The Charboneau Adult Learning Center

A Program of The Literacy Project

15 Bank Row, Suite D

Greenfield, MA 01302

413-774-3935

www.literacyproject.org/charboneau.html

December 2006

Successes/Highlights

Setting up Regular Guest Programming

Sergeant William Williams of the Greenfield Army Recruiting Office made a brief presentation to our Morning

Pre-GED class. We have arranged for him to check in with our classes every 60 days or so. We have also

arranged for Davey from Women In Action to make a monthly Health Presentation (mostly reproductive health) to

our Morning Pre GED class. She has been stopping by every week since September to check in with individua learners.l

Amy Wheeler Passed the GED!

We knew she could do it, but we wouldn't have known of it so quickly without great follow-up by Amber. (Amy is still

undecided about how to deal with her future.)

Next Step Up Award Ceremony

Diane O'Hearn invited Amber to her College Success class to help give out "End of Year" awards. Hopefully, the

majority of this cohort will persist throughout another semester at college.

Gift of Sight!

The Gift of Site program is offered through LensCrafters to eligible participants unable to afford the price of quality

eyewear. Louise was able to work with a contact at LensCrafters to secure a pair of stylish eyeglasses for a young

man in our Evening GED class.

Mentoring Mini Grant!!!

SABES responded to Amber's proposal with a $1,500.00 grant to pay stipends to former Charboneau students

who finish at least one semester at GCC and agree to mentor Charboneau students and graduates transitioning

into college. This is a thrilling and extremely heartening development.

Traditional Renaissance Holiday Feast!

Well, it's a “Charboneau tradition” by now - since it's the third time we (Louise) did it. The Chicken Limonia was

delicious and the Spit Roast Meat was especially succulent, infused as it was with choice bits of zesty garlic. This

year's Rosy Almond Cream was made extra rosy with the addition of raspberries and a pomegranate seed

garnish. Special thanks to Jose for another tray of his tasty Spanish rice.

and . . .

Achievements by Learners

4 learners Applied for a Job 3 learners Completed Additional Math Units 11 learners Completed Assessed Math Unit 14 learners Completed Monthly Word Bank Exercises 17 learners Completed Essay/Significant writing project 1 learner Created Curriculum Materials 3 learners Documented Partial Math Unit with Self Assessment 1 learner Enhanced financial management skills 1 learner Enhanced household management skills 2 learners Enlisted Supportive/Safety Services 1 learner Enrolled-voc/prevoc training program 1 learner Got a job 1 learner Has greater involvement in children's schooling 1 learner Improved personal health 2 learners Interviewed for job 1 learner Learned about benefits packages

2 learners Learned about credit/debit card use 1 learner Learned about HIV/AIDS 1 learner Learned About Nutrition 1 learner Learned About or Used Community Resources 1 learner Learned ways to reduce stress 1 learner Obtained Stable Housing 1 learner Participated in Policy Making At Work 1 learner Passed GED 9 learners Read a book 2 learners Read Additional Book(s) 1 learner Registered at/Visited Career Center 1 learner Registered for GED Test 1 learner Registered to vote 1 learner Retained Current Employment (into 3rd quarter) 1 learner Retained new job for 9+months

Challenges

Stabilizing the Transitions Program

We are very grateful to Jennifer McKenna for her help in securing the BJ's grant that, on top of the P-21 funds, will support an 18 hour per week position through the calendar year of 2007. We are also very appreciative of all the support from throughout the agency, especially from Ipek and the Board. The Career Center (Patricia Crosby and Jim Parcells) have been superbly skillful and prescient protagonists in our efforts to maintain continuity even as the Greenfield Block Grant evaporates with the end of 2006.

Still, a calendar year is a very short time, and we won't have much breathing space before confronting the need to keep this programming going and growing into the future.

Class Activities

Louise's Morning ABE Class was heavily engaged in vocabulary building exercises that were closely integrated with Writing activities. They also completed units on Meteorology and Christmas traditions. (Louise went all out with decorating this year!) One student, Derick Campbell, created a worksheet on map skills for the entire class to work on and learn from. They also did more study on the solar system - especially the new definitional system that excludes Pluto from the ranks of the planets.

All the GED and Pre GED classes began a new Word Bank/Vocabulary activity that was presented as a new monthly expectation/requirement. No doubt that it will continue to evolve, but right now it involves word forms and transformations of parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, and adverb forms), sentence writing, and subject and verb identification. Next month will probably also involve Sentence Classification (Simple, Compound, Complex, Compound/Complex).

Joe's Morning pre-GED class continued their Unit on the Industrial Revolution with the focus on the Great Depression. Students read a short book on the life and career of Franklin D. Roosevelt and a long chapter on Eleanor Roosevelt's life and career. The plan right now is to continue this unit into the new year with extensive readings on the New Deal which will hopefully generate further writing, discussion, and study of modern mainstream ideologies in the US. The class also did more work on Elements, Compounds, and Mixtures as a follow through to a topic introduced in the previous month. Another Science activity was based on the political questions involved with regulating/banning "trans fats" in prepared foods and restaurants.

The Afternoon and Evening GED classes meet only 6 hours per week, and therefore are better focused on individual work. The monthly requirements for Writing, Math, and now Vocabulary/Grammar are intended to be a base of consistency between all of our classes and levels. So far the reactions seem promising.

Attendance had been somewhat low this Fall, but by the end of November all classes were full except for the Afternoon GED class which is non rates based. Even better, the classes all had solid corps of good attendees that were augmented by newcomers who also got off to a steady start as far as attendance is concerned. The Evening GED class has developed a very positive and productive work culture. A majority of them hold jobs, a condition we have been working for some time. They enjoy each other's company while playfully, but persistently, enforcing group norms concerning effort, attendance, and promptness. We are actually very pleased with the culture that has been developing in all our classes, and hope that this will continue into the new year.

Continuous Improvement Plan and Next Steps:

Encouraged by December's attendance (which was stellar in terms of both volume and consistency) we are going to increase our attention to issues related to stability and turbulence in attendance and enrollment. The database allowed us to develop some measures for both conditions which might offer some empirical support to our tighter attendance policies and increased academic expectations.

We developed an overall Stability measure which is a composite of other indicators of stability, short-term persistence, and turbulence. We counted stable attendees as an average of the number of students in a month with 12 or more hours AND 75% their own scheduled attendance (persistence), students who attended 70% or more of all classes offered in a month (stability), and students (if any) who attended more than 24 hours.

We measured Turbulence by averaging the number of students who attended less than 12 hours OR less than 50% of their scheduled attendance with the number of students who attended less than 55% of the classes offered in a month.

The first parameter for both Stability and Turbulence in classes is basically an indicator of individual students' persistence. The second parameter captures learners who begin or stop attending mid-month.

Before 2004 the "Stability" measure hovered at a disappointing level where it was very difficult to find consistency from one class day to another. In 2004 (around the time we started gird ourselves with more strictness concerning attendance) the Stability measure actually dropped. But in 2005 and 2006 there was an overall increase in stability with steady attendees outnumbering irregulars in every month except September 2006.

When the "Stability" measure was plotted against "Enrollment" it was no surprise that the two were negatively correlated: increases in Enrollment often coincided with decreases in Stability and vice versa. Given the current thrust in the field toward Managed Enrollment, we are now planning to resist over enrolling during the Winter and Spring months that traditionally represent our busiest season. We want to work on increasing genuine learning gains and on developing our own measures to help indicate increases in actual learning. That means valuing consistency and stability in attendance over high enrollment figures.

Additional Information:

12 days of classes Class Contact Hours: 727.70 60.6 hours per day (about 25 learners in classes per day)

				ATTENDANCE
				12+ hours	25	69%
				2-11 hours	9	25%
				<2 hours	2	6%
					36
ETHNICITY	Intakes	Enrolled					REFERRALS	Intakes	Enrolled
AmerInd/Alaskan	0	0	0%				Career Center	0	3	8%
Asian	0	1	3%				Community College	1	5	14%
Black	0	2	6%				Employer	0	1	3%
Cape Verdean	0	0	0%				Flyers/Publicity	0	2	6%
Haitian	0	1	3%				Library	0	0	0%
Hawaiian/PI	0	0	0%				Court/Probation	0	2	6%
Hispanic	0	3	8%				Public School	0	1	3%
IndianSub	0	0	0%				Social Agency/Gov't Org	0	3	8%
White	3	29	81%				Word of Mouth	2	17	47%
Other/Not Given	0	0	0%				Other	0	2	6%
	3	36						3	36