Welcome to another academic year! We are so grateful to each of you for your investment in our shared vision of support for students, educators, and the community in their commitment to postsecondary success and completion. We are currently entering our second year of King County Promise implementation, and would like to share with you a few appreciations as we enter the fall season:
We hold deep gratitude to the schools and organizations in the Highline Promise and Promise to Community partnerships. They have spent hours in retreats, working group meetings, and internal meetings to create and sustain the programs that are actively serving Promise youth.
We hold deep gratitude to the schools and organizations in the Highline Promise and Promise to Community partnerships. They have spent hours in retreats, working group meetings, and internal meetings to create and sustain the programs that are actively serving Promise youth.
As we head back to school, we appreciate the students involved in our Youth Wisdom Council. A central aspect of the KCP model is the centering of youth voices and uplifting their lived experiences to guide the program. We value that they have full academic schedules and are able to prioritize showing up to represent their communities.
We recognize all the College and Career leaders in the region who volunteered their time to allow us to learn and uplift their work.
Finally, we appreciate the guidance and support of our partners at the King County Department of Community and Human Services who continue to be responsive and willing to adjust to new challenges and opportunities.
Looking ahead to the 2023-24 academic year, PSCCN will continue to play the key intermediary role of Systems Supporting Organization for the King County Promise. Our commitment in this work is towards centering the lived experiences and dreams of our Black, Brown, and Indigenous Youth of Color. Some of the immediate upcoming work is to use the partnerships’ foundation of co-design and collective commitment to move towards active power sharing, collaborative and data-based decision-making, and participatory budgeting. Together with our partners, youth, and family, we are co-creating smoother pathways through existing systems while imagining new pathways and systems.
We are looking forward to reconnecting with many of you and continuing to share our learnings as a community.
Affirming OUR Actions to Increase Postsecondary Success
The recent ruling from the US Supreme Court that denies affirmative action will drastically impact the postsecondary
opportunities for youth in our region. When Washington state enacted similar legislation, we saw a sharp decline in Black, brown, Latinx, and immigrant students enrolling in college and postsecondary opportunities.
The impact of this decision will be felt for generations and provides us an opportunity to affirm OUR actions, as a community, in creating a more equitable education experience for all students. From our work, we know that we cannot rely on the system alone to provide equitable education access to our students. However, through authentic collaborations and co-design in partnership with the community, we as leaders in the education system can understand the postsecondary experience of those historically furthest from college opportunities and provide targeted services to remove barriers that the system won’t. These critical connections with institutions, community providers, families, and students unearth the unmet needs our students face, and challenge us, as educational leaders, to innovate and provide tools necessary to achieve postsecondary success.
Through our partnerships, we have created services to support students across the region.
These include:
FAFSA and WAFSA advising spaces.
FAFSA toolkit workshops.
College transition checklists.
College course navigation guides
Social-emotional support providers
Convening spaces to share best practices and learning opportunities with education and industry leaders.
Program guidance and coordination across institutions and community-based organizations for King County Promise.
These are just some of the actions we have taken in response to student needs. As we enter this new college and career landscape, let us continue to lean into our relationships and learn about the opportunities to support our students navigating postsecondary pathways.
In Partnership,
PSCCN Team
Click play below for the audio version of the article.
Reflecting on the Umoja Summer Learning Institute: Strengthening our Commitment to Student Success
Recently, King County Promise (KCP) staff members within the Highline Promise Program had the opportunity to attend the Umoja Summer Learning Institute (SLI). The SLI is a week-long, immersive institute focused on the Umoja Community model, offering insights into its philosophy, pedagogy, and best practices regarding the Umoja mission to enhance the cultural and educational future of African American and other students. We are excited to share some of the invaluable learnings and takeaways from some of the KCP staff who had the opportunity to attend. These reflections and learnings made at the SLI, can help shape our approach to serving our students within the Highline Promise Partnership and broader King County Promise program. While the week was filled with learnings regarding Umoja practices, curriculum, and resources, one of the key themes that kept arising was the Umoja practice of "Everybody's Business." Umoja describes the practice of "everybody's business" as such, "We are a village, acting in accord, and unafraid to be seen and heard as we do our work, leveraging every voice and source of information to do our best by our students… we cover and pitch in on each other's work, even while we maintain our areas of expertise. When a program event or program need comes up, we all inquire and support. And particularly when it comes to our students, we all stay aware of their progress, their challenges and crises, and their successes."
This practice directly aligns with the King County Promise model of intentional and cross sector collaboration, and reminds us that the work we do cannot and should not be done alone. Collaboration and communication are essential for the success of our students. The Umoja SLI facilitated connections between representatives from different institutions including nearly all of the Highline Promise partners, enabling learning from one another and strengthening of a shared vocabulary and understanding. As organizations and practitioners build stronger relationships centering on student needs, trust, and transparency, they can maximize and leverage their individual strengths to better meet the needs of our students. Lupe Samifua, a Promise Staff Member from Highline College shared his learnings, "we definitely can take this Umoja Practice and use it as a reminder of how the success of our target student populations requires all the stakeholders to be intentional, present and communicating successes/challenges. Our students' success depends on all of us working together."
Additionally, Haley Edwards, an Education Advocate from Northwest Education Access said, "Even outside of the context of Promise, having co-conspirators to connect our Black students to on each campus (specifically ones that understand postsecondary institutions are not designed with the youth we serve in mind) can make the difference in finding 'belonging' for Opportunity Youth and traditional K-12 students alike."
Along with building a deeper understanding of Everybody's Business, and the 14 other Umoja practices, attendees had opportunities to build connections with other Promise Staff and strengthen cross organizational ties. These attendees recently had the opportunity to share these learnings to those who were unable to attend at a recent Highline Promise Planning retreat. PSCCN's hope is that this knowledge supports Promise Partners through shared grounding in partnership values and vocabulary, ensuring that promise staff are better prepared to support our students in their educational journeys and equipped with the values and vocabulary to sustain transformational change for our communities. Special thanks goes to our Promise Partners who proposed the Umoja Summer Learning Institute as a shared professional development opportunity, and to the King County Department of Community and Human Services in procuring professional development funds to support partners' attendance. As we integrate Umoja practices into our King County Promise Programming, we are confident that we will create an environment where all students can thrive and achieve their goals. Together, we will continue to work collaboratively, communicate openly, and support one another, because our students' success is truly "Everybody's Business."
King County Promise: Youth Listening Sessions Revisited
In the summer of 2021, the Puget Sound College and Career Network (PSCCN) engaged the Equity in Education Coalition (EEC) to assist with its community engagement efforts for King County Promise (KCP). After our first year of KCP implementation, we revisited the findings from several youth listening sessions. The Promise partners have repeatedly prioritized recentering students, and we are using summer to reflect, reset, and align programming with original goals.
The EEC is a social justice policy organization focused on eliminating the opportunity gap and promoting success for children of color in Washington state. EEC's role in this work was to convene and run listening sessions with youth who are within the demographic targeted by the King County Promise, namely youth between the ages of 16-26 who have been historically underserved by our education systems. These youth identify as BIPOC, and/or LGBTQ+, are from families who live at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, experience homelessness or foster care, and are youth with disabilities. We feature a subset of their findings.
Below are the key findings that came out of our conversations with the young people who participated in our listening sessions:
King County youth want to go to college. While our sample of youth was not necessarily representative of all King County Youth, without exception all of the youth we spoke to planned to attend or were already attending college.
King County youth want and need much and higher quality advising support than they have been receiving. We asked the youth who attended our sessions about both their plans for college and the support they have received from adults in their lives.
When we asked youth which adults in their lives they talked to about plans for future education, overwhelmingly youth said their parents. Secondarily, some youth mentioned older siblings, teachers, or other adults in their lives. It was overwhelmingly clear from our conversations that youth did not view counselors in their high schools as a viable source of ongoing support. During our first session, some of our participants told us that they had never had any direct contact with a counselor while in high school. During one of our sessions, not one student had ever spoken with any kind of advisor.
First-generation American students get the push to college from home, but little guidance on how to get there. Several students in all three sessions mentioned that their immigrant parents had made it very clear to them that they expected their children to attend college. However, their parents were not able to provide guidance on the mechanics of applying for college even in the cases where they were, themselves, college-educated. As one young woman said:
"I felt like I had little help when it came to applying to school and everything was last minute. I felt so lost because my parents are immigrants and I just decided to stay in state because I didn't feel I was smart enough to apply out of state."
Several other first-generation students who have navigated their way to college mentioned that they now feel an obligation to help younger siblings and family members as they themselves transition out of high school. This creates an additional burden on young people who are themselves trying to navigate through college and career.
Students who were navigating out of high school during the pandemic will need extra guidance to recover. While the lack of advising support in King County long predated the pandemic, students who attended remote school during their junior and senior years may have slipped through the cracks and are finding themselves floundering as they navigate their way to college. As one participant said:
"In high school I did have people help me but I feel like because of the pandemic they weren't helping me or keeping in touch so I had a hard time with navigating going into college and I dropped my classes because financial aid wasn't helping and I knew nothing and I didn't go to school after my senior year and I'm starting school now that I have support."
Whatever support may have been provided during in-person school during previous years, during the school building shutdowns of 2020-21, students who were already struggling to access counseling resources may have found themselves completely without support.
Support should not end when college begins. Many of the young people we talked to had managed to navigate to both career technical and four-year colleges in the midst of a pandemic and with little support only to find themselves adrift once on campus.
Youth with disabilities and learning differences need tailored support. Youth with disabilities, even those with financial privilege, need targeted help navigating colleges that meet accessibility needs. One participant explained to us that she uses mobility devices, but when applying for colleges her counselor was not able to help with navigating which campuses would be able to meet her physical accessibility needs.
Youth want a voice in programs that affect them and want to be heard on their terms. In our sessions, we asked about experiences working with adults, and about what role a youth advisory group should play in designing and refining the Promise. Several respondents acknowledged that they were not accustomed to providing guidance on programs that affected them, and thanked us for bringing their voices in. When we asked what would make a youth advisory group most successful, we heard that the group should:
Be youth-led
Use youth-centered language
Include youth from a variety of demographic backgrounds, ages, and life experiences
Capitalize on youth strengths, such as facility with social media
Have agency in important decisions that directly affect them
PSCCN Starting a Promise Blog to Share Expertise from Community Leaders
PSCCN has spent this past year supporting our pilot partners for the first year of King County Promise (KCP). KCP is a public-private partnership engaging King County K12 districts, Community Based Organizations (CBOs), and Community and Technical Colleges (CTCs) to develop a comprehensive student support model supporting historically underserved young people to obtain postsecondary credentials. The Promise mission is to support young people in pursuing college and career options that fit their goals. KCP is designed to provide students of color and historically underserved students with robust, individual support that increases their readiness to access college and complete postsecondary credentials. KCP also focuses on aligning systems and policies to reduce common barriers that students face.
Our goals are twofold:
Increase postsecondary attainment by age 26 of King County Promise served youth to 70 percent, with no gap in attainment rates between prioritized young people and their peers.
K-12 districts, postsecondary institutions, and community-based organizations in King County collaborate to create a cohesive, equity-focused P-16 educational system that supports postsecondary success for young people.
This blog will feature guest authors and their experiences, learnings, and best practices from their points of view in a bi-monthly blog. Our goal is to amplify and give space for the voices of people personally invested and impacted. Topics will be relevant to our College and Career Network. The authors will be representative of the different community leaders within KCP including systems leaders, practitioners, students, and families.
If you are interested in being a guest author for future posts, please contact nbadri@psesd.org for more information.
While the week was filled with learnings regarding Umoja practices, curriculum, and resources, one of the key themes that kept arising was the Umoja practice of "Everybody's Business." Umoja describes the practice of "everybody's business" as such, "We are a village, acting in accord, and unafraid to be seen and heard as we do our work, leveraging every voice and source of information to do our best by our students… we cover and pitch in on each other's work, even while we maintain our areas of expertise. When a program event or program need comes up, we all inquire and support. And particularly when it comes to our students, we all stay aware of their progress, their challenges and crises, and their successes."
Lupe Samifua, a Promise Staff Member from Highline College shared his learnings, "we definitely can take this Umoja Practice and use it as a reminder of how the success of our target student populations requires all the stakeholders to be intentional, present and communicating successes/challenges. Our students' success depends on all of us working together."
Special thanks goes to our Promise Partners who proposed the Umoja Summer Learning Institute as a shared professional development opportunity, and to the King County Department of Community and Human Services in procuring professional development funds to support partners' attendance. As we integrate Umoja practices into our King County Promise Programming, we are confident that we will create an environment where all students can thrive and achieve their goals. Together, we will continue to work collaboratively, communicate openly, and support one another, because our students' success is truly "Everybody's Business."
This blog will feature guest authors and their experiences, learnings, and best practices from their points of view in a bi-monthly blog. Our goal is to amplify and give space for the voices of people personally invested and impacted. Topics will be relevant to our College and Career Network. The authors will be representative of the different community leaders within KCP including systems leaders, practitioners, students, and families.