Assembly Budget Subcommittee No. 3 on Education Finance

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you, everybody. Good afternoon. Thank you for being here. Today is October 22, 2024. This is the Assembly Budget Subcommitee number three on education finance. I am a chair of the Committee, Assembly Member David Alvarez, and with us, we have two other Assembly Members, Sharon Quirk-Silva and Assembly Member Mike Fong.

And we'll definitely give them a chance to introduce themselves in a second as well. But I want to thank you all for joining us. This has been a hearing we've been looking forward to. We are excited about this conversation. It is a first for this budget Subcommitee.

We have never held a hearing in a state correctional facility before, first time ever. And we will discuss a critical topic both to public safety and also to education. This is an oversight hearing, as we hold throughout the year in the different hearings that we have in the Assembly.

That means that we are interested in better understanding what is happening in higher education programs, particularly as they relate in our state prison systems and how they're working and how they can work better. That's what this hearing is about. Today. We want to know about how they can get improved.

We expect to have public testimony and look forward to that. And obviously, we have also, thanks to the work of our consultant, Mark Martin, we have put together some panels that we hope will be not only of interest, but also, again, of a lot of good information for us to put to good use.

We have experts, faculty, administrators that are going to testify on the higher education programs that are here at RJ Donovan and also around other prisons around the state. I'm also really pleased. And one of the things we like to do in this Committee is to start with students. And today we will begin with students on their panel who will share their perspective and their experience in higher education.

We should always listen to students first, no matter what the setting is, even if today here we are at prison because we know that education has tremendous power to transform lives, and we want to hear about that from the students and also those who are the practitioners.

I want to also thank Warden James Hill and all the staff at CDCR for helping to make this hearing possible. We thank you. I know it wasn't simple, but we appreciate you working with us. Past research shows that higher education in prisons lowers recidivism. It cuts prison costs, and it makes for better prison conditions, both for the incarcerated and the individuals who work in the prisons.

California has responded to this research not too long ago where higher education opportunities are available at every state facility and all three public higher education systems, our community college system, the UC system, and the CSU system are involved in some way, and we will hear about that today. We're at a critical period of these programs.

Under three successive presidents, the federal Pell Grant has been opened and expanded to incarcerated students, providing more access. A key question for us today is how to best use federal resources. These federal dollars help support and grow these programs of higher education in our prisons. In our state.

The state is also contributing significant funding, at least $90 million every single year. But we also know that higher educational opportunities are uneven, with some programs and prisons offering more robust courses and programs than others. And we know that a lot of incarcerated students are taking correspondence courses which may not involve interaction with faculty or lead to an actual degree. While some higher education is better than nothing, I think we would all agree on that.

We should all be working to ensure that incarcerated students have access to quality course programs, counseling, advising, and all the support systems to make sure that they have the ability to transfer and achieve credits. This is especially critical for our students here at Donovan and at other prisons who parole and eventually will be in our communities.

There should be an easy route for students to transfer to campuses to the outside once they have served their time on the inside. Among the many things we can talk about today is how to improve program quality, find ways to offer students choices and degrees that they pursue, and how to best use and better use technology.

I want to note that we will not spend a lot of time talking about k through 12 education today inside of the prisons. There are also k through 12 programs or programs at UC or CSU and community college campuses that seek to support formally incarcerated students. We know those programs exist as well.

We are specifically talking about programs within our prison system. They are all interrelated and important, but for the sake of time to be able to get through our discussion today, we want to focus on these programs specifically. We will condo subsequent hearings on the other issues as well.

Lastly, I do want to point out, and we will have a panelist, but the Legislative Analyst Office has prepared a report that I felt was incredibly useful in preparing for today's conversation, and it's called assessing community college programs at state prison. It does focus a little bit on community colleges, but it gives us a sense of what's happening in our prison system. It was just published July of this year, and I highly recommend any of you who are interested in this.

There will be some questions that I'll be asking, and again, we'll have a panel specific to this, but very, very important and useful information here. And as a reminder, this is a public hearing. We are currently live broadcasting the hearing and being recorded, and it will remain on the Assembly website.

And also, again, we will allow for public comment and testimony at the end of the hearing, just like we do when we have these hearings in the state capitol. So again, I want to thank you all for coming. It is great to see such interest. I am really excited about the conversation. And now I'd like to kick it over to our Chair of our Higher Education Policy Committee in the Assembly, Assembly Member Mike Fong. Welcome.

Thank you so much, Mister Chairman. Thank you, Mister Chairman Alvarez, and for convening this hearing and for your leadership and efforts around this space. And good afternoon to each and every one of you.

I'm proud to join Chair Alvarez, Assembly Member Quirk Silva, my colleagues, and all of you here today to really examine higher education in our incarcerated systems. And we believe in the power and promise of higher education to transform lives.

And it's the power and promise of higher education transform lives for those who are incarcerated as we look at how we continue to improve society as a whole. And today's hearing. zero, okay. It's a lot right now. And today's hearing is so critical to really look at these efforts.

And I'm so grateful to chair Alvarez and the leadership here today to really look at these systems. And as you heard from chair Alvarez, the working efforts around the community college space and the community colleges, working around educating those in our prison system, but also the UC Irvine program as well.

Last year, I had a chance to visit Donovan, walking around the yard, and met some of the graduates and participants in the UC Irvine program. And it's that power and promise of higher education to transform lives of those incarcerated, to transform lives of those in our communities, and look forward to learning more about the programs here today and how we can continue to improve upon the programs and build upon what's currently offered.

And so today's robust conversation and oversight hearing is critical to those efforts. Anything that we can do to continue to expand those opportunities and really look at these efforts is something that I'm very close to looking at and expanding these opportunities as well, and looking at how we can continue to uplift these opportunities with that.

Thank you so much, Mister chair, for holding this information hearing here at Donovan to really look at how we continue to improve and expand higher education opportunities in our prisons, but also in our State of California. Thank you.

Thank you, Mister Fong. And now I'd like to ask, Chairman of a Subcommitee on State Government, Miss Quirk Silva.

Thank you, Assembly Member. It's a pleasure to be here on this particular topic for myself, I'm going to make a few notes on some of the areas that I've spent. This is now my fifth term in state Assembly. I'll be entering my last term if elected.

So 10 years as an elected representative, representative as the state, and I've seen quite a bit in education, incarceration. So many issues that over a 10 year decade, you really start to examine and look for solutions. As a state Assembly Member, I looked through the lens of my own personal life.

Where I come from, a family of 10, 5 brothers, four sisters and three of my brothers have passed away. Two had interfaced with incarceration for most of their lives. Both of them are not here. And finding out and really investigating more about what could it look like for somebody, not only in my family and others, has been a journey that I've taken in the last three years. I have been to Norco. I've been to Amity reentry, Chino prison.

In addition, I've traveled across the world now to Oslo to look at the prison models there, and just recently came back from Scotland and Ireland to look at the women's prisons there. Certainly want to acknowledge the staff and team that work at our prisons. We know that this is a job that is not an easy job.

And speaking of family, I had two aunts of mine who are retired who worked in corrections in Fontana. So I try to look at all sides. As a former elementary school teacher myself, I know that there are many things that we do, some are exceptional, and there's always room to continue to learn and improve. So I'm really excited to be here to listen, to learn, and I'm looking forward to the commentary. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Miss Quirk Silva. Again, thank you all. And as we enter our conversation, again, centered around students, I'm really, really appreciative of the students who are able to join us today to talk about their experience and their perspective. Really looking forward to your testimony.

And I want to thank you for making time to be with us and share your story. So we're going to start with Allen Burnett, who's Executive Director of the Prism way, then followed by Joseph Johnson, Southwestern Community College student, and John Winkleman, who is a UC Irvine bachelor's degree program student. And maybe they'll mention it.

But earlier today, there was a really great event here with a celebration of graduation of students who have graduated through some of these programs. And I'm sure we'll hear about that from you. All as well. Again, thank you. And Mister Burnett, I'll turn it over to you now. Thank you.

Can you hear me? Okay, so I talked softly, so. All right, thank you. First of all, thank you for allowing me to share this space with you. Such an important topic. It's actually near and dear to my heart. As Assemblyman pointed out, I am the Executive Director of the prism Way. I am also formerly incarcerated.

I served 28 years and eight months. I was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole as a young adulthood. My sentence was commuted in 2019 by our, our current Governor, Mister Gavin Newsom. So for me, we have the saying at my.

Where I work at is I'm not supposed to be here because I understand the gravity of my situation. So every day that I'm home and I'm free and I'm giving back and doing the work, it is a blessing to be able to do it. It's part of my living amends. I gotta say that San Diego is beautiful.

I left Alhambra about extra couple hours early just so I can drive and just take a look at the, you know, the scenery out here. So, again, so thank you for allowing me to be here. I started my higher education while I was incarcerated. I did experience community college when I was 17 years old.

I went to Santa Ana College for one semester. I'm from Orange County, but it wasn't until I. Excuse me. Obviously, I'm nervous like, this has never happened before, being in the presence of y'all. So just bear with me for a second or catch my breath. I'm gonna be the one to say it, guys. Cause I'm nervous.

I don't know how y'all feel. Okay. All right. So I started at Cal State Los Angeles in 2016. Prior to that, I was doing correspondence courses. I earned four associate's degree, and each one of them went in my locker. They started the BA program in 2016, and we started with communication studies.

For me, having an opportunity to be in the presence of actual professors was transformational. Prior to that, it was just I would send my assignments in and they would come back, and I never met a Professor.

And oftentimes I didn't even get the results back from the class that I took until, like, the following semester when I got my grade. So the stigma of incarceration was one of the challenges that we faced while we were there. In my cohort, 95% of the men were serving life without the possibility of parole.

The conversation was, why should we provide these individuals with an education when they're going to essentially die in prison. So we were fortunate enough that some forward thinking individuals decided that it was best to give us an education as well. My belief is that everyone deserves an education. Everyone. So I was commuted.

I came home and I graduated with my bachelor's degree at Cal State LA. I enrolled in the master's program at Cal State LA, and I earned my master's degree last year in communication studies. I will kind of touch on this point right here that there is a huge difference between in person learning and correspondence course. You're incarcerated.

We developed this mindset that has been ingrained in us, that we are unworthy, that we don't deserve, that we are the worst of the worst. And essentially, like us, having an education is we don't deserve that education. And so we carry that with us for many years. I think my colleagues here would agree.

And so having someone in person come and say, I believe in you. I know that you can do it. I trust you. And to have a conversation and be able to share ideas with your colleagues and have those points pushed back to you, it's life changing.

We had the President of Cal State LA come to the prison and sit with us, and he said, once a golden eagle, always a golden eagle. I couldn't wait to get home and go to Cal State LA and be on campus. I love Cal State LA so much. I live by Cal State LA. I'm a golden eagle. So. And also, I think one other thing I wanted to touch on was I read one of the report that the Assemblyman had pointed out and said something along the lines of prioritizing students.

For me, as a person who was sentenced to death by incarceration, my opinion on that, and I don't know if my opinion matters in this space, but I will share with you that I think that's a mistake. I think everyone, regardless of how much time they have, they should have an opportunity to receive an education.

I also read Assemblywoman Silva's bio, and you have mentioned that the answers are in the home and in the community. There's a saying that we always hear is, like, people closest to the problems are the ones that are closest to the solution. Like, we have done a tremendous amount on the inner work to be able to recognize how we became the person who was able to commit crime, harm another human being, and why we ended up in prison.

Once we get to that point, we marry this idea with our higher education, and we begin to create ways on how we can give back and help fix the community. These things come with an overlap between incarcerated individuals and people who are not incarcerated. This is how these things work, and this is some of the things that I'm doing here in my role as the Executive Director of the Prism Way.

So I don't want to take up too much time, but I just want to say thank you once again for allowing me to be here, allowing me to share this space with you and appreciate it.

Thank you, Mister Burnett. We will now hear from Mister Johnson.

Hello everyone. Good afternoon. It is my pleasure to be here today and share with everyone about myself, as well as how education has changed the trajectory of my life. At 18, I was charged with first degree murder and consequently sentenced to life without the possibility of parole. Entering into the system, I was completely illiterate and had no internal understanding of who I was as a man or what I want out of whatever my existence had left to offer.

At the age of 21 years old, I learned how to read and write and I found meaning and purpose within educating myself and discovered something that placed value into my life. I wrote into basic adult education program and I worked diligently through these steps in order to earn my GED.

In 2015, I started taking corresponding courses and this excited and discouraged me because college was something at that time I was not entirely prepared for. I struggled understanding the curriculum and I wanted to quit. Arriving at Richard J. Donovan was a blessing for me in my educational journey.

The chance to take in person classes was just what I needed. And as intimidating as it was for me to give college another chance, I was not going to allow experience to stagnate my goals in life. Upon enrolling, I was confronted once again with yet another attempt to take me off course and for me to throw in the towel. A Professor offered his personal opinion of me. His he said I was a class clown and I wasn't taking my education serious.

His words were crushing weight to my spirit and I used them as a way to fuel my motivation, to complete my goal and demonstrate that I would not squander the opportunity to become a better man.

Courses such as personal development helped me better organize my time efficiently and constructively by setting valuable goals, managing my time, and building positive values as I apply myself. I continue to excel each semester earning a's and you can imagine how that felt. And today marks the completion of that hard work.

I graduated with a social degree in social and behavioral science as well as sociology. Education has changed my life and I have used the tools I've learned to share my education with my family.

My stepdaughter has struggled herself and I have poured my love of education into her so that she may learn to cultivate the same passion as I. We have nightly reading sessions. She is showing great improvement. My stepson has recently graduated high school and I am proud to share that as well.

He will begin his first day in college in the spring of 25. My wife, who is an immigrant, has strengthened her English comprehensive skills, but even greater was that it helped her decision to enroll into a nursing program. And graduate education has allowed me the ability to be a positive role model within my family.

Through my education, I have found a true internal understanding of myself that years ago I did not have when I tragically took the life of another man. Today I'm learning Espanol as a second language, as well as have enrolled into the UCI program, where I will continue to pursue the next chapter of my journey.

If not for education, this moment would not exist for me as a way to shed light on the transformative powers that the programs like Southwestern Restorative justice program have on us all. Thank you.

Thank you Mister Johnson, Mister Winkleman.

Thank you, assemblymen and women. My name is John Winkleman, and as a currently incarcerated graduate of the University of California, Irvine, I've gained a profound understanding of the grace and mercy of second chance. In my youth, I attended 10 schools before the 10th grade, and then I dropped out.

I felt no connection to any school or community with an education that did not feel I was capable or worthy of going to college. At the age of 19, I began my incarceration. I would not have an opportunity to further my education for another 24 years until face to face college came back to CDCR.

As the first person in my family to pursue higher education, I did not foresee a pathway to earning a bachelor's degree, let alone from within prison. However, I transformed myself from a high school dropout into a UCI graduate, summa cum laude. An alumnus. Thank you. An alumnus.

On the precipice of applying for a PhD program in criminology, law and society at UCF, I have shattered. With the improvement in cultural capital that I've gained from my degree, I have shattered the cycle of under education and poverty that has plagued my family for generations.

And now that I understand the importance and availability of a UC education, no one in my family or sphere of influence will ever again believe they are not capable or worthy of pursuing their education goals. UCI lifted has changed the trajectory of my life and demonstrated that higher education is in fact available for all.

Today, my wife is attending the same college I graduated from, and our daughter is a freshman at a CSU, and my nephews and nieces. I'm able to mentor them now in their educational journey and able to pay it forward. UCI lifted not only improved my life and my family's life, but it's improving our community as well.

And how does the community benefit from the funds that Legislature allocated to UCI lifted? I believe it was $1.8 million over five years. CDCR claims that 95% of incarcerated people are returning to our community one day.

The question we must ask ourselves collectively is, who do I want as the passerby, the person I'm working with, my coworker, my employee, my neighbor? Do I want the person who spent the last decades in the concrete box not seeking any rehabilitation?

Or do I want the individual who applied themselves in a rigorous UC program and applied themselves within the sphere of education, which is the number one intervention in recidivism, by the way, and transform themselves into a conscientious and contributing Member of society? I could tell you who I want living next to my mom and my wife.

Overall, my experience in UCI lifted has helped me to transform myself from an uneducated and impulsive youth to a thoughtful, lifelong learner and stands as a testament to the belief that education is a fundamental human right capable of offering second chances in purpose driven lives.

The motto of the University is let there be light, and UCI has guided me towards developing that light within myself and shown me how I can share the light with others. Each of my UCI professors rigorous instruction has taught me what it means to be a good person. It's much more than mathematical formulas and sociological concepts.

The difference, they taught me the difference between having a good life and living the good life, and how to be a healthy, conscientious and contributing citizen of the world and human being in service to others. These lessons underscore the profound impact that education can have on transforming lives and fostering a more inclusive society.

With my fellow students, I have created community and established a connection within the University of California, Irvine. Today, I choose to live the good life, a purpose driven life. I am engaged in many meaningful projects of worthen focused on giving back and improving our world, and I'm committed to honoring my second chance. Let there be light. Thank you.

Thank you to all three of you. Just please stay there. We probably have some questions and comments from our Assembly Members. I think I want to just start off fully, introduce the panel before we got into, I think, the excitement of just wanting to hear from you all and thank you for sharing.

You know, one of the one of my jobs as the Chair of the Education Finance Subcommitee is how do we ensure that we have education resources to reach as many students as possible. And when I learned about what's happening in, for incarcerated students in our prisons, certainly that was, that was important and interesting.

But to be very, very frank with you, I was more interested in learning how investing in education in our incarcerated community could help us save money in the long run. And it does.

And there's research that shows that, don't get me wrong, but I say that because as we struggle with a budget as a state to do the things we want to do to reach the people in the ways we want to reach them, and provide the services that we want to, and make sure classrooms have support for teachers and that students who are, you know, from backgrounds, who can't afford to go to college to get the financial aid.

It's really from that lens that I looked at the prison programs. Okay. Is there some savings associated by educating incarcerated individuals so that when they're out, you know, it costs, what now, over 110-120,000 for each individual who is incarcerated? Let's invest, you know, a fraction of that.

This is my thinking, 10% of that in education so that when they get out, they don't come back. And that's going to save us money in the long run. And that allows me then to spend money or allocate money through our budget to other programs that aren't so important.

And that's the mindset that I came looking at this from. I want to thank you for your testimony, though, because I think you also just reminded us that there are other benefits that aren't measured or quantified in the same way. And I think all three of you spoke to that.

You spoke to how you have impacted others lives in your own family and in your surroundings. And there's a value to that investment as well. Maybe it doesn't get captured as well, or it doesn't get captured at all sometimes in terms of quantity and what that means. But the fact that you have inspired others to continue their education and pursue their education, that is what we want of everyone.

And so I think there's a value to that, to Mister Burnett's point, you know, the Lao, and again, we'll get into the questions on this, but the report does talk about, you know, should we be prioritized?

It's a question, it's not a suggestion from the LAO, but it's a question that I, you know, I definitely want to talk about, should we prioritize students who are going to be, I think that the figures they use is less than five years in the system.

Given that they're going to be getting out sooner, shouldn't we be focusing our educational resources to those so that they can come out prepared? And there's some value to that conversation.

But as Mister Burnett pointed out, there's also value in educating others and everyone and what that means and the power of education, just generally, that we all, I think, believe in. I've said it to other groups in other settings.

You can't take away education from someone that's like a power that you can earn, as Mister Johnson did from, as he shared in his testimony, being illiterate to GED, to an associates, and then what comes next, a power that he earned that isn't able to go away and the value to that.

So just wanted to make those comments. I'm sure there'll be other questions, but I wanted to give my colleagues an opportunity now to ask questions. If Miss Quirk Silva, you want to go first?

Thank you. Gentlemen. Really moved by your testimony, and I applaud you because it isn't just that you decided to pursue education, it's that it's hard, as you said, that you were illiterate. So you were starting from maybe a first or second grade level. And so whether you start at a very young age or in your case, older, education is hard. It's hard under the best circumstances. So to do it well, incarcerated is even more difficult.

And your testimony about the in person face to face is really a question for our time, as since the pandemic, we've seen many individuals choose to be on online education for various reasons. But I'm a proponent of face to face when possible, because I know the experience of interacting.

So often when you're behind a screen, people have their screens turned off, they're doing 10 things, throwing in laundry, cooking, holding a baby, which I get that, but my point is for learning experience, it's really important, but which was mentioned by my colleagues.

Certainly the impact you are now having on family Members and even more of the ripple effect is profound and it isn't being measured. And we definitely should make sure that we start to quantify that, because that is an important revelation.

But one of the things I wanted to ask, and any of you or all of you can answer is sometimes we talk about the point we're at, which is now. Well, you're incarcerated. What happens now from the future?

But if we back up and we said we weren't going to talk about high school prevention is quite an issue under all areas. So if we're talking about climate, if we're talking about incarceration, how do we prevent individuals from actually getting there? You mentioned something about not having any valid experiences in education.

So if you could give one specific type of advice that you would give to teachers that or administrators or superintendents, that could keep students more engaged, because so often we find the problem of the non engagement then leads to other engagements.

So if you are not active in school, that could very well lead to doing other things that are not as positive. So I guess just if you want to go down the line, we'll start on that end.

So could you clarify your question a little more for me, please?

What kind of advice or solutions or commentary would you have for educators that might help prevent students from going down the track that could lead to prison?

And we're talking about the K through 12. Right off the top of my head, I would say, I would like to see educators have more trauma informed care. I went to 10 schools before the 10th grade, like that's, there's something going on there.

And a lot of times teachers or educators, they have a lot of students, but they might be able to see those things if they had more education about that because I was not engaging for a reason. I was not able to focus or stay in school or didn't want to be around for a reason. Right.

And while it's not their job to, you know, provide that care, maybe just the understanding of something's different, something's going on right here and having those type of trainings or something I think would be beneficial.

Thank you.

For me, what comes to my mind is TLC. We all need it. Growing up, I was more pushed to the side instead of giving the attention that I needed and somebody to really be there and show that, you know, hey, I care for you, I care about your education and I want to see you grow instead of being like, you know, you're a problem child, go to the next school. That's it.

Thank you.

I almost just want to compliment what Mister Wilkerman said. It's definitely the trauma informed care. I feel like there needs to be more qualitative research to talk to the men and the women that are incarcerated to get to understand like why they're incarcerated in the first place.

And a lot of it has to do with like what was going on in the childhood or excuse me, in the home. What kind of adverse childhood experiences did they have? Whether they were being molested, domestic violence in the home, drugs and alcohol abuse. Those things lead into negative experiences at school and the trauma informed care.

Just to touch on what you were saying a little bit, it allows the educators to take a deeper look at the children and see what other kind of needs that need to be met.

I'll just comment on that. We're thinking alike here. I actually tried to run tried means it didn't go too far. But maybe my colleagues can do better with piece of legislation.

I tried to run a Bill that would actually require teachers to take the AcEs test and it's as you know, a very short 10 question test so that they could look at their own traumas, because we think that educators have the ideas.

Remember, I was an educator for 30 years in elementary school, but they come with their own traumas and they come with their own biases and their own narratives. And if they could look within and say, okay, this type of event caused an issue for me and it may cause an issue for my students.

Divorce is one that is so underrated and yet it's still one of the most common impacts, and yet it's one of the most impactful experience that children and adults go through. And yet we think it's just not a big issue. It's a big issue.

And so maybe we can look at something of requiring educators to take an ace test to at least be aware of. I'll hand that over to you.

Thank you Miss Quirk-Silva. Mister Fong, do you have some questions?

Thank you so much Mister Chair. And thank you Miss Corksov for putting it on our radar as well. Aces test. We can definitely take a closer look.

And thank you to all our speakers and panelists for sharing your powerful stories, your narrative, to share your lived experiences, and for opening up about all the different experiences that you've experienced.

And when we look at the programs at the community college, when we look at the programs at UC Irvine and the work that prism way is doing, I think each of you said it beautifully.

It's the power and promise of higher education to transform lives not just for yourselves, but for your family Members, for your friends, for your community and families. And it's that ripple effect that Miss Corkosova said as well, and just want to amplify the work and efforts around in person versus correspondence.

We know that in person is always the most impactful way of learning, and so my question has to deal more with, do you have the resources necessary to do your work and the time and space to do the reading, the homework, study the group activities, study with other students? How does that.

How does that work to any of the panelists? Thank you.

Hello.

Okay, so, resources. Yes, with my cohort. We were the first bachelor program through UC Irvine, first cohort. And it was a struggle. I don't want to complain. Cause I'm very grateful that it even took place. Like, it was unheard of to have a UC school come and offer a bachelor's program. Honestly, I'm very grateful for this opportunity.

But we struggled with Wi Fi issues. Having the laptops, being able to get messages to our professors or not. It's gotten better. They have put Wi Fi in our housing unit now. It used to be it'd have to go out in the rain or the cold and sit on the yard. It was challenging.

Study space is non existent. They have a prison library, but it's a law library. It's not for the students. So we have, like, we would get together and just group up in the day room and do our work at a table. But at the next table, there's people slamming dominoes. There's the football games on and people cheering.

There's dogs. We have a dog program here, which is amazing, but they're running around doing dog stuff, right? And so it's not like a library or a study space. It doesn't exist, which is unfortunate. But, you know, there were a lot of students. We formed certain mottos.

Like, one of my fellow students, Mister Peter Lewis, he had the motto, leave no student behind. So no matter what, like, I struggled with. I struggle with math. I have what's called dyscalculates, dyslexia with numbers, and I struggled with math.

If it takes people 6 hours generally to do the work, it took me about 24 hours of studying to get it right. But, you know, I had students who would help me. We'd just sit down with all the noise and chaos going on and just work it and work it and work it, you know, other resources.

We have a difficult time getting books. Professor McClanahan, who's going to be sharing later, brought us a 350,000 word Oxford dictionary on her own, we couldn't get a PDF dictionary on our laptops. I mean, we're in a research based University and I can't even get an appropriate dictionary.

That's a challenge that I think that could be fixed pretty simply. There's a lot of other situations which could be better. Moving forward, I would like to see graduates from the degree, I mean, from the degree pathway have something meaningful and purposeful to do with their lives while they're incarcerated.

Is it possible to have them tutor or mentor and be paid by the University to help the next coming generation with applications and working with the professors like tas do on campus? CDCR pays employees, you know, pennies on the dollar, literally.

But a living wage where an individual who earns a bachelor's degree could work to support themselves, not have to go back to sweeping and mopping. All this education needs to be used for something. I had janitorial skills when I first came to prison, but now my skills have expanded and enlarged, so put me to work.

The workforce development that's happening here is tremendous. I'm one representative of 23 people who graduated with me. They're outstanding exemplars of rehabilitation. There's another hundred people in the pipeline coming through that are juniors and seniors between here and UCI Riverside. And there's thousands more reaching their handout to you.

The legislators saying they want this opportunity that we've been so gracefully given. Right. These things can be, and I believe should be changed because this is how we break that cycle. Like collectively, legislators and students working together. Like, I'm willing to do the work, Mister Johnson here, he's willing to do the work, but we need that support.

Right? So that's what I'd like to share. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

You said it perfectly. My cohort is, we got it easy. You know, it's a lot, it's a lot of work to do, but I believe that it can be accomplished. You know, we have study groups. A lot of times we just have individuals. Sometimes we get together, sometimes we have larger study groups.

The Wifi that this came, it was very helpful. Now we can actually do our work from inside of ourselves at any time of the day, which is helpful. Some of us are night owls and like to be up and study, so that's a plus. I'm just, I don't really have, I'm nervous and it's just, you're doing great.

Thank you so. But he said it perfectly, you know, the best thing we can do now is just be able to have more access to research material as far as we are in the research University. So we want to be able to look up different things and have access to that.

Great. Thank you so much.

Yeah, so when I was going through my experience with community college, we bought our own books.

We had a book sharing club where if you bought a book, Mister Alvarez and I bought a book, then we would swap and then the next person comes in and we would give them an opportunity to use the books and then they'd buy a book. So it was a buy in process.

So some of our books were outdated, but now they have the capabilities of using online reading and things of that nature. But technology is a challenge for many of us outside and I can imagine it's a challenge for those inside. Again, he brought up an interesting point.

That's something I want to kind of, kind of highlight is the peer support specialist. It's the lived experience of having, you know, incarcerated men who've already went through the process of education to be able to sit and assist the individuals that are currently going through it.

That also plays into something that Miss Silva had mentioned earlier about, like how do we reach the youth and having those with lived experience to be able to come in and support teachers? Because again, the home and the community, something that you had mentioned earlier.

But the real challenge, there's additional challenges of individuals being transferred in the middle of them, actually in the middle of their degrees and midterms and things of that nature.

Fortunately, that Cal State, La and Lancaster and also the Department, they were working together to try to prevent people from getting removed from the facility until they actually finished their program.

In my experience, the way that it worked was when you had the individuals who were living at the facility working with the staff that were working with the University. Our program ran smooth.

So I think that's something that we had study groups and our study groups would be inside of the education Department where they carve out time for us to do that. But again, it comes with this collaboration between the currently incarcerated, the staff at the institution as well as the University. So thank you.

Thank you so much to each of you for your comments and for your insights on the challenges, but also opportunities going forward. So I really appreciate your insights. Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you. Let me ask you about enrollment and how you found out about the programs, because a couple of you have mentioned peer support, which undoubtedly could help with that. I mean, I'm sure people talk and so word gets out, but can you talk to me about the enrollment process and how difficult or simple it is. Now.

I think I should go first on this one, because I had my start of my program before them, so I feel like I should go first. The way that I found out about it was word of mouth. It was a Ta in the education Department. Initially, he said, hey, there's a correspondence courses.

You don't have to take everything that you find in the back of a magazine to earn a certificate. You should actually, you know, enroll in an associate's degree program. And I did that. And again, I have four associate's degrees and with a life without parole sentence, they just went in the folder in my locker.

But when we had the opportunity to start the bachelor's degree program at Lancaster, again, it was word of mouth. It was from one of the gentlemen who was an actual Ta.

So it goes back to what I was saying earlier about the people that are there, that live there, that are working with staff, and they were able to convey that information to the population, like, hey, this is the program. So the BA program, you had to have the golden four. And through the. Which is oral.

Help me out here. Oralcom. A lab. It was. Yeah. Composition, and it was another one, I think was statistics or something. Statistics, yeah. And statistics was hard. Like a crying. The whole thing. It was so hard. But we pulled through it together.

But I say that to say, like, we had to help each other to be able to meet the. To meet the requirements to get into the BA program. And that was with support from the people that were on the institution, University, as well as the staff.

Let me just clarify for me. A Ta is CDCR or is it a.

Sorry about that. I'm at the institution. I'm thinking everybody here knows the lingo. It's a teacher's assistance, just like in the community. And it would be someone who actually was incarcerated. Who? There was a gentleman there by the name of Mister Gilmer. I'm giving him a shout out.

He was the Ta there, and he would go and he would sign people up. He would make sure that people had their books. It was pretty much the population where I was that were forward in getting our education program going.

He was incarcerated, and that was his job.

That was his job. Got it. Thank you. His job. His job was to be a Ta, but he was going outside of his job to make sure that people were educated.

Thank you. Anyone else want to share on your experience on enrolling?

For me, it was my English teacher I had in Lancaster. Her name was Miss Averkles. I had just recently found out I got my GED, I was excited, and she was like, well, just sign up for. For school. And I was telling her, like, nah, I'm okay. I really don't want to do it.

Like, I just want to relax. And she just told me to take one class, and I did. And I got here to RJD, and I was told about the bachelor's program, but it was only being offered on ER, so I worked and I worked to get over here, and that's my journey.

And it was fairly simple, you know, and because the last two cohorts, and they allow us to do it on a computer, which was amazing, it made me feel like I was actually at home doing it, enrolling on the computer. So that was wonderful for me. Thank you.

So I have a little bit different perspective on this. When I first heard that a bachelor's program was potentially going to be available, like, I was stoked. I was so excited. I knew I had to do whatever I could to be part of this program. And then Covid hit. zero, man.

It just pretty much wrecked everything in education. Miss funches over there, we were going through southwestern College at the time, she was Director. I'm not sure what her title was, but she would come in and bring packets. You know, it was correspondence through packets.

And, you know, we were completing our degree through southwestern college at the time, and we heard that a bachelor program was coming from UCI, and UCI doesn't have the golden four. You need statistics, and you need an English composition class. You need a critical thinking composition class. So it's two English classes, and then you need the. Which.

01:00 a.m. I missing. Anyhow, they're a little bit different between the CSU and the UC's. And I found that I was meeting all of these requirements. I was so excited to apply, and I called my mom, and I said, I'm applying to UC Irvine from prison. Can you believe it?

And she told me, there's no way we can afford that. That's a really good school. It's like a top 10 school. There's no way we'll ever be able to afford that. And I was like, mom, there's something we never knew.

It's called the blue and gold program, and if you make less than $80,000 a year, they pay your tuition. And she broke down crying. Because this. Has been a bar for my family for generations. Sorry. It makes me emotional. This is one of the greatest things that's ever happened in my life. And so I applied for UCI.

I wrote my essays you have to write four essays for the application process. And I waited along with, at that time, 26 other students. And when I say it was towards the end of the year, maybe November, when we applied. And then in April, I got notification that I was accepted to the University of Irvine.

And I was just so, just floored. Like, I knew. I knew that from that moment, my life was going to change. And not only my life, but my family's life, and like, generations down the line. Now, as far as the applying process, wow, that was challenging.

Like I said, it was going through Covid, and we did it all on paper. Miss McClanahan, Professor McClanahan here was one of the people who came in to volunteer to help us submit our applications on paper. We have no access to the Internet. I don't know if you guys know that.

So it was all like, write it down, give it to them. They type it up and submit it. It was really challenging. Since then, Mister Johnson, here's cohort three. I'm trying to get it straight in my head.

We're now on the third cohort from UC Irvine, and they've made it so that they can apply through a portal through the CDCR approved Wi Fi access. So when I say we have WiFi, it's not Internet. It's a specific system within CDCR, so now they can apply online. And I'm able to help the students.

I help several students with their application essays, putting them together, like, understanding what is the question asking? I've received this gift from the University. Now it gives me an opportunity to pay it forward. So that's what I'd have to say about the application case.

I appreciate you sharing. It's really interesting. I know my colleagues and I have sat in numerous conversations on access to college and all of the experience you've had.

Believe it or not, there are students that are not incarcerated facing the same access issues, whether it's having lack of access to the right, you know, Internet service to be able to apply, or having someone to tell you that you can just do it. A teacher or a counselor.

I had a personal experience for myself applying to college, which I've shared often in other settings and hearings, where if it weren't for that one counselor who almost forced me to submit that fee waiver from the University, I probably wouldn't have ever had a University education myself.

So it's just interesting how some of the challenges you face are very similar to the challenges that a lot of students who are not on your traditional path into higher education are facing. A lot of similarities there and certainly things that we could share with each other.

The other question I like to ask you, while we have you here, is on correspondence. It's been a popular topic. It's in the report as well. If I could just ask you to be as blunt as possible with this, something I don't think you struggle with. What should we do? Does it work?

I mean, clearly some of you have taken those courses and it has led you here. So there must be. There might be something there, but is it, should we be investing more or that specific resource that we currently invest there in more individual, not individualized, in person types of or hybrid types of coursework?

What is your assessment of correspondence coursework?

For me, correspondent? It sucked. It sucked. But that was the only college that was offered at the time. And it was hard because, you know, dealing with, you know, certain classes, sociology, and you learn in different terms, and you don't have the actual teacher or Professor to sit there and go over this material with you.

So I had to rely on, you know, fellow inmates to teach me something that they learn in themselves. That was the hard part. I think the best thing that can be done is for tutors.

Tutors to come in, you know, from the school to be able to help people, because I know this is a pathway to face to face classes. And some prisons, this is the only thing that they have is correspondence.

So to be able to have somebody come in from the school and help them understand the material that they struggling with.

Any other thoughts? I would say don't scrap it. I think that for individuals who don't have an opportunity to immediately go into a face to face program that beginning with correspondence is. It's a good thing. Like I mentioned earlier about the struggles that we have about being incarcerated.

And if you allow an individual who has this mindset of, like, I'm no good, I'm worthless. To take a correspondence course and to get an a or b or to pass a course for that semester, you are setting them up for success as opposed to just dumping them into a program where it's face to face.

It could be asynchronous, it could be better, and it definitely needs to be better. I got out of prison and received a letter from one of my correspondence course professors letting me know that I passed the class I took seven years ago. So I'm just kidding. It didn't happen. But that's. No, but it's snail mail.

That's what it's called. Snail mail.

So back on. Okay, so as far as correspondence, I believe that it can serve as a bridge. And as Mister Burnett was saying, like, there, there. And Mister Johnson was saying, there is a place for it. But I would like to see a requirement on their funding that they provide feedback.

So many papers that I've submitted and assignments I've submitted, and I didn't know what I was doing. I taught myself statistics through correspondence. I've never taken a statistics class in my life, and I just had a book and had to, like, figure it out. Submit the assignment. No. Graded paperback? No. Just how many percentage I got wrong.

That didn't really serve me well. And UCI, I took three additional statistics classes, and that served me really well because I had amazing professors, like taking a deep dive into it, and then I was like, and now I get it right. So the correspondence has a place.

Also, I would like to see, continued, the hybrid model where we have the face to face classes, but students are able to, if necessary, like if they're missing a class or something, be able to pick that class up on their journey.

So, yeah, I believe it does have a place, but by far, the face to face model has been much more enriching for me personally and for the other students that I've seen.

Thank you. Appreciate you all answering those questions. Thank you for, again, your testimony and for your questions. And we are going to now move on to the next panel to hear from some of the folks who you've worked with yourself in your program. So please join me in thanking this panel for being with us today. Thank you.

And now I'd ask the next panelist, Miss Chelsea esquive from the community colleges, Miss Rebecca Silbert from Department of Corrections, to come forward. Please.

Okay, so we will start off with the Community Colleges. Thanks for being here.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. It is an honor to be here today. I'm Chelsea Esquibias. I'm here on behalf of Chancellor Sonya Christian, who I have the honor to report to. I worked for her previously at Bakersfield College and after SB 1391 was passed. We went into the prison facilities and we went into 10 prisons and started programs throughout the Central Valley and have continued to expand over the years to the on campus space jails.

And I now report to Doctor Sonya Christian as she's the chancellor for the state overseeing the Rising Scholars Network demonstration project as a part of Vision 2030.

On behalf of the California Community College's chancellor's office, I'd like to extend our sincere gratitude to the Legislature, the leadership of RJ Donovan Correctional Facility, and our colleagues at Southwestern College and UC Irvine. We deeply, deeply appreciate you and all that you continue to do for students.

Vision 2030 is a roadmap for California's Community Colleges, and it's the first systems level strategic plan that focuses on the urgency for focused attention and prioritization of bringing educational opportunities to justice involved young people and adults.

We recognize that our efforts as a system are integral in the ongoing transformation of California's criminal justice system, marking a paradigm shift in practice and investment away from a focus on punishment, which is linked to high recidivism rates, to a focus of rehabilitation and restoration leading to better opportunities and outcomes for justice involved their families and communities.

Through the Rising Scholars network, we are setting new benchmarks for inclusive excellence, creating pathways to success that are bold and ambitious, transformative, and delivering on the promise of reform and the investment that the Legislature has made to the California Community Colleges and the Chancellor's Office.

Our vision for the future of the Rising Scholars network focuses on increasing enrollment, streamlining administrative processes between our agencies and district partners, and accelerating our progress towards degree completion and transfer. We're preparing justice involved learners for workforce demands through comprehensive reentry services.

With that in mind, I want to share with you three bold ideas, strategies, and interventions that we have and we will be adopting to support colleges and the systems level efforts to identify areas for improvement, filling in gaps, and offering targeted and support services to our justice impacted students.

First, we are focused on enhancing infrastructure to provide colleges and our justice agency partners with high quality, evidence based technical assistance, professional development, and trainings to support community colleges efforts to accelerate progress towards producing positive outcomes at scale for our justice involved learners, deepening our capacity to support colleges and their justice agency partners will also result in our ability to scale and expand to colleges and institutions who may not be providing educational opportunities to justice impacted students.

Serving at scale through leveraging ongoing funding of adult and youth programs, this expansion of support represents the most significant structural change in service provision to community colleges in the last 10 years. Second, we're launching the Rising Scholars Network demonstration project.

It is our partnership with CDCR, an incredible, incredible partnership with CDCR and community college partners, and the Chancellor's office, which launched a three year initiative beginning this year in 2024. Our project aims to tackle complex and confounding challenges that hinder our system's ability to accelerate progress towards goals that I've previously mentioned.

Our key commitments include strengthening and standardizing partnerships with CDCR, ensuring system wide consistency and supporting seamless transitions and transfer for justice involved students leveraging data and evidence for informed decision making standardizing and enhancing personalized education plans and academic support strengthening transfer pathways and specialized program offerings ensuring system wide consistency supporting seamless transitions for students.

An example could be standardizing core educational services and developing a framework to support seamless transitions for students, moving between correctional institutions and ensuring continuity in academic advising and support services. Third, we are launching the Vision Aligned strategic plan.

We are also developing a vision 2030 aligned, comprehensive strategic plan, providing a clear roadmap for implementation and serving as the guiding framework for all stakeholders, guiding our efforts to expand educational opportunities in correctional settings and increase transfer and completion.

At this critical juncture in the growth and sustainability of the rising scholars network adult programs, our colleges receive $3 million to support the cost of textbooks and learning materials for justice impacted students in jails, prisons, and youth facilities. Since funding year 21-22 the California State Budget allocation for the Rising Scholars Network grant funded programs has remained fixed at $9.5 million.

Despite our growth in enrollment and increase in the number of correctional facilities served and awards and certificates earned under California Education Code 78071A, we are authorized to Fund up to 65 programs, yet more than 90 of our colleges are currently providing educational opportunities and support services for justice involved students in correctional facilities and on campus.

To sustain this progress that we've made and meet the growing needs of justice involved students and our colleges, we respectfully request an increase in funding, and this will allow us to advance our ambitious goals outlined in Vision 2030 in in the Legislature. Thank you for your time, your attention, and I look forward to answering any questions that you may have.

Thank you, Miss Silbert, welcome.

Thank you. Good thanks. Good afternoon, Chair Alvarez. Members Quirk-Silva and Fong my name is Rebecca Silbert, and I'm the deputy Superintendent over higher education in CDCR. This is a relatively new position. It was a Governor's appointment a little over a year ago. So I'm newish to CDCR, but not new to this work.

I was a federal public defender for about 10 years and then was running one of the research centers at UC Berkeley in 2012. And the Ford Foundation came to California and said, you know, we should have. We should have hired in prison. And at the time, we didn't really.

And they were gracious enough to give a grant to Berkeley law and the Stanford Criminal Justice center, and we spent a couple of years doing a roadmap for the state. We then raised about $13 million and gave out grants, one of which went to Bakersfield College, where Chelsea was running the program.

I then moved the work to a nonprofit in the chancellor's office. And when CDCR was looking to continue to improve this work, this was one of the gaps in the system. This was a place where we still need to build it, we still need to grow. And critically, from my position, we need to build more institutional sustainability.

I was joking, I think, with Mister Martin earlier. There's too much institutional knowledge in my head. So one of my jobs is to build this as something that never, ever goes away, that is never questioned, as something that our students wouldn't be entitled to. So we have it forever. Our vision at that time in 2013-14 was very unusual for the country, and we had the advantage in not having very much in California of being able to start from scratch.

Our vision and the goal at the time, in meeting with Senator Hancock at the time as well, was to enmesh the public higher education system and our criminal justice system so that no student would ever be overlooked and every student would have opportunity no matter where they were, and that anything that a student can access on the outside, they can access on the inside, whether that's a juvenile justice, an early intervention program, a county jail, state prison, been out for two days, two months, 20 years, that our public higher education system would say, we're here, you're welcome here.

We've got you. I find it incredibly thrilling and inspiring that we are so close to that. We didn't intend to replicate the public higher education system in CDCR. Our goal was to have students served, and however that was going to happen, and our system picked it up. So we have 116 colleges, 23 CSUs and 10 UCs.

And in CDCR, we have about 25 community colleges, five CSUs, and two UCs. So we have managed to replicate all of the good and some of the challenges, as you mentioned earlier, in my job, you know, the critical thing, as you pointed earlier, is to defer to the students. So I'm always listening to students.

I hate following the students because, like, the worst thing, because a part of me wants to sit here and say just what they said on my end. What I feel like I can do in this position is work with the colleges and universities and listen the students to A 50% of my job, if not more, is just finding problems and trying to solve them, and B, building a network.

And I think that's something that we don't talk about as much, but it's really critically important to have a network of the colleges and universities working with CDCR and also on the outside, working with the county jails and juvenile and on campus.

So we have quarterly, roughly quarterly, I hold an open call for all the community, all of the colleges and universities that are working with CDCR. Just an open call. This is what's happening. This is something new coming. I'm hearing about this. What do you think about that?

We have monthly calls with the bachelor's degree providers, the CSUs and UCs, plus Pitzer, the Chancellor's Office, runs regular calls with the community colleges. Inside, we have built, I believe you saw the contract that we had with some of the CSUs, because that funding for the CSU passes through us.

The MOU we had with the community colleges, we actually had occasion to pull some of those old MOUs. The first one we had in 2014, I believe, was two pages. The next one, there was like, a five pager. We had a 2018 version that's, I think, seven pages.

And the current version in the chancellor's office in CDCR, I believe, is about 19 pages. But it's not 19 pages of randomness. It's 19 pages of things that we did by listening to students, listening to the colleges, listening to the education staff in CDCR. Where do you have a problem? Where is it working?

All right, let's write that down. Let's write this down. That's what this is, is trying to work together with these enormous systems. And it is. I'm just gonna say it sounds a little corny, right, to talk about California innovation, but it is. I spend a lot of time working with my cohorts in other states, and I think you'll hear this later from the Vera Institute.

But having built this very intentionally to be the 30,000 foot view of our corrections Department, the state county whatever it is, working with our public education system, and we do have one of the best higher education systems in the country.

It's incredibly powerful to view it not as like one little program here and one little program here, but as a combining of these two systems to collaborate and continuously try to improve and get better so that all of our students can get what they deserve and need, and we want to give them.

Thank you very much. And just a correction. We do have the best public higher education system in the entire country, and you should all very be very proud of that. Those of you who have made it that, let me start with some questions, and I'll toss it over to my colleagues. You both heard the students and Miss Silbert, you said. Yeah, everything they said. So that sort of answers the question. But, you know, Mister Fong asks the question of what are some of the needs?

And we heard from some of the basic needs, like from the WiFi, you know, that that's the limited WiFi in order to access coursework material and those things. Has that been. Is that an ongoing work, or has that been addressed as an issue at all the institutions?

Are you asking about WiFi in particular?

Yes.

So we have been rolling out the WiFi. We have, as you heard from the students, we have brought wifi to the housing units here at RJD. We have nine additional institutions where we are relying on the waps, the wireless access points. But the coverage in the housing units is nothing complete.

And when I just found out the other day, we have one institution that the. You'd have to ask someone else, but the material with which it's constructed does not actually allow us to put it out there. So we do have spaces like that.

Okay. And are the nine institutions you're referring to the nine that have the in person bachelor's degree programs,Oh, they all have it.

They do.

Okay. What about the question about the, especially with the University programs, the research tools and access to. I assume they were talking or referring to maybe journals or maybe those types of research tools. Is that being rolled out? What is the status of that?

So we have EBSCO. EBSCO is a research service, a research tool. It is a version of EBSCO that they created for Departments of Corrections. So it is connected to the Internet, but it does have an extra step process where the students can see the abstracts, and then they make a request.

It goes to our librarian, who clicks to approve it and downloads it for the students. We also are just pilots, will be news to everyone. In this room, we are just piloting JSTOR, so we will hope to have both. That, again, is a version that JSTOR creates for Departments of Corrections.

We're doing a lot of learning from other states about how it works. We just had a, just the other day, I spent an entire afternoon because we also have a limited version of EBSCO for our ABE, for our pre high school learners. And we learned that students could click on both, which would send them to the wrong place. So they weren't getting their articles. So we fixed that. But yes, so we do have that research tool available.

Okay. The issue of the correspondence course, I was, I was interested in the comments that were made in response to that question, that the lack of feedback, is this something that you have heard previously? And is there anything that's being done to address that?

So when it comes to the correspondence, I really appreciate, I want to also just recognize the students. I thought they did a fantastic job and all that they shared. When it comes to correspondence, we truly are prioritizing face to face for our students. We want our students in the classrooms, right. The number one priority.

Correspondence is a necessary modality at this time. When we think about that bridge and getting people kind of on ramped in, students have shared that before. When we think about some of the more rural areas where we have our colleges and our prisons, it may be hard to bring some of those faculty Members in just because we don't have as many faculty Members in those rural areas. And correspondents can help with that, and those students close to graduation who maybe are missing a one or two classes.

So when students give us that feedback, or when we have received that feedback on the opportunity to receive more from their faculty Members, to your question, it really presents this opportunity to think more about how to expand the technological access, how to create an opportunity for those faculty Members to reach the students.

And through all that's being done so far, those are some of the discussions we're having. How do we create better pathways for those faculty Members and students to engage? And we also the demonstration project that I was referencing earlier that's built into that.

How do we create the most feedback and highest quality education for our students when they are in correspondence? So it's something we're addressing as a part of the three year project that we're currently launching.

I continue to be interested in that. I do want to hear more about. And I think one of the students said, like, for whatever my testimony, it's worth, clearly it's worth a lot because all my questions are based on their testimony. So I appreciate them, but because we don't have that experience.

And so when it was testified to that, I was a learner that definitely needed feedback and that iterative process to learn, submitting a document and then not ever getting any feedback, I'm not sure that I would have been very successful as a student myself. And so I'd like to know more going forward how we can address that.

You mentioned some technological, but if there's already some communications being returned to the student in some form, why is that so challenging? Why does that remain as a challenge? Tell me more of the. Maybe the logistics of the challenges.

Yeah, I think that when we think about it, the two systems are built in opposition of one another, right. That we're thinking when we're in CDCR, it's built based on safety, security, limited access to the outside world.

And we think about education, we're talking about how much feedback can we get you, how can we meet your most immediate needs and then creating situations of collaboration between the two systems to say, how do we do this?

How do we work within the confines of regulations, where we're on snail mail, where people are sending a letter to someone and we are out here living, not incarcerated, and we're used to immediate access on email? How do we bridge the gap between those two systems and something that we continue to talk about?

I think that we have made progress. We need to make a lot more progress, and there's an opportunity through the project and through the collaboration. But I appreciate that you bring it up. Most definitely.

And I do think it's an opportunity to revisit, because we're always looking for, as the California community colleges, to improve access and improve the highest quality, provide the highest quality education to our students.

Miss Silbert, can you provide your perspective from CDCR as to why there's a challenge in this and how perhaps some of the many creative things you've figured out, how to get this one figured out.

Figured out might be a tall order, but I'm willing to try. Face to face is absolutely our priority, not just cause it's an SB 416. And I worked and advocated for SB 416, so very familiar with that process. It's because we hear it from students, right. You heard it this morning.

There's no question that the experience is so powerful in a face to face classroom. So it is a priority of the Department, it's a priority of our college partners. One thing that we have been doing is working with the local partners. So here, for example, that Southwestern College, you'll hear from them earlier.

So we have a lot of colleges that are offering face to face pathways, but we may have only four classrooms available. We may have 10, we may have 15, we may have two that may change over time. We may have something else that has.

There may be safety and security reasons why someone can only come in between 3 and 5 right during the day. Our priority statutorily and as a Department is the ABE classes, the adult basic education classes. So those are taught during the day. And we still sometimes fit some college in, but much of it happens later.

So you have amazing, fabulous face to face partners like Southwestern College who can supplement with an additional class that's going to be on the laptops or asynchronous. So I do think all modalities, I don't think it would serve students to eliminate a modality, and I believe we did hear that this morning.

What we would like to get to is maximizing every bit of face to face we can, and we do that semester after semester and are always trying to get better and using technology to increase. For those who have to be in an asynchronous format to increase the amount of feedback and back and forth, there is, you know, one of the. One of the things that has been a learning curve for CDCR has been the concept of academic freedom, and that is sometimes a tension point.

Teacher faculty have academic freedom to use our laptops or not. We have had some faculty decline I to use them for whatever reason, but they are there, and we use the canvas learning management system so people can upload materials. There's a discussion board where you can have a conversation between students and faculty.

So trying to build out all of those things to provide more of a robust experience for a student who is supplementing their education. Or we do have students who say that they choose it. They may have. Be choosing to have other jobs in CDC, or they may want to be a learner on their own.

We do want to provide choice while making sure that we put the quality guardrails in place to ensure that every choice is available and every choice is high quality.

Yeah, appreciate that. I think you've covered, you know, a lot of ground there. I don't want to be stuck on one particular thing, but I do think there's something to this issue of correspondence coursework, and I think we need to.

You don't have, you know, a Southwestern College in the backyard of every prison that is able to go and do the face to face and the interaction, as was mentioned there, you have colleges where you probably may not have a college instructor living anywhere near there. And so correspondence makes sense.

But to not have any feedback on the coursework done is what is of concern and how we figure that out is what I'd like to keep us focused on and probably ask to follow up on that. I don't want to totally monopolize the time. I know Miss Silva, Quirk-Silva has some questions, and then Mister Fong will go after.

Just to follow up. I definitely get the scenario that face to face is best, not always possible, and you're working towards that. That's very clear to me. And you'll get there when you can, depending on faculty and access and all of these. But going back to correspondence questions, correspondence, in its word means to communicate.

And if there is a student, it doesn't matter in or out. That's not receiving correspondence or feedback. That's a major problem. And if we're saying that students inside have the same benefits of education, then they need to have that feedback. And there's absolutely no reason that that can't happen now. And it needs to happen now.

We have technology. We know what being an educator means. An educator means corresponding with your students. There's absolutely. Otherwise you're talking to a blank screen. And my question would be, is how are professors decided upon as those instructors that are going to work with incarcerated students?

Because they have to want to do this and they have to know what it means to be an instructor for incarcerated students. So if they're not completely buying into the idea, and the idea is that if somebody is taking, quote, an online course, there still has to be correspondence.

We see people paying thousands of dollars to do online, master's degrees, bachelor's degrees. And there is correspondence, which means interaction and feedback. So that, to me, is something that is a major issue, and we need to improve it, and we need to do it now.

Do you want to provide the response or take it up?

I would like to. I very, very much appreciate your feedback. I also want to share that we do, we have face to face. This is from an earlier comment. I just wanted to clear up something I said prior to make sure that I'm clear. We do provide face to face in every single prison in California except one.

I apologize. Thank you. And then correspondence, of course, in addition to that. But I just wanted to be clear because I felt like I was a little unclear earlier, and so I just wanted to make that in addition. So thank you.

Thank you, Mister Fong.

Thank you so much, Mister Chair Alvarez. And thank you for your comments to both of you. In terms of the question, resources to follow up on Mister Alvarez's question on as well. You mentioned Wi Fi, you mentioned research materials. The other question, I think was brought up by students of study space. Is there an opportunity to create more opportunities for study space?

So I think study space, classroom space, space. I believe there was a comment made before this started. If you can have the pleasure of reading Lao reports for the past 10 years about CDCR, they will probably all mention space. Surely it is a continuing problem.

I will say it's been a problem since I started this work in 2012. The difference between 2012 and 2024 is leadership in the direction of leadership. So anyone else who was around in 2012, 2013 there may have been space, there may not have been space, probably didn't use it as effectively.

What I see now is in every institution, the college, and CDCR's education staff and custody staff, where's their space? Where can we, where can, you know, this doesn't look like a classroom. Can we use it as a classroom? Is there appropriate ventilation and sound? You know, is the college okay with it? Is the faculty okay with it?

What if we have wardens willing to change dinner times and count times? So, zero, you want to run a class from four to five? Well, normally we would have custody. No one can come out from four to five, but we need a class. So let's fix that.

So we have from the top down, all hands on deck, trying to utilize the maximum amount of space. It continues to be a priority. It's a priority. All programming is a priority for the Department. The individual answers are going to look different in every prison and in every yard, with every college, every semester, from time to time.

Time. So there's not a one size fits all answer. It's really about the communication and the collaboration with the higher education system, our external partners.

Thank you for that context, and thank you for looking at that issue. It sounds like you're doing a deep dive on it, and I think as we go forward, how we can continue to amplify those opportunities. Secondly, in terms of the number of students that are offered these educational opportunities, is there a capital enrollment? Can you share more about how the enrollment process works in terms of like, the numbers of capacity for interest on.

The CDCR side or on the college side?

Both sides. Yeah.

Sure. I'm going to again say that it's going to look different in every institution, in every yard and every partner. So we have some institutions where there is space and there is interest, and it may be a place where the college has the capacity to only offer a few classes.

But that institution may have a thriving volunteer theater program. It may have extensive substance abuse programs in anger management and book clubs and all other kinds of things. So the issue of programming in space is much more complicated than just college. It will look different.

An institution like RJD, where we are today, being close to San Diego, has a plethora of higher education options and really, really powerful higher education partners. So the enrollment there will be limited by a number of things. It's going to be limited, most critically, by the Fire Marshal. Right. We have old Folsom up in Sacramento.

Those are small rooms. They were built a very long time ago. The fire marshal won't let us have. I think it's 25. We have some rooms here that are large and some rooms that are small. So we will fill every room to the maximum extent the fire marshal will let us.

The colleges have their union agreements, and those differ from college to college as to what their capacity is. They're also title five limitations. And then we have our stuff, right? This is. This is a lot of work for something that we all. That of us that do this. And I see many people in this room, like most of us, get up every day and think, this is a good job. Like, we're making it better. But it's hard. Just.

If you think about just coming in here this morning and the emails you got about wear this, don't wear this, imagine doing that for 46 gate passes, classes every semester for your faculty, and then trying to figure out classroom space, and then you have to put all your materials through custody, because we have to make sure that only the correct materials are coming in.

We're not violating title 15. So it's. Our staff have a limit, both under their labor agreements and under their capacity. So we attempt to maximize in every way possible. I can't tell you if we're at, you know, 2015, we had almost nothing. It shot up to 2019, and I think the LAO statistics show that.

And then we hit Covid. I think it's important to remember that even last year's Data, 22-23 was affected by Covid because that 22-23 academic year started August of 22. But those colleges needed to know in March of 22, do you have a classroom for me? How many people can fit in that classroom?

And critically, under title V and for ftes funding, will the students be able to start that class in August and finish it in December and in March and April of 2022? CDCR could not make that commitment we still had entire institutions on lockdown, so we had to tell a lot of the colleges.

I'm sorry, I can't tell you whether six months from now we're still going to have students. So that 2223 data still is impacted. So last year was really the first year. It looks to me like we've pretty much leveled out of 10 to 12,000 community college students every semester.

We have more capacity for bachelor's degree, but we have a funding restriction there. But for community college, I think there's more capacity, as Miss Scibia said, to get more students on a streamlined path to degree, to get students faster to degree. So bring in more students and we may have some room to increase as well. I think we're just going to have to take it semester by semester and see if we're at a plateau or if we have more room to go.

Absolutely. Thank you.

Thank you. And then to. Okay. Thank you. And then to enrollment. One of the things we want to be really intentional about in the community college is making sure our students all have Ed plans and have met with counselors, and that that aligns with the scheduling. Right.

We want to make sure that these pathways are so clear that our students can get on, they can complete their degree and then upon completion, have the opportunity to go into a baccalaureate pathway.

So when we think about enrollment, we really want to think about the high quality educational plans, the deep support services to our students, so that we are scheduling with deep intentionality. So using all of the space, but making sure that we use it in the best way possible to serve our students.

A part of the project that we're launching right now is how do we get our students onto that pathway and keep them on their pathway? When we think about movement for our students.

So we may have a student in a class, many students in a class that will finish that course and be in Bakersfield College's district, going to Bakersfield College and have an ed plan. And between semesters, 15 of them are transferred out. They wake up and they're in Redwoods district, they're in Norco district.

People, I can see heads shaking. They'll wake up, and two semesters later they're in southwestern's district. And so the added complexity when Rebecca is sharing about complexity, the added complexity is how do I schedule with all of these Ed plans to make sure that I'm maximizing enrollment in a way that makes sense, and at the same time, my students are ebb and flowing out and landing in different community colleges.

And I show back up a month later, and I'm not sure if they're all here. I don't actually even know where they all went. And so when we're thinking about how to get students all the way through the pathway as quickly and most efficient way possible, we're at that next step of collaboration, of how do we make sure we know where those students are right if they're moved. That's a necessary part.

It seems to me, as CDCR, with students changing levels and going different places, but how do we, as the community college system, what we face as the rising scholars that is so unique to any student population is typically if a student moves from one community college to another, they're likely in the same district, or they left a community college and went down the street and they re enrolled in a different class, and it's pretty easy to track them down.

It's pretty easy to find them. In our situation. We're figuring out how do you coordinate 25 community colleges and all of the facilities, right. And figure out where those students are to keep them on path.

That's tremendous. Thank you for coordination. That's a big logistics coordination endeavor. But I think the work and efforts around the community college space, and great to hear the 10 to 12,000 students. I think when we look at the LAO data, we're not sure if it's a plateau, if it's going to continue to rise.

But I think as we come out of the pandemic, we know that those are the most challenging times in our higher education system. And we saw dips of enrollment of 15% to 20% across the State of California in our community colleges. But now, as we grow back, I know a number of community colleges are experiencing growth in enrollment again going forward. And that seems like it's here in our CDCR system going forward as well.

But it's a work effort that all of you are doing to program six months a year ahead, to look at facilities, to look at faculty, to look at demand for classes, to look at the scheduling and all that comes into play. So it's a lot of work, but I want to commend you for that.

But also, we know that there's more work to be done around the space to provide if there's needed demand to make sure that we meet that demand as well. So really appreciate the context, info and insights here today. Thank you. Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you. I just wrote a note about, and I know Mister Fong knows this really well, Calbright. It's an experimental program in the State of California to get people, non traditional students, in a different way, access to higher education. And we've invested in that.

And perhaps there needs to be that kind of intentional investment in this program as opposed to a, this is a little thing that community colleges does, that a couple of UC's do and a couple of csus do.

And then if we're lucky enough to have someone who really wants to champion this work, like I know Miss Silbert has for a while, then the programs work. But if that's not there, then it maybe doesn't work as well.

And so I'm concerned, as you are, about the long term viability really of this and how do we make it a long term, sustainable program. And so you might need to look at something a little bit more intentional in that way. I also think that raises the question of a couple of, for me, a couple of things.

One, and I know the Lao report talks about the lack of a comprehensive assessment of facilities and the spaces available at CDCR throughout the system. I'm wondering the question is, is there an assessment currently being done or any other type of master planning from a facility standpoint?

And I have the same question from the academic standpoint, is there a master plan being done? I know you talked about Vision 2030 from the community college perspective and aligning, I think you said aligning degrees or certificated programs to the workforce needs. How much of that is being planned together or separately or individually by both of you?

So this, it was two separate questions, I guess. So the space assessment question, CDCR does not currently have funding in its budget for the type of assessment envisioned by the LAO in that report. We, as I said earlier, space is something that we focus on to make it work every day. But the type of assessment they were recommending that would require funding that we don't currently have.

Quick question, how much funding is currently allocated for higher education programs at CDCR?

I don't know, but I'd be happy to look into it and answer that after. In terms of the degree coordinating the degree pathways, one of the big lessons we learned in the first couple of bachelor's degree cohorts, and I think this was clear, but in case it wasn't, the community college is open enrollment, as we know, and many of the colleges offer multiple degrees, and I think you'll hear that, too.

Today they can offer two or three or five or multiple pathways. The bachelor's degree programs are cohorted. So in the canvas learning management system, in the laptops, and every student have one. I just have a PDF sitting there with a description of every program in every location.

And students can tell us, I'm interested in sociology at UC Irvine. I'm interested in communications at Cal State LA. And we try to find a spot for them.

One of the early lessons we learned in terms of statewide coordination was that we were starting students in our bachelor's degree programs because they had an associate degree and they would start their bachelor's degree program and they're still missing lower division requirements. Now, this is probably something that any community college consort or will tell you will, duh.

But it was news to us, right? So then we were struggling to keep a student in that bachelor's degree cohort and trying to find, you know, one person on 1 yd who needs one seat in a poli sci class, right?

And we're running around and the local community college, either they ran that class last semester or it's full. So we're trying to find a correspondence seat. It caused an endless amount of problems, and we realized that California already had the answer. And the answer is CSU GE. I EDC soon to be CalED C, right?

Because that's something that every community college counselor can advise a community college student. Let's shorten it to Cal Ed C and hope that we get there soon. You've met your Cal Ed C requirements, right? And then we know we can put start that student in a bachelor's degree cohort and they can go full time.

They can take all the classes they can finish in the two years without us having to get to and be running around like, where are we going to find that one seat in that poly sci class?

So that is an example of the statewide coordination that gives the local community colleges the flexibility to offer the degrees and the classes that work for their faculty and that work for their Administration while keeping students on that Cal Ed C pathway. So they have as many bachelor's degree programs available to them as possible.

And I'll give you a chance to respond to the planning. Perhaps that is happening specifically, though, to the types of degrees for the careers that are going to be out there for those individuals who are eventually going to be released. And you talked about how important it is to have a pathway to a BA.

Couldn't agree more, but I think there are probably some that have an interest in pursuing certificated programs. And I'm just curious how much analysis is being done to the workforce needs of the region tied to the programming that's being provided, and then doing the, as you said, personalized educational assessments and counseling to get people on that pathway.

Yeah.

You want to take me? Okay. There's one piece of this whole puzzle that I didn't make as clear earlier, and that is that CDCR receives public safety funding to provide the CTE, the Career Tech Education side of the house. So that is unusual.

I think there's only four states nationally that do it that way, but that is how we do it here. So the public safety budget covers those career tech classes, and we have an entire division in CDCR. My cohort, my compatriots that do all of those career technical and job pathways, for example, those.

That's a lot of the building trades, but they're looking at some of the computer stuff and looking at all in the moment. I'm not thinking of them all, but we do that, not the community colleges.

So the short term or Shorter term job, local placement, you know, apprenticeships and job placements, that is handled by CDCR, which is why the community college relationships that have developed is on that transfer track pathway.

And that's also why 1391, by its terms, says the community colleges can receive apportionment for teaching in CDCR unless they overlap or duplicate anything already offered by CDCR.

Okay.

Thank you. So when we referenced that one, making sure that we're aligned, of course, with the BA pathway, all to what Rebecca just shared, and then we think about the workforce leaning into different and different ways to think about how to really connect our students. Right.

So some of the things that we have seen happen or that colleges have been doing is bringing people in from the outside as guest speakers, connecting what does peer mentorship look like inside? And then bringing people to lean into that. So becoming really creative to create experiences for our students.

But we also teach, and, you know, it's not a part of this space, but inside the jails, the federal prisons, and the youth facilities. And so in those places, we can offer the CTE pathways. And so, to your question, in those spaces we're really digging into, what does it look like to align with the workforce and the industries in the region?

Because those people that are taking classes or those students taking classes with us, for example, at the county jails, will be returning to that same community where the workforce needs or what needs to be met and what their interests are.

Appreciate that. The last question I'll ask is, you've both made it abundantly clear that it is challenging to put these programs together in a system as large as both the community college system and CDCR, I think, begs the question of, is there an onsite specific, dedicated individual that can help ensure things like, you know, push for space for the right classrooms, reach out to the local community college to do the partnerships, to inform the Administration at the prison campus that perhaps moving 15 individuals who are currently taking a course right now doesn't make sense until they finish the course.

I know that there are other things that are taken into consideration when those decisions get made, but this, to me makes sense, like it should be one of the considerations as decisions of moving inmates and things like that are being made. Is there someone at every institution that is the person that helps provide that direction and that feedback to the Administration?

Yes. Every yard has a college coordinator. And if the student count is very high, we have more than one. We have some institutions with 5 and 6 college coordinators. We also have a full education. Every CDCR institution has a school within it that's an accredited adult school that has a principal and assistant principal and college coordinators.

So here at RJD, there's a principal, there's three assistant principals, and we have. How many peskies? Three. Three college coordinators here that manage the different yards and the different college relationships. That is their full time job.

Okay. Okay. Those are all the questions for me, unless there are none from my colleagues. Well, thank you very much for your testimony. And thank me, this panel.

Want to thank you all for coming and definitely interested in hearing about the programs that you work with. So we will start with the Southwestern Community College District program with Raquel. Welcome.

Good afternoon. Just apologies in advance. As it was mentioned, we did have a graduation here this morning. I've been speaking, speaking a lot for the past 6 hours, so if my voice goes out, hopefully you can still understand. But good afternoon, Chairman Alvarez and Members of the Committee.

Thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony in today's hearing and for your attention to a topic that is of critical importance. My name is Raquel Funches and I am representing Southwestern College's restorative justice program that has been offering community college courses at this location for eight years.

Southwestern College began offering courses in the spring of 2016, where we launched two courses for 54 students. Nearly a decade later, we have served approximately 3000 students who've enrolled in over 300 courses, resulting in almost 8000 total enrollments. Students have successfully completed 90% of their courses, often outperforming their peers attending southwestern college courses outside of RJ Donovan.

Since 2019120 students have been awarded nearly 200 degrees and or certificates in various disciplines. As a result of academic excellence, over 100 students are active Members in our honor society, Phi Theta Kappa. Excuse me. The Southwestern College Restorative justice program is funded solely through the California College Chancellor's office via grants.

These grants Fund personnel and instructional supplies and materials. While the restorative justice program has achieved significant positive outcomes and success, we also face certain challenges. For example, limited access to academic resources, materials, and technology hinders student learning experiences and staffing issues lead to gaps in program delivery, and reduce educational quality.

Addressing these challenges is essential for enhancing the effectiveness and expansion of higher education programs in prison. In the coming years, I aim to broaden Southwestern College's presence within RJ Donovan by enhancing our partnerships, implementing peer tutoring and mentoring initiatives, and expanding the variety of degree pathways that include STEM disciplines.

These efforts are focused on improving program quality and fostering academic success. The benefits of providing higher education in prisons are both profound and multifaceted, with clear economic implications. Building the infrastructure for safe technological resources, opportunities for paid student positions, and increased staffing can help eliminate barriers to education for incarcerated individuals.

These measures will improve program quality and allow Southwestern College to expand our reach here at RJ Donovan. Ultimately, serving more students effectively. Let us commit to investing in an equitable society that values higher education as a pathway to redemption and opportunity. Together, we can transform lives through higher education. Thank you for your time and consideration today.

Thank you. Miss McClanahan.

Thank you so much for the opportunity to speak today. It really means a lot to us to be able to have this chance to address you directly. My name is Annie McClanahan. I'm an associate Professor of English at UCI, and I'm one of two faculty co directors for UCI lifted.

I've also taught English courses in lifted for the last three years. I had the pleasure of teaching both Mister Winkelman and Mister Johnson. So today I'm going to give you just a quick overview of what lifted has achieved and how we are growing, as well as some of the challenges that we face.

I will say that my actual role in the program is much more on the faculty side than on the funding and policy space, so feel free to ask me questions about teaching later on. Since 2022, Lifted has served more than 100 students, 76 at UCI and 26 in our first year at UC Riverside.

Lifted students first complete AA degrees in community colleges apply to the UCS through the open transfer pool, enter as juniors, and complete their BA degree in two years. UCI lifted students earn a sociology BA with an option for an English minor. UCR lifted students are earning a BA in education.

UC faculty teach in person, seminar style, one day per week. 23 students in UCI lifted's first cohort received their BA degree last summer, making us the first top 10 public University to grant BA degrees to incarcerated students. Students our cohorts are exceptionally diverse and have been exceptionally successful as college students.

60% of our students are on the dean's list at UCI every quarter, and our recent graduating class won multiple campus wide research and writing awards. We're also expanding. Our goal is to double the number of students we serve by 2027 at RJD, hopefully in partnership with UCSD.

And we're doing all this work at an out of pocket program cost of roughly $5,000 per student per year, which is one 20th the $100,000 per person per year cost of incarceration. Recidivism rates are vanishingly Low for those who earn BA degrees. Four of our students have been recommended for parole or earned sentence commutations.

We're also finding ways to leverage our existing funding. We've allocated seed funding to support replication projects. Both the project that's just launched at UCR and the project that will launch at UC Santa Barbara in 2026.

Public funds are also supporting our private fundraising of at least $150,000 per year, and this summer, we also became the second eligible Pell eligible prison education program in the nation.

Legislative interventions have already helped us ensure a high quality of educational delivery allocations for our partners in the community colleges and csus, as well as for programs like rising scholars, project rebound and underground scholars are ensuring a robust pipeline of justice impacted transfer students in the UC.

We also ultimately hope that the Legislature will provide permanent funding to lifted as with our counterparts across the state, higher ed system policies prioritizing face to face college course delivery have also helped us guarantee high quality faculty and student interaction.

That said, we do face some challenges, much of which you've already many of which you've already heard about, especially around stability of funding, technology and access to space. Choices around technology, including software, research tools, and Internet access, are currently determined by CDCR and its Office of Correctional Education, rather than in consultation with faculty and University administrators.

Often, these decisions prioritize unspecified safety and security concerns over educational needs. So you already learned that our students have access to a very limited version of EBScO. They're limited in terms of how many articles per week they can request. We've also had issues, for instance, providing them access to statistics software.

So basic educational software, as well as research databases and Internet access. They are restricted from the wealth of knowledge our main campus students can access easily via the University library.

We have similar issues around access to space to ensure educational equity between our UCI lifted campuses and our UC main campuses, we need access to space for support services like disability services, writing support, tutoring, library, and study space. Legislation might further clarify the importance of allocating existing space for educational purposes.

For all these reasons, we would strongly support the creation of an educator led oversight board or working group to coordinate and support higher ed in prison policy across the state. Again, I hope I can say more in the Q and A about all this and about my own experience teaching.

But to close, I want to say one personal thing. My students at RJD talk passionately. They spoke today about how higher education has changed their lives. But I also want to make clear that teaching in this program has changed my life, too.

It has reminded me of why I wanted to be a teacher, and it has revived my faith in what a public University can be and do. As the UC motto has it that John often quotes fiat Lux, let there be light.

Thank you very much. Now we'll hear from Miss Buckley.

Hi. Thank you so much for hosting this and having this space. It's an honor to be here with all of you. So, I'm Annie Buckley.

I'm a Professor at San Diego State University and also the Director of Our Institute for the Arts, Humanities and Social justice, which houses Vista, which I'll be speaking about today, as well as a number of other programs supporting people who are incarcerated, including prison arts Collective, which I've been working with for 11 years in 15 state prisons.

So have been working within CDCR for quite some time, and now with higher Ed for the past three years. So thank you so much for having us. We did create a presentation with a lot more detail that you can reference in your time. I'm going to cover the highlights.

Vista, or valuing incarcerated scholars through academia at SDSU, mirrors the academic rigor of SDSU's main campus. We offer two year completion degree ba programs for in prison learning environments. SDSU Vista is the result of a cross state initiative with CDCR and in collaboration, also across multiple units in SDSU.

As all of our programs are, I think it's something that sometimes gets forgotten. There's so many aspects of the University that are involved, including financial aid, admissions. I'm going to miss many, many more. And we're also run through a global campus. SDSU's extension program. We currently offer an interdisciplinary studies BA.

Our first class is going to be graduating in May 2025, and we just started a second cohort with a BA in journalism, and we are currently developing a BA in humanities. We have 69 students at Centinella State Prison. I think I didn't mention that before, but that's where our BA is and that's our partner in CDCR.

And we actually have students in the General population as well as in the sensitive needs yard. I believe it's the only BA in sensitive needs at the moment. Some highlights. 96.8% of our students in the first cohort made the dean's list. This is a very impressive statistic for SDSU. I know you're an Aztec. So, Mister Alvarez.

So all of the students who paroled thus far are continuing in the CSU system with support of project rebound. One at SDSU and two at Cal State La because of where they paroled. That is what made the most sense. Just briefly, our faculty.

I'm really proud that our faculty are a balance of SDSU tenure track faculty, lecturers from SDSU as well as lecturers new to our program, as well as faculty who themselves are formerly incarcerated. And that really does speak to and inspire our students. So we hope to continue that.

But one thing I will note is that faculty travel between 1.5 to 3 hours one way to teach in Imperial Valley. We have maybe one from the region. We'd love to have more, but it is a very small rural area and our faculty do travel twice a week, quite a long distance.

This program, as you know, is a collaboration between the CSU and CDCR, and SDSU is one of five CSU campuses offering 10 BA degrees across CDCR, and I think that the potential is ripe for partnership to continue with these state systems.

So our program, SDSUvistA, in addition to CDCR, has funding from we received the second chance Pell in 2022 and were just recently approved as a full Pell prison education program program in August 2024.

In addition, we have a grant from the Mellon foundation, which I think is really vital to provide wraparound services that, as you've heard today, are so important for student success. So it's based on holistic higher education in prisons.

Some of the opportunities you've already heard so I won't go into depth, but I will say the opportunity for both personal and communal transformation is very high, not only for individuals and their families, as our students spoke so well about, but also for the University community, for us as faculty, as administrators and our students.

We brought students from main campus over to the Vista campus, and those interactions were just life changing for both groups of students. Some of the challenges you've heard distance and space. It's very difficult, actually. It's not possible to schedule back to back classes, despite how far faculty travel, because of the limited time that space is available.

And some of the recommendations echo what my colleagues have shared, the potential for expanded partnership between the CSU and CDCR, as well as you just shared statewide coordination and collaboration there is, which I don't think has been mentioned maybe a lot today, but I think an incredible need for consideration of the full student experience for student success, including counseling, cross campus activities, student engagement, and as we heard from our students and some of my colleagues, the need for a mechanism for paid student assistance at the University, pay scale within the prison system, and increased access to technology and resources, ideally campus libraries.

As you said, it would be so incredible if our students could access the libraries. So in closing, SDSU and all of these degrees provide overall more than a degree. They provide hope and leadership and opportunity.

And I want to quote one of our students from Vista Silas, who said, investing in programs like these sparks the flames of change both within us and within the community. So thank you for your time and leadership. I look forward to your questions.

Thank you all for your testimony. I think one thing that just always reminds me from educators, or I get reminded from educators, is that you make a lot happen with often very little.

And there definitely seems to be happening, that seems to be happening here with imagine how much more we could accomplish if we had the resources that you've all described are needed. And that's what this hearing is about, understanding what those resources needs are.

And then it's our job, as we next year deliberate our state budget, is try to identify how to do that. So I'm gonna start maybe with our. Where we ended with our panelists here, and then maybe work my way backwards. I'm trying to understand the degrees that SDSU offers. Are there two degrees or are there.

I heard you mentioned 10. Is it 10 system wide with all of you, or is it 10 from SDSU?

So SDSU offers currently two degrees in sentinel estate prison, and we are on two facilities, General population and sensibilities, which cannot interact. So it's essentially like two programs, and then the CSU. So, representing my colleagues within the CSU as a whole, there are five Cal State campuses that provide a total of 10 degrees.

Thank you. And can you talk about, and I'll ask this of all of you, why these specific degree programs? Was there a reason behind that? I'd like to understand why those programs specifically.

Yes. So, for us at SDSU, we thought about a number of things. One of them was, what is the interest from students? Which we didn't speak to our specific students, but myself and some of my colleagues, having worked within corrections for a long time, were able to think about needs and interests.

We also thought a lot about what are the potential career pathways that people who do have system impacted backgrounds could potentially be successful in? And so try to consider that.

And lastly, because you're applying for second chance pill, and it was part of that, the career pathway, I guess I already mentioned that, but that was also a goal of second chance pill as well.

So that's really how we thought about them and came up with the interdisciplinary studies degree as our first degree, because it does have critical and creative thinking and helps people think across disciplines and opens up doors for potentially, like, communications fields that didn't have as many barriers as, say, like, social worker education.

Okay, let me ask the same questions of all three. So, for the UCI program, which degree, how many degrees, and why? The ones that you currently offer.

At UCI lifted, where we offer one degree, which is a ba in sociology through the social sciences with an optional minor in English in the humanities. The new program at UC Riverside offers a ba in education.

We are, because we are a smaller program, and we do have a kind of cohort model, it's very important that whatever degree programs we offer, it be feasible for the students to complete them kind of along at the same time over the course of the two years that they're in our program.

And it's very important that they be able to articulate with the community college coursework that they've already done. In addition to that, obviously, some of the sort of technology and space questions make certain kinds of programs very, very challenging.

So, for instance, there's a lot of interest in computer sciences among our students, I think, particularly for professional pathways that so far has not been possible simply for technology reasons. Similarly, other programs, for instance, STEM type programs, are very difficult because they require students to take courses in a certain order.

So if you're going to take chemistry courses, you have to take chem one and chem two, and you have to take them in that order. And at the size that we are on a kind of cohort model that we're on, that's just not feasible. We are expanding.

We hope to add the next minor program that we would like to add as a business minor. We've had a lot of interest from the business school school, so we do hope to continue to add more options, particularly as we expand. I wish I could speak to the decision process at UCR about education, but I just.

I just don't know. Yeah, but I'm happy to get back to you on that.

Yeah. The other thing, if you could get back to us, is understanding that not all of the students who are in the program are going to be guaranteed release in the education sector if they're going to seek an education career, I'm interested if there's barriers as a result of their background to enter that.

So I'm assuming the answer is yes, but I'd be interested. Miss Funches, can you talk about the varied program? You have a lot number of programs. And then was there a process for decision making on why those programs?

Sure. So we have a college program in four of the yards here at Donovan. The degree pathways that we have followed are sociology, liberal arts, communication studies.

And in 2016, Southwestern was one of 67 colleges that was selected as a second chance Pell pilot cohort, and we started with a business Administration degree and similarly to what was shared. That is one area of demand of our students one of your questions, and.

I'm wondering, because these are all meant to be pathways to four year institutions, does the four year institution exist to receive them with that preparation for all those programs?

Okay, so we have a dedicated academic counselor who has everyone on a student education plan leading to currently the degree that they declare, and hopefully with more expanded BA programs, we can lead students specifically into that degree pathway. Another reason why we focus on these particular types of degrees.

As Chelsea alluded to or misses Scubius alluded to, we have students transferring regularly and at any time throughout their educational pathway. So if they're going to be transferring to a prison up north or in the Central Valley, having them maintain the same degree pathway allows them to jump back into it no matter where they transfer.

So we know that currently the state's direction was to offer degrees in psychology, sociology, and communication studies. So focusing on one or three of those degree pathways allows students continuation no matter where they end up transferring to. Should they be put up for transfer?

And I have to ask an important question, because on the outside we see the barrier of. We just had an audit that was put out on transferring and getting into csus, and UC's is not as simple as there is no simple pathway. I'll just put it that way.

I'm maybe editorializing a bit, but I think that's almost very factual, 100% factual. Are you telling me that the programs you have all allow you to get into any of the programs at the CSU or the Irvine or Riverside program?

That is correct. So all of our students within that Ed plan are following an IGETC. So it allows them right now, direct transfer into UC Irvine. And if and when a CSU comes on board, I know there's that direction for CalgeTC. That will be an additional direction that our counselor will be focusing on.

Maybe something for all of us to learn, Mister Fong adts. Maybe something we can learn from what the prison is doing and do it better on the outside. Completion rates you all mentioned, especially the two segments, higher education, you complete in two years. Are you telling me what is the completion rate in two years?

You make it sound like every student is completing in two years. Is it 100% or is it close 90%? What is the percentage?

It's my understanding that so far, with the exception of students who have been released over the course of their program and maybe one or two cases of students who ended up transferred, it is 100%.

Wow.

Yeah. And so far, I mean, we're only in our first cohort, but yes, everyone is on track to graduate, except the three who paroled who are now enrolled in Cal State and other Cal states except for, I believe it was two or perhaps three. I have to get back to you on specifics.

In the very beginning of the program were removed for reasons unrelated to the program that we never knew anything about. But other than that they're all graduating in the two years.

I should add also that we did have three students who left who were released during their time at UCI, lifted and then entered UC campuses. So three students, two at UCI and one elsewhere.

Thank you. On funding. You do it differently. The chancellor's office provides some funding to support this program. Some of the University programs are the PEP programs that allow for Pell grant funding.

UCI received our colleague, for those of us that are here, Miss Katy Petronoris was behind the UC effort and she really wanted to be here today and unfortunately couldn't make it. But that's funded through a one time allocation. So different funding mechanisms and if we're seeing the success that we are seeing continue.

Talk to me about how you get funded now and how you see yourself being sustainable long term, maybe with community college system first.

Sure. I think quite differently from community college. A large portion that funds student enrollment is the California college Promise grant. So all of our students are earning $0 of income, so they qualify for the CCPG. That covers their enrollment fees. We are hopeful as our grant funding is renewable and continued. That is one source.

It is also my goal to institutionalize our staffing positions because that is one bulk of our, our grant funding that is taken is for personnel. As of today, for the past year, I was the sole staff Member in my program.

Two months ago, thankfully, I was provided some support staff, but it's my goal to also institutionalize these support staff positions through the district that is generated through our ftes's to cover those staffing positions.

So the funding that we get allocated directly from the chancellor's office could be toward more support services, as the students mentioned, that we're quite lacking, that we can bring in those tutors, those advisors, or the peer tutors, peer mentors, to be able to provide those more academic support services that unfortunately, through our grant funding is taking a lot of our personnel.

Thank you, CSU.

Yes. So for the I'll speak to SDSU. The specific with the CSU and CDCR is that partnership between the two. So it's really what allowed us to do this. So to be invited as one of the celtic campuses to be in this CDCR partnership so that's one piece for SDSU vistar, other piece is from Pell.

So initially, we were accepted into the second, I think the third cohort, excuse me, of the second chance Pell, which gives students who are incarcerated the opportunity to receive Pella. The University is in the second chance pill, but the universities are limited on the total amount of Pell, even if students can access it.

So then we did apply, and we're just in August, accepted as a full pill. So now students can receive Pell. So, yeah, we just got that in 2024 August.

Sorry to interrupt. Does that mean you rely less now on CDCR funding then?

Well, it's to be determined because it hasn't started yet, but there will be more. There ostensibly will be more Pell funding, but not every student can receive Pell. And because we have CDCR support, every student can be accepted, and no student is turned away for lack of funds. So that's that.

Both pieces of the pie are always going to be necessary, because every student is never going to all receive Pell, because some are not eligible if they're not a citizen, or if they don't meet the requirements.

And then the third piece of the pie for us is the Mellon foundation grant, which is for holistic learning in higher education in prison, which is vital for us to have the support that we need to provide student success and to meet our goal of mirroring campus, mirroring what happens on campus to the best that we possibly can within the institution, such as some of the things I mentioned earlier.

And the last thing is SDSU itself, through, like, the office of Financial Aid, the Office of, you know, admissions, the provost office, and what have you.

Thank you. Appreciate that.

So we did receive the one time state budget allocation. Obviously, long term. We would love to see that become permanent allocation similar to our partner programs. That funding not only covers our direct, our sort of annual direct costs, but has also supported the launch of these two replication projects and also has been used to leverage additional funding.

So, first of all, establishing us as a Pell eligible program, as I said, we're only the second in the country. And the Pell income that we expect is in the range of about a half a million per year per site.

We have also used it to support that outside philanthropic fundraising and also to secure a federal grant to support expansion. So we've been trying to leverage that existing funding into other forms of budget support.

Thank you. Appreciate that. Mister Fong, do you have any questions for this panel?

Thank you so much, Mister chair, and thank you to all our panelists. One question I had was in terms of faculty challenges. I know somebody mentioned about travel time, an hour and a half to get to the location.

If everyone, each segment can address the challenges for faculty teaching in this type of environment and how we can better address those challenges.

We'Re all, you go first. Thank. Go first. Yeah. I think that the distance is probably for us the most, the biggest barrier. It's like one and a half minimum. Sometimes it's two or more hours that people drive one way. That said, you know, we do reimburse for mileage and the faculty love teaching in our program.

Like overall, across the board. I don't want to speak for everyone, but the feedback from faculty is extremely positive. Our students are extremely engaged, motivated, curious, excited to be there, showing up. So that's some of the positives. I think that the mileage is a drawback.

One of the things that we've done is training for faculty that I would love to see expanded to be more in depth to address some of the needs that were mentioned earlier. We touch on like trauma informed pedagogy. We encourage our faculty to be collaborative.

We really talk a lot about how to be engaged in the classroom because our students are not going to be able to leave their classroom and like run into someone in the hallway or go to see a campus speaker.

So we do try to integrate as much, and I think our faculty do an incredible job of making those classrooms as engaging and through dialogue and collaboration as possible, and then also with those wraparound services. So in terms of the challenge, I guess the only other one that comes up is that we are through extension.

So that's both a benefit and a drawback for faculty. So our tenure track faculty would have to take on this class as an overload. It's not part of their regular teaching load, whereas if it was within the state budget it would be. But then that also offers drawback because then some faculty couldn't do it.

So there's a benefit and a plus to that. But that is a potential issue for some faculty as well.

Thank you.

And that's almost a perfect segue. Some of the challenges that we have is due to the majority of our faculty being adjuncts. So adjuncts can only work a max of three courses or be assigned a max of three courses per semester.

So when they are being spread thin between online classes, on campus courses and then extension campuses, college bound, you know, CCAP courses, there's a limitation to how many courses adjuncts can be assigned specifically to teach for our program that is quite robust just this semester, we have 35 different courses on four different yards.

So the faculty load is sometimes what presents some challenges. And then because they're adjuncts and that workload Max, they're teaching at multiple community colleges. Freeway flyers, you know, as they're called. So oftentimes they may get their schedule from another community college.

Before our assignments, Miss Silbert referred to it, we have to submit our assignments so early, and other colleges might beat us to the punch. So sometimes those faculty already have their assignments from the other 456 community colleges that they're teaching on.

So oftentimes there are our schedules conflict since our courses can only be offered during two time slots here at RJD.

Thank you.

In lifted, we're very fortunate that most, though not all, of our faculty are tenure track faculty, and all of us are teaching. Almost all of us are teaching it as part of our regular course load, which is really great. I think it's part of what makes the program feasible. We also are driving long distance.

If you know where Irvine is, you know that it's not that close to here. So we're also driving roughly 2 hours each way. The quarter system, obviously, when you're teaching a class one day a week, if you miss one because there's a lockdown or something else happens, that's 10% of the quarter right there.

The technology issues are also obviously put a lot of strain on faculty. I'll just give one example, which is that we have an amazing instructor who teaches a computer science course. She teaches coding, and she's taught every year that we've been here.

And the first year that she was teaching the course, the students had to write out code by hand, give her the paper, she would enter the code into a system to test it. And that was the way that the entire course was run. So you can imagine the level of dedication that that takes.

At the same time, I will say I was just in a meeting. One of the things I've been thinking about a lot is how to increase professional development for our faculty and find ways for faculty to be able to have the work that they do.

For lifted sort of recognized by upper Administration as part of a sort of broader research and teaching and diversity and service portfolio.

And so I was in a meeting talking about professional development with some of our faculty, and one of our sociology faculty said, you should teach in this program if you want the most amazing teaching experience of your life.

And you should not teach in this program if you do not want the most amazing teaching experience of your life. So I think for most of our faculty, the sort of the challenges, the benefits outweigh the challenges by a lot, but the challenges are very real.

Thank you for providing the perspective of faculty from each of the segments here. Anything that we can do to continue to uplift the work that is being done here is tremendous. And then lastly, I just want to follow up on chair Alvarez's comments about the ADT programs. We really appreciate Director fudges for bringing that forward.

Sounds like there's a lot of good coordination here, but this is something with lessons learned that we can look at expanding those ADT opportunities across different pathways. So really look forward to that conversation. Thank you, Mister chair.

Thank you, Mister Fang, Miss Quirk-Silva.

Thank you for all of you, for your testimony, really, again, inspiring, particularly related to the faculty. And I do apologize. I mean, I think I might have made you a little scared. I wasn't trying to do that. I think between the correspondent and face to face, obviously very different outcomes.

And I think when it comes to feedback, that's just a fundamental core value I have as an educator. So obviously face to face, you're going to get that in real time. But I do apologize for the context of how I express that.

But related to the challenges, first of all, huge cheers to the efforts and to the enthusiasm, because certainly traveling is just one. Just to get here makes quite an effort, and I sincerely appreciate that. I know that those who are receiving the instruction do as well.

But there were a few comments from our first panel about support related to tutoring or mentoring or peers. When I had visited Norco, this is about a year ago, that came directly from some of the students themselves that were talking about.

Now that they're attaining these types of degrees, whether they're AA or BA, and they may not be slated to be in their timeline, be released maybe at all, maybe not for quite a long time.

What are their opportunities, whether it is work or even working with others, to pass on their knowledge, either as a mentor themselves or to be mentored.

So I guess my question is, what are some concrete types of examples we might take from this hearing to put forward as under that topic, mentoring, peer mentoring, or even themselves being mentored? I know the one individual I was told talking to at Norco, he said he was very good in math.

He had received an AA, not in math, but he was very gifted in it, and that he in fact was doing helping with his daughter, who they would do some facetiming.

And so it brought up the conversation, what about us even working with education in K 12 where we so desperately know that students are struggling all the time to even look at opportunities for some type of pilot program to use individuals who have these degrees as tutors.

I mean, it would obviously be online, maybe face to face, but that's just an idea. But I guess what are your thoughts?

Sure. What worked for us here, particularly on this yard, some of the Abe courses have embedded tutors and those tutors happen to be college students and graduates and they have a heart of gold to pass it on and become tutors themselves or mentors to their peers and prospective students in the programs.

So Southwestern has been really fortunate to tap into those existing resources of those tutors who have agreed to tutor their peers. Pre Covid, we actually had paid tutors that would come in. We have an academic success center where tutors on campus were coming into the facility to do Friday tutoring that I established here on this yard.

Unfortunately, due to Covid, a lot of those tutors moved out of state because they were students themselves and also funding constraints in their mind with the amount that they were getting paid for.

Of course, we don't have the same distance locations as my partners here, but the, the limited time that they had with the students to tutor them, it's in a group setting, were some constraints.

So that was one area I want to tap into is being able to pay our students, because I do appreciate their ability both intellectually and their privilege and honor of being tutors.

But frankly, I think it should be a paid position if we are relying on 12 perhaps up to five students that are wanting to give back and tutor their peers. But I think that it is something that should be compensated for the work that they do, for how often they do it.

Sometimes it is daily, on the weekends, overnight. So being able to compensate the students for the work that they do I think is really critical.

Yeah, I just would completely second that. I think for us, particularly, sort of always thinking about what are we offering our main campus students and what are we offering our LIFTED students and how can we ensure that those two populations are being served as much as possible in a completely equitable way.

And so I think having more on site tutors. Right now, we do have a better relationship where we have Writing Center tutors from main campus coming and doing, working with students in courses. We also have a much better and improving relationship with Disability Services Center on main campus, working with us here at RJD. But I think continuing to do that and ensuring that, if there are peer tutors that are maybe graduates of this program, tutoring their peers, coming through the program, that they be compensated and trained equivalent to main campus.

Yeah, I agree with both of my colleagues, what was shared. I think what I would add, maybe a little bit unique to us, is the program that we created, the Holistic Learning in Higher Education, is really about how do we provide those services to students and asking students, what is it that you need, what is it that you're interested in. And having our students really, in the end, co-create the toolkit that we're going to be making. So that being said, something that I think about all the time as a program director is the sustainability piece. It is scary to go, oh, we're doing this thing.

We're seeing the impacts, we're seeing the life changing experiences, but we don't know... You know, I was just talking to the Mellon Fellows the other day who are, you know, multiple disciplines with system impacted experience, many of them, and they were putting into place these programs and talking about how important it was.

And I was like, we have to set it up in such a way that it will last after this because there isn't a mechanism for that kind of wraparound services to continue. But I think to your, I think you were also asking about the students themselves having those paid opportunities.

And it's actually, we have a call, I think, this week, Ms. Silbert, and I just reached out to her recently. We're ready. We want to hire a teaching assistant. We think we have, you know, we are looking for a position on campus. It's open. We want to extend it to our students in VISTA. And so we're hoping to work out a mechanism to be able to hire a student in that position. But they are very involved in the co-creation of the support services that they do receive as well at the time now without that position in place.

Thank you all. Please join me in thanking our panelists for their perspectives. Now I'll ask our final panel to come forward. We have Orlando Zavala and Drew Soderborg from the Legislative Analyst Office. And we have Alan... Alan, you have to help me with your last name, Wachendorfer with the Vera Institute of Justice.

For those of you who are unaware, the Legislative Analyst Office is an independent legislative office that assists us throughout the year on budgetary matters but then also on policy matters. And so we've asked them to share their thoughts, certainly on the report that they just published a month or two ago. Now it's been, I guess, two or three months ago. And then we'll hear from the Vera Institute of Justice on some other concepts that are working in other parts of our country. So with that, we'll turn it over to the LAO's office.

Hi, I'm Drew Soderborg with the Legislative Analyst Office. As Assembly Member Alvarez said, we're nonpartisan fiscal and policy advisors to the State Legislature. About half the year is focused on advising the Legislature related to governor's budget proposals.

But in the other half of the year, usually around this time of year, we focus on independent projects that we often initiate ourselves. With a 10 year anniversary of SB 1391, we decided to take a look at the community college programs that are being offered in the state prison system. And Orlando snd one of our colleagues, Paul Steenhausen, who couldn't be here today, took the lead in doing that. So I'll turn it over to Orlando now.

In putting together this report, we spoke to researchers, CDCR staff, community college administrators and faculty. Also, we spoke with incarcerated students in these programs, both at the men's and women's prisons. And overall, we found that there were several positive aspects of these programs and a number of problems but missed opportunities.

We found that students generally perform quite well in these classes and have course success rates that are similar to students on the outside in the community colleges. Meeting with students, incarcerated students, we learned that it's helped them change their personal image in a positive way, build confidence, it's enhanced communication with some of their family members.

And even those confined to life sentences shared with us that these classes help them mentor younger incarcerated students and even inspire those family members on the outside. So we heard that at various different facilities. You heard that earlier today by the earlier panelists. Also in speaking with community college faculty, they noted that these students come motivated to their classes, they generally complete the work, are prepared, and they enjoy teaching at the facilities.

Hearing from CDCR administrators and correctional officers, those we spoke with shared that the prison environment has improved as a result of these community college classes. I'll be going over some of the identified problems and missed opportunities that we found from our report and some of the recommendations we have to address those problems.

Demand for courses seems to exceed the number of available classes. We heard that some people can wait up to three years before taking their first community college class, and when this happens, when the demand is greater, colleges develop enrollment priorities, some that have notable drawbacks.

For example, some colleges, what they'll do is they'll enroll students based on who submitted the application first or, yeah, who submitted the application first. And this has notable drawbacks in that those that are completing their first degree are not being prioritized or students that already have a degree enroll in these classes.

Other colleges, what they'll do is they'll provide priority to those that have, that are working towards that first degree. Given that there are different approaches, different colleges throughout the state take several different approaches. We think, we envision an approach that would allow the state to have consistent enrollment priorities.

And again, this is a byproduct that from the fact that there is more demand than classes available. This would, we envision perspective with those that are closest to release and those that are working towards completing their first degree being prioritized.

We think this would increase the number of those that are released with an associate's degree and would allow the risk of recidivism to decrease and improve their job prospects. A key barrier to expanding these classes or offering courses to the students is that space is a key limitation within the prisons.

But currently, to determine how big of an issue this is, the state needs to know how many classrooms there are at the prisons, how the space is currently being used, and how big of a deficit, if there is one, is at each individual prison or system wide. And currently the state doesn't collect this information.

As a result, we recommend the Legislature require CDCR to collect this information. And this would require the Legislature to adopt utilization standards and space standards in similar ways that the three segments of the higher educations utilize these and how they report them on their instructional facilities and their classrooms.

And these standards generally say how many class or how many students fit in a class, how often in these classrooms should be used, and that would help determine how much space is needed throughout the prison system and would also not only help for the community college class, but broadly rehabilitation programs in general.

Also, in looking over the success metrics, we found that incarcerated students in in-person classes actually perform better than correspondence. And again, as mentioned, correspondence is this communication, students typically get a packet in the mail. They'll complete assignments, send it in, and then they'll wait for the faculty to grade it and send it back in the mail.

And the state has also rolled out access to laptops or is in the process of rolling out laptops for students in higher education. So this has presented an opportunity for some colleges to pilot online education classes, and we see this as potentially promising. It could help address the limited classroom space.

But again, we don't have data on whether these programs are better than correspondence or about the same. So we recommend the Legislature require periodic updates on these online pilot programs, and to the extent that they're yielding better results than the correspondence model, then both the community colleges and CDCR could move towards online education as opposed to correspondence.

We further found that funding for community colleges lacks an incentive to promote success, and this is because the funding is primarily based on enrollment. There isn't a success component built into the funding formula in the same way that it is for traditional students that are not incarcerated.

As a result, we recommend the Legislature replace the existing funding formula, which is primarily enrollment based, to one that builds in a performance component. This would give the colleges a stronger incentive to provide robust support services that could lead to better outcomes. And we recognize that changing a funding formula would take time.

And as a result, we recommend the Legislature require the community colleges to report on outcomes each year, which is currently not readily accessible and able to be found in a public manner. And although incarcerated students are now eligible for the Pell Grant, the state is not drawing down on those funds, and we found that the state would have to change the way they charge students.

But under our recommendation, we think this is feasible in a way that would continue to change. By changing the way that the state charges incarcerated students, we think that state could pursue that in a way that still comes at no cost out of pocket to students, and we estimate that this could free up tens of millions of dollars each year on an ongoing basis, which could be used for other purposes.

And then lastly, although national research has shown that college programs help improve outcomes such as recidivism, employment, the state lacks an evaluation for these specific programs in California. And to help assess the effectiveness of these programs at state prisons, we recommend an evaluation and CDCR to work with their education partners to provide some of these outcomes and specifically recidivism, employment rates and wages by educational program and working with the partners to do so. Thank you. Happy to address any other questions in our report. Thank you.

Thank you. We'll move on. Yes.

I figured. Oh, this not on. The light is on. Okay. Oh, I can hear myself now. That's better. I figured I would be the one that's, like, in between everybody and dinner. So I'll try to get through this quickly. If somebody could grab me a little bit of water, that would be much appreciated.

I think at some point I'll need that. But Chairperson Alvarez and Members of the Committee, I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. My name is Allan Wachendorfer. I'm a program manager with the... Thank you so much. I'm a program manager with the Vera Institute of Justice's Unlocking Potential Initiative.

I want to immediately go off script a little bit just to say that I, too, I was profoundly, profoundly impacted by higher education in good ways, but profoundly, profoundly impacted by the criminal justice system in very bad ways. And so I really appreciate that this conversation and the work everybody in this room is doing to make the system more just and make communities safer. So just wanted to say that right out, we're sort of bookending it with people that have been impacted on both ends, and I really appreciate that.

But my organization, the Vera Institute, is a national research and policy organization that's focused on promoting evidence based practices within the criminal legal system. It's probably no coincidence that in 2012, we, too, were approached by funders because of our positionality in working really closely with the criminal justice system.

We were asked to pilot some programs that provide technical assistance to those programs that bring college into prisons in three different states and see how we could make that work. And with our long term goal being to overturn the ban for Pell Grants for people in state and federal prisons, which we achieved that goal in 2020, and we're now in the implementation phase of that effort. But that was by way of Second Chance Pell, which launched in 2016 and expanded several times.

And over that time, my organization and my team has provided technical assistance to over 200 colleges and their partner corrections agencies in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the federal prison system through the Second Chance Pell Pilot. So I wanted to focus on a couple of the recommendations we've heard in the LAO report. Just to urge caution on those, one I would sort of strongly oppose, and then offer a few suggestions about how we might improve the quality and create a more student centered system. And I say system.

Ms. Silbert mentioned that, because I've been doing this work in this role for six years now, and I've been pushing that from day one that we really need to think about this as a system, all the partners working together. And corrections education for a long time has been a little program here, a little program there, and now that we're all starting to work together, we can really start to serve students at scale. And California is really leading the way on that, so kudos to you all. Excuse me.

So on the notion of switching to Pell Grants for the community colleges, I really get where that's coming from, but it was mentioned already sort of that that would require all students to be charged tuition, so it's changing the model completely. And then not everyone is going to qualify for a Pell Grant.

A lot of students have loan defaults, trouble tracking down documentation. And so you would end up in a situation where you have to have a state financial aid program to backfill for those students who don't qualify for Pell. Now that presents an issue where some students are using up their Pell dollars and others aren't.

They're able to use the state dollars. And so it kind of presents itself as an equity issue potentially. Another thing is just one thing we learned with Second Chance Pell is it's a massive, massive undertaking to qualify people for Pell Grants. There's so much staff time that goes into helping people complete FAFSAs alone because they have to be done on paper in most cases because of Internet restrictions. So this is just, and then tracking down the paper.

If students get, have to, they get randomly checked for verifications by the federal government, those staff are then going back and forth to the facility to track down paperwork. It's a big job for the colleges to take on. So I just want to, like, caution on that part of things. Financial aid offices are not equipped for this because they're used to all of their students just getting online, filling out the FAFSA, and they don't have to do much handholding for that process.

And then lastly, if, like in that same vein, financial aid counseling and career counseling are so critically important with Pell dollars particularly because they're limited, and students aren't aware of the limitations of federal dollars such as the lifetime eligibility cap.

So we've seen plenty of situations where students go and use up their Pell dollars on multiple associate's degrees or certificates, and then nothing is left for the bachelor's degree. And here, more than anywhere, we absolutely need those Pell dollars to be braided in with other funding streams to pay for those bachelor's degrees.

On the prioritizing of people closer to release, I think this would significantly diminish the quality and equity of education programs and would advise against that, and here's why. Initially in Second Chance Pell, schools were required to prioritize people who were within five years of release.

We found that mandatory prison programming, which is often scheduled closer to people being released, gets in the way of people completing their degrees and uses up some of that time. And then we also found that for a variety of reasons, people just, they take longer to complete programs.

The LAO report noted that the current average time to completion is nine years. And so therefore, if students are to have enough time to complete, you would need to prioritize, that prioritization would need to occur much earlier than the five years from release that was suggested.

But additionally, and this was noted earlier, Mr. Burnett mentioned, this policy would disproportionately deprioritize people serving life in long sentences, which presents in itself a racial equity issue given that people of color face disproportionately longer sentences. And so people serving longer and life sentences would be deprioritized.

And we heard earlier already that those folks, they're serving as mentors, they're serving as leaders within the prison communities and helping create more safer rehabilitative environments. But beyond those two caveats, I do want to applaud the efforts to sort of take this step back and look at how can we improve things from here and improve quality, particularly around space issues, technology enhancements, and quality metrics.

I have a few other things here that have to do with, like touching on the student best interest factors that are required by the federal government and seeing how maybe many of those could be applied to all the college higher education programs to make things more consistent and advanced quality.

Absolutely, I know we are not supposed to touch on that part, but want to encourage expanding programs like Project Rebound, Underground Scholars. These are national models that I talk about all of the time in my work across the country. People say, who's doing a good job for programs on campus?

And I go talk to somebody from Project Rebound or Rising Scholars or Underground Scholars. I was also asked to talk a little bit about the collaboration efforts that go on. There are a lot of states developing statewide consortium or statewide stakeholder groups where the college partners, the correction partners, and other stakeholders are getting together to coordinate things with one another. That, admittedly, on a scale like California would be challenging to do.

But the idea there is trying to get everybody on the same page as far as aligning credits, service coordination, evaluation metrics, data sharing, and things like that. So if the staff capacity was available to sort of get that ball rolling and keep it rolling. I could see it potentially still working.

One sub piece of that is encouraging to look at ways to collaborate directly with students themselves. We heard a lot about what are the students, what do the students have to say, and a lot of this conversation has been centered on them, which I really appreciate. We piloted...

We actually replicated Washington state's model for student voice councils in Oklahoma and Michigan. They're sort of like student government, if you will, but inside the prison. And I think some of the programs here may do that, but seeing more of that would really helps to be more responsive and adaptable to the unique challenges faced by students, incarcerated students. I'm really close to the end here, so bear with me.

I saw in the LAO report, and a couple people mentioned too, expanding the kinds of credential pathways. I did want to note that Vera is soon to be releasing a report on the topic of high demand, well paying careers that are also accessible to people with criminal convictions, like overlapping those three criteria.

And some of the things, just as a sneak peek, that show up in that for the State of California specifically are associated of science degrees and health sciences, pre-engineering and legal studies, and then bachelor's degrees in business administration, which I think was already mentioned as an area of interest for students. Information technology, operations management.

There are a couple states that are figuring out how to allow students to to learn how to work with computers in, even though it freaks security staff out, there are ways to figure that out. And then lastly, I wanted to lift back up Mr. Winkleman's point, and Ms. Buckley mentioned this too.

I would love to see and really encourage California to figure out a way to provide incarcerated students with paid opportunities, work study, peer tutoring, even teaching roles that can offer both an income and that valuable experience and make huge contributions before they even leave the prison.

Colorado and Maine are actually setting a really huge precedent by paying people fair or living wages to do these roles, which begins to contribute to a really important trend of paying everybody in prison a fair wage. So in conclusion, I just really want to applaud everybody for the great work that you're doing. Urge caution on the two things that I mentioned, and I'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have. Hopefully I didn't use up all the time.

Thank you. Appreciate both of you, your testimony. I'm going to at the moment now ask the Legislative Data Center, who are the folks who are making sure this is all available to the public, not just today live, but forever available on the website, if you all join me in thanking them for the work that they did to make this possible. And I'll also ask them to please bring the microphone forward for public testimony.

I'm going to actually, don't go anywhere because I know I have a couple questions, but I want to make sure we have access to the members of the public who would like to say something prior to the hour number three of us being here together. I want to give you a chance to come up to the microphone now, and in a minute or two, and since I don't have my phone, I can't keep track of time. I'll just look over my shoulder here. But in a minute or two, share your testimony as it relates to the topics or topic that we have here today. So please feel free to come forward and state your name for the record and begin with your testimony. Welcome.

Hello, everyone. My name is Rosalba Johnson. I'm representing my husband, Joseph Johnson. I just want to say that I am all for education you guys are providing for incarcerated people. I'm proud to say that my husband, with the knowledge he has been learning, he is passing it on to me and his step-kids. Sorry, I'm nervous.

This has been a positive motivation for myself, as I was able to enroll back to school and pursue the career in healthcare. So, like he always says, each one teach one. So, as you guys see, it's important to please keep this program going, and I gave all my support to this program. And thank you. Thank you for everything that you guys do. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you for your testimony. Please, again, state your name and proceed.

I'll just do that. Thank you, everybody, for your time today. My name is Jeff Knorr. I'm an english professor at Sacramento City College and the faculty director of the Re-Emerging Scholars Program. I don't know that I really have a lot to add that hasn't been already said, but I think I would like to echo the necessity for equity. We spend a lot of time on campuses talking about equity programs and the necessity to close gaps, success gaps, access gaps among our student populations. And this is a student population that if we choose to bring them into our educational institutions, they have a right to equitable treatment. And so I think it's necessary that primarily, we really, you know, we've...

There's so much work being done to get faculty into the institutions, but we need to equally provide the funding and resources that adequately support counseling, tutors, TAs, that can provide those extra services that our students on campuses actually can access all the time. If our students on campus showed up and the library was closed for three weeks, there'd be an uproar. Right. And that's a necessity.

I think we also just want to remember that the models that these two gentlemen over here showed us today for being remarkable citizens in our world, in our communities, and their families and their small ring of people that they love and live with and model what it means to be really an outstanding person is a testament to the work that gets done every day in the CDCR facilities and what people bring back when they have the opportunity. Thank you.

Thank you. Appreciate you, your testimony. Anyone else wishing to provide testimony, please come forward and state your name and share with us your testimony. Welcome.

Hello. So I just want to tell you guys that this programs do help. When I see the man come out or the woman come out in the low riding scene. So we always help communities to integrate. So when they come out and they come out with a degree, it helps the community because they're just not, they have a degree. They could actually go to work. Another thing I did hear is that people that are doing life sentences don't get these opportunities, and I think it's important for them to do get these opportunities because laws are always changing. So just consider that. And thanks to everybody that's doing this, I applaud you. And thank you to David Alvarez, they do a lot for the community.

Thank you for coming. Appreciate it. Anyone else? Well, we want to, obviously, again, thanks, Warden Hill and the CDCR staff here at RJD for allowing this to be a public hearing and for anyone who wish to come to join us. So thank you to the staff. Please join me in thanking CDCR staff at Donovan.

So for my colleagues, we come to an end on the hearing today, but there are some important things that I think I certainly have learned. I had previously read a couple of different reports, including what I mentioned earlier, the LAO report, which was referenced here, on some of the recommendations that are being made.

I think there's value in all of them. There's value in listening to some of the testimony presented and perhaps, not contradiction, but certainly at least asking the right questions as to some of the recommendations from the LAO. I think what I leave today with is there's one important need overall which we must at some point figure out how to, how to address.

And that's the recommendation from LAO, not just for community college programs, but for all these programs, and an evaluation of how successful those are being and how, where are the things that we can learn from to improve. I think that's, that's one thing that is needed when it comes to funding and making sure that we have more funding available.

So I'm interested in pursuing the, ensuring that the state receives, through Pell Grants funding, funding for students, understanding and acknowledging the concern that was raised here at the end, that we don't want to leave any student ineligible. And so how do we create a system where the state benefits, as we struggle to provide more services, particularly to this population, through funding and not leaving essentially money on the table that the federal government could provide to us? I think we have to dig deeper into that and try to figure that one out.

And then what I mentioned earlier, which was the LAO's report, calls out utilization standards of the space. I think some sort of master plan, or that word gets overused too much, but certainly some assessment of what's available to us in terms of space to be used so we can maximize these programs as they all seek, it sounds like to me, to grow and provide more access to education. How is that going to happen?

How is that going to happen physically with the space? And how is that going to happen with the resources that our segments of higher education need in order to make that a reality? So those are things that I take away as questions that need further defined.

We need to further define and that we need to try to figure out how we can do that successfully. So I'll leave it at that and turn it over to my colleagues so they can ask some questions or provide their final comments. Mr. Fong, do you want to lead us first?

Thank you so much, Mr. Chair. Thank you to our panelists here, and then I'll make my final comments after I ask the question. To the gentleman from Vera, you mentioned a couple states that are doing coordinating bodies. Can you share which states are doing that job and what we can learn from those states?

Sure. First, I would mention that we have a report on that that I can share the link for. There's probably, I would say 13 or 14 of them highlighted in there. Michigan stands out as one that I actually helped develop myself, which also is a good cautionary tale around scale because they have 14 college partners and it was quite an undertaking to get them all together and on the same page and working together. But, you know, yeah, there's quite a bit of other examples in that report.

Thank you. And to the LAO you mentioned, thank you for your presentation as well. In terms of state funding, you mentioned modifying the funding formula. Would that entail completion rates? Would that include time to ADT? What would be some of the metrics of success or recommendations there? And thank you for highlighting that on page 10 that it did take an average time of nine years to degree. And so how can we speed that up? To the LAO, thank you.

Right. And we envision an approach that's similar to how traditional students are funded for success, and some of those components are earning an associate's degree, earning a community college baccalaureate degree, earning a CTE or certificate, earning nine or more CTE units, passing transfer level math, English.

These are components that traditional students in the colleges already get funded for, so adding these to the formula would incentivize the colleges to not only prioritize enrolling students but ensuring that they have fiscal incentives to provide support services so that students can succeed.

Thank you. And thank you, LAO, for the report again and for the data and really looking at how we can continue to be more transparent in the process of sharing that data and really accessing that data for the public. So I think that's another critical step going forward. But just to provide a quick comment, thank you so much to Chair Alvarez and to Assembly Member Quirk-Silva, my colleagues and everyone here today for putting today a robust panel.

It's been a really informative, a discussion, a lot of very powerful insights and narratives being shared, and the importance of providing higher education opportunities in our prison system and our opportunities here is how we can continue to better, provide better outcomes and looking at data and metrics, but also looking how we can provide the better human stories as well.

That's what, at the end of the day, it's about our students. And so really grateful for the opportunity to share in this space here today. Thank you again to CDCR for hosting us and to all our panelists for sharing their powerful testimony. Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Fong. Ms. Quirk-Silva.

Again, lots of thank you's, not only to all of the panelists, which all gave very important insights, but of course, to Corrections for allowing us here, the warden and his team and all of you who joined us. This is unique, and I give thank you to our chair here who chose to do this directly on site.

Again, I was mentioned, this is my 10th year in Assembly and the first time we've had a hearing like this, so I appreciate it. I want to just end with the students, as we began, which are, these are students that are incarcerated, but these students are just like us. If nothing else, I got that deeply.

Whether they had an experience in education that did not allow them to be successful, whether they were unseen in a classroom, whether there were household family issues, they simply committed some type of crime that landed them here. And yet as a student, they struggle with the same things that students on the outside struggle with.

Whether is, how am I going to do it on a test? Am I good enough? Can I do this work? And then you add in some respects the lack of support, whether it's the tutoring, whether it's the counseling, or whether it's a space to study. Certainly myself, growing up in a family of 10, there was no place to study. I was the first in my family. And with two brothers that were incarcerated, I firmly understand even more coming today that, yes, I achieved, but within the same family, I had two brothers who didn't.

And my mother was the biggest cheerleader for all of us. And yet for many reasons, looking back, my youngest brother, who died at 50, in school, he was not diagnosed at that time with ADHD. Yet I know that, as an educator myself, he probably, that's what he did have, and he would get in trouble at school and then again at home because of getting him in trouble at school, which is a cycle.

And I just firmly wish and believe that these type of opportunities and programs could have changed his life and that he would still be with us had he had these opportunities while he was incarcerated. So leaving this, I know there's challenges, I know there's barriers, but I'm so optimistic to see the work by not only our LAO, who took this on as a project, but the students here and all the people who work, whether you're in corrections or you work as a professor or, yes, faculty, because it is a special, special opportunity that you, in fact, have.

And as was mentioned, the professors gain as much. I remember when I went to Norco, they said the students actually from, I think it was one of the college, came in and took their courses on campus there at Norco and how much they gained from that experience. So this is, as I said from the beginning, I'm here to learn, I'm here to listen, and I certainly learned a lot. I think there's some takeaways that I'm definitely going to be looking at, but I'm also leaving being inspired. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Ms. Quirk-Silva to this panel and to all the panels, I know we've had questions, have had comments. This is an oversight hearing, and so you should expect to receive follow ups from us on those questions. I think questions do remain even to our own LAO, and I'm sure we're going to engage in these conversations on some of the recommendations. For example, as listed on the agenda, the pros and cons of community colleges developing the federal PEP programs and taking advantage of Pell Grant.

And how do we do that in a way that, as I said earlier, doesn't leave any student behind, but we take advantage of that. And the same goes for the UC and the CSU programs that are out there. The evaluation component. One thing, this committee, but also in the Assembly, through our Speaker, that we are focused on, is on making sure that the dollars that we are spent, we are spending them wisely, and they're being invested in the right ways to have the highest impact.

If we are not evaluating what we are spending our resources on, then there's no way to say with any certainty whether that's happening or not. And so this year, through the hearings we had through this committee, and as we go forward in this committee and certainly on this issue, we have to figure out ways to analyze and to evaluate these programs.

And we need to have data to make decisions based on data so that we can make our best informed decisions and spend resources more where needed and perhaps away from places where it's not. We need to have the information on how we're going to make these programs work in this ever changing and challenging environment of a prison, where space is a big factor, and there are many variables to that.

But I don't think it's impossible to figure out, as we do have space in some of our prisons that has become available as a result of the declining in the population, how do we get a little bit creative with that space. I think there's definitely more we can all figure out how to do better. And then wanting to continue to make sure that we focus on the students and the services that are needed by students, that it's not just about getting into the classroom, but also succeeding, having the wraparound services.

And I think to the Vera Institute, and my colleague already asked the question that I wanted to ask, but what are those mechanisms that exist in other states that it appears that we're a little bit behind in some other states and the work that they're doing in terms of having the stakeholders come together and the people who are involved with these programs so that we have the network of the decision makers, administrators, and that we can facilitate the work that everybody who spoke here earlier wants to continue to do and continue to provide the service to students.

So I think I leave with today with a lot of optimism as well, as my colleague has just said, that we can continue to get this right, continue to make it better, continue to impact more lives, continue to change California in a positive way, and I think that we will likely see some form of legislative or budgetary action around this issue in this next session, as we want to improve and provide, again, a better quality service for our taxpayers and for our citizens.

And so with that, I want to, again, thank you all. I want to thank my colleagues who came from, also from far. We heard about people traveling far to work. They did the same today. Mr. Fong from Los Angeles, Ms. Quirk-Silva from Orange County. Appreciate them being here, and I appreciate all of you. And with that, our hearing is adjourned. Thank you.