huge shock to all the ROPs, as you know, across the state. In terms of the efficiency piece, Santa Clara Unified is a robust district. Financially, we could do a campus like Metro Ed within our boundaries. We have the fiscal wherewithal, but we do not do that because fiscally strong districts don't make such poor decisions.

With six districts, we're one of the six. We're leveraging a state of the art campus so we don't have to duplicate this six times. So, to your issue of efficiency, what I would say to you when you're looking at where should career tech money go? A classroom with no equipment inside and no teachers inside, and a sign on the outside door saying, this is career education. This is CTE.

No, it's not. You need to really fund real CTE. Metro Ed is real. It's a campus. It has equipment. It has teachers that have career experiences in their career tracks. Put the money. You want efficiency. ROPs are efficient.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Hi, good afternoon. Kyle Highland. On behalf of the CTE JPA coalition membership comprised of 15 JPAs that provide CT over 60 school districts in California. Linda Granger and Alyssa Lynch are proud Members of our coalition. And for you, Asssembly Member Muratsuchi. So is the Southern California Regional Occupational Center Program. So they're also part of our coalition proud members. We want to thank you for the robust conversation that took place here today.

And we hope that the development of the master plan leads to ongoing and sustainable funding for our CTE programs, especially those that have a proven track record of success. We also think it is imperative that the state leverages the efficiencies of existing and successful CTE delivery models, like the ROP model that we heard about today. We believe that the ROP model is the exemplary CTE delivery model, and it is something that should be highlighted in the master plan and scaled throughout the state. So we thank you for the conversation, and we look forward to working with the Administration and the Legislature on building out the master plan. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Nick Romley here on behalf of Project Lead the Way. They work with school districts up and down the state, in particular providing students with real world, career centric training in things like biomedical sciences, engineering, computer science.

We support the governor's efforts to get these kind of hands on, real world training programs into all of California's K-12 students hands. Further support things like getting these pathways started as early as middle school. In particular, those that have things like diplomas, certifications, higher education credit that'll give them some currency with higher education institutions down the road if they choose to go there instead. Right. So things like that.

And then on top of that, we just want to say we really support the Legislature's efforts in this, want to be a partner with you guys in the governor's office as we work to make sure the master plan works for all of California kids. Thank you.

Thank you.

Good afternoon. Leangela Reed, on behalf of KROP, the Association of Career and College Readiness organizations, and also on behalf of the Small School Districts Association. I couldn't be any more eloquent than our immediate past President, Linda Granger, except to say thank you for this opportunity to have these conversations and the opportunity at the state level to fix glitches so we're better for our students.

And on behalf of the smalls, I would just ask you to remember that over two thirds of the districts in California are small. We have districts as small as five students. So when you're looking at competitive grants, it just doesn't work. So the pots of money work. But I also would encourage our smalls participate in regional programs, and they've been phenomenal for our students. We want to thank you for this time, Mr. Muratsuchi. You've been a longtime supporter of our programs, and they're flexible.

They respond to the needs of the economy and kids like them. I don't know what else we can say except to say thank you. We want to be a partner, however we can be a resource. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you to all the Members of the public. Again, thanks to the panelists. I want to thank Legislative Analyst Office, who's still here and listened to the public testimony, as did the Department of Finance. They were here to the end. Appreciate that the public testimony is as important as the panels and as the Members who speak. And so I thank you for sticking around. We will adjourn our meeting today, and we will see you at the next meeting next week. We're adjourned.