Educational Opportunity Center
EOC Program Description: EOC helps our participants enter, re-enter or transfer to a postsecondary education program. Our target population is low-income adults whose parents did not attend college, however we are not limited to only serving that population. The first hurdle many of our target population face in getting into college is the lack of a high school diploma, and so our first objective is to help those participants without a diploma obtain their GED diploma, through providing GED study resources, referrals and waivers to pay for the GED test. Once our participants have a diploma, we can provide almost any service that will support their efforts to get into college, but mainly focus on career planning, deciding on a major or certificate program, applying to the college of their choice, applying for financial aid, finding additional scholarships to meet their financial need, and financial planning. We currently document the services provided to each participant, and can provide documentation on the following Student Services KPIs:
Our participants authorize us to review their enrollment status using Student Clearinghouse, and all participants that enroll during the year that we serve them will have a print out of their Student Clearinghouse report. For 2010-2011, we assisted 254 students apply for financial aid, 171 apply for admission to post secondary education, and 179 enrolled or re-entered into post secondary education. Note: We only track the type of institution a participant enrolls in (Public 2-year/Public 4-year /Private/etc) however I believe that the 77 we helped enroll in a “Public, four-year institution” all enrolled at UNM.
Our intake forms track demographic data, and while I am unclear which specific achievement gaps are being measured, I am confident that we are serving those specific populations, and helping them improve their education and reduce the gap. This information is documented in participant files, the EOC participant database, the EOC monthly report to Rosa as well as our Annual Performance Report to the Department of Education. For 2010-2011 we assisted 683 low-income & potential first-generation college students, 43 low income, & 7 first-generation participants. Of those, 67 were American Indian or Alaska Native, 40 were Black or African American, 430 were Hispanic or Latino. We do not currently identify if a participant is from a Rural or Urban background. For 2010-2011, in addition to the participants we helped with post-secondary education, we helped 71 of our participants who did not have a HS diploma enroll in a GED study program and helped 12 receive their GED.
We do not track any information on student leadership development, but do track efforts to help with career planning. However, that information is only tracked in participant files and is not currently being tracked in the database or the monthly/annual reports. Finally, the information we have to report to date in this area is very limited, but we have ordered the resources necessary for us to do a more comprehensive career development portion during our one-on-one meetings as well as potentially doing workshops, and so will have more information as the year progresses. This data is not collected in the APR format, and so I do not have it available for 2010-2011, however as we finalize the 2011-2012 data we will be able to provide data on those participants who received career readiness.
In large part, our participants do not come to us, we need to go find them, and so we do significant outreach. We document each outreach activity with a sign-in sheet and also report on our activities on our monthly report. We largely limit our outreach to high school age and above. We also document all the community partner meetings we participate in. For 2010-2011, we had 168 official participants aged 14-18, 311 participants aged 19-27, and 257 participants aged 28+. Of those participants, 12 were veterans and 37 had limited English proficiency. I do not have figures on the number of outreach events we did, but will be able to provide that information for 2011-2012 data, once the data has been finalized.
