Hello and thank you for joining our webinar on section 23b supporting Summer
Learning programs. My name is Thomas Soria, I'm the Director of School Partnerships at
Michigan Virtual I've been with Michigan Virtual for over 10 years I'm a graduate of Michigan State
Go Green! and my role is to support K-12 students staff and administrators with technology-based
tools and distance learning opportunities. For those that are not familiar with
our organization Michigan Virtual is a non-profit 501c3 our mission is advancing both learning and
teaching through research practice and partnership we work with Michigan schools districts, ISDs, and
the Department of Education on various education organizations to collaborate and help improve
learning outcomes. This webinar will provide you guidance on Public Act 3 specifically section 23b
to support summer learning options credit recovery and before and after school programming. Over the
next 20 minutes we'll discuss how to apply for state funds help meet application deadline of
April 15 2021 and we also will share learning options that support student learning recovery
SEL and mental health supports to better explain how to access these funds. I reached out to
Tammy Jackson. Tammy spent 31 years at East Jordan High School first as a teacher then an
assistant principal and athletic director and finally as a principal for the last 18 years.
Along with her extensive tenure and school administration Tammy served on the MHSAA
representative council and MASSP's board of directors including two years as president.
Currently Tammy is on the MASSP staff where her primary responsibilities is supporting new and
aspiring principles additionally Tammy provides education consulting services to educational
organizations across the state thank you for joining us today Tammy I'll kick this over to you
thank you thank you Thomas I appreciate it you know as you said that my responsibilities right
now really center around supporting principles and the roles that they do and I have to tell you in
the last two weeks as I have been reading the MDE documents on this grant that they have provided
for schools I couldn't help but think that these poor principals are trying to prep up and
get ready to enjoy some spring break um being as though they haven't had much of a summer and are
spending most of their weekends contract tracing or doing something related to COVID-19 and and
as they were getting ready to take that break all this information was just pouring out about this
grant with an April 15th deadline and regardless if your spring break was last week or this week
that's a really short deadline and so um I took it upon myself to just do some research into this
information and kind of tear it down and prepare myself to share it and make it a little bit easier
to understand for principles so that's kind of where I am and so with our time today I just
want to share with what principals across the state are saying and I want to talk a little
bit about the um funding and then how to access the funding in the application so MASSP did a
survey of school membership schools after the first semester of this year to just try and
determine where schools were with their past and failure rates of students under the circumstances
and what they found is 92 percent of the schools that responded are reporting a much higher than
normal failure rate after the first semester and if you look at these charts it really is ironic
because it shows that students who are in the hybrid situation actually failed at a quicker
rate than those who were in person or who were all distance learning really there wasn't much of a
difference in all three of those settings when you really look at the data and it just showed that
while schools hadn't doubled their failure rate they were down close to um doing that in in
all those situations and so all schools across the state are really in the same situation and
where we don't talk about failure because we're talking maybe of not earning credits so we're
talking middle or lower level we're still talking at them reporting students who are
just not um ready to move on to their next level and and the the learning gaps have just gotten
larger so so what so I want to talk to you about today is the three programs that are
Michigan has determined to be eligible for the funding under the Public Act of 2021 section 23 b
so there's three programs that schools can develop apply for and access one of them
is a summer learning program which is meant for students in K through eighth grade that requires
in-person learning for a period of eight weeks and we'll talk about that more in just a minute the
second program is credit recovery and that's for students in ninth through twelfth grades and that
program can be distance or in person and it can be taught in a synchronous or an asynchronous design
for those programs you are eligible for 550 per eligible student and that doesn't mean
per student who attends that means the number of students in your building who could attend
who qualify to attend and then you can access 100 additional funds per child if you are innovative
and we'll talk about that in a minute too so the last program to talk about is the before and after
school program we call it the academic remediation programs and many schools right now have programs
that they're running and ironically those programs could go back and qualify for this funding
if they meet the criteria and if they don't with some small changes they
could meet the criteria moving forward for the remainder of the school year
So there's a lot of information on this one slide and I'm not going to read it all I'm just
going to briefly explain that in the remediation program your your students do have to be in person
and they have to be in person for eight weeks now MDE does not state how many hours per day they
have to be in session nor do they even specify that they have to be in session every single day
they say a week is Monday through Friday and in that time you must be in person
for some period of time on some of those days and you don't have to run them consecutive so schools
really have an opportunity to take a week off for cert for the holidays maybe the fourth of July or
maybe go two weeks on one week off whatever it works best for their staffing and to have those
programs qualify for additional funding if you incorporate social emotional learning outdoors
or adventure components stem project-based learning if you collaborate with public
services in some way like social social workers or other agencies if you offer robotics theater
and if your partnership with the college all those things would qualify you for that extra 100
Now in the high school credit recovery again you don't have to be in person you can do that in a
hybrid situation at a completely online situation you could have an open lab where kids come when
they need to come you could staff that lab with staff in the course subject areas and then again
with all of those extra things you can qualify for the money now one thing I want to say when
it comes to credit recovery is that an issue that that schools often have when they use
their teachers to teach summer school well let's first back up a little bit right now teachers
are feeling really tired they're feeling really stressed out and they've been working so hard and
and a lot of them are not willing to teach school in the summer this year and schools across the
state are saying that but what I wonder is if a teacher would be more willing to help out with
the summer learning program if they didn't have to come every day or if the hours were not all
day long and most importantly how about if they didn't have to develop the curriculum
or deliver the lessons or do the grading what if you used a third-person party with that a vendor
party that gave you all of that information and then your teachers could just be there to
support students learning kind of facilitate the process versus deliberate when you have a K-12
program and um which you often have are teachers who are unwilling to give a credit in a course
that they taught by allowing students to complete anything less than what they taught in the schools
are completed in the regular school year so that sometimes causes issues as well and then that
last program that after school or before school program you can actually apply for up to 25 000
if your program is focused on remediation and it's an extension of your current instructional
delivery in other words you're not teaching an enhancement you're teaching you're just
helping students get through the curriculum that you have in your school at the time
So what I did is I put together these three guidance documents and there's a
there's a different document for every one of the three phases and that document explains
what has to be in the application for any of those three programs and I think on the next
slide you'll see that there is a link where you can pull those documents up or access them
as well as a QR code so if you snap a picture of that whether you do it now or what
now or at a later time you're going to have access to those documents and again what they're going
to do is guide you through the application process for any three of those scenarios
So lastly I just want to take you quickly through the application because I can't tell
you how many hours I spent trying to figure out where the application really was and so if I can
save you even five minutes trying to locate this application that would be a good thing
so the application actually sits out in your monthly learning plan submission
site so you have every month schools have to go online and they have to update their learning
plan in the month of April for that update if you scroll down
to actually the bottom of that application you can go ahead and do that for me if you would um you
will see that the application sits right there and if you just quickly go through those next slides
for me you'll see that there's three just kind of keep scrolling and there's there's a place for
all three of those programs and what you do is you simply answer the questions they have asked
what that guiding document will do for you is it will help you answer those questions because
I've broken it down by question what what the question is and what must be included in that
question or then that answer of that question in order to qualify for that particular program
unfortunately you can't cut from a document and paste it into these spots I don't understand that
but but you can't do it so you're going to have to type it live but if you write it out in advance
obviously that's going to be a lot easier to do and then you can just transfer the information
into the application and you can submit it and you are supposed to hear pretty quick about
if you've qualified and for how much money you have qualified for
you can also save the program and go back to it if you're not ready to complete it at the time
um and then submit it when you are ready to submit it
wow well thank you tammy and and it seems like you know they they uh they don't make it easy for for
us as we're like copying and pasting and trying to gather all this information but I think that
you helped a lot of administrators kind of plan uh as well as providing them some great resources
and we're also going to make those resources that you provided available to schools on a website
that I'll share at the end of our presentation today and you know and and I'm sure many people
know that uh you know Michigan Virtual we've been you know providing online courses for
students in the summer for many years and that's through partnerships with our local districts
and we plan to continue to provide that support you know but before I share some programs that may
qualify for that I like to acknowledge that not all online courses are the same and at Michigan
Virtual we strive to focus on quality instruction and student outcomes and our focus is on learning
recovery and earning the credit is just part of that process you know my son he's a fifth grader
and he found success in learning online and much of that is due to the feedback and the and the
the quality of support that he was getting from his online teachers and at Michigan
Virtual our teachers are trained in the pedagogy of instructing online and the focus is providing
student with personalized feedback to meet learning objectives and close those learning gaps
so our courses go through a rigorous process of done by an outside agency called quality matters
where we review the the courses and content and integrated into each course is an orientation
model module excuse me that acclimates students to the online learning environment and none of this
is possible without partnerships through Michigan schools so you know we you know we don't award
credit you can't graduate from Michigan Virtual so you know here's a couple programs to consider
and you know Michigan Virtual offers up to 10 weeks of summer learning and during the school
year we support students in grades 6-12 but in the summer we primarily focus on courses that are
commonly delivered in high school students take summer courses for a variety of reasons there's
some that are trying to improve a grade or maybe make room in their schedule next year by taking
a prerequisite for the fall and our goal is to deliver high quality learning experiences
and we do so but by providing a trained online teacher with each course
and you know we also have a subset of courses that are specific to students that need remediation and
those are called Essentials the courses cover the MMC High School graduation requirements and are
tailored to each student so instead of having a student complete an entire course of algebra
essentials recognizes what students already know by offering short assessments prior to each unit
and if a student demonstrates competency then the Michigan Virtual teacher will advance them
to the next unit and you know just like you said tammy I've already had several conversations with
schools that are asking us to partner with them not to replace their summer program
but come alongside with them and help support them in the areas that they may not have teachers to
to help them with whether it's a language or a course that they just don't have a summer
school teacher so we're looking to partner with schools to help you know students stay on on on
target to graduate with their cohort and rest assured you know our courses come with quality
and caring teachers that will support and motivate those students through their
their learning experience and if those students have an IEP or a 504 accommodation
please tell us you know we want to support those students unique needs here's a couple other unique
programs that are going to be available and and much of it at no cost to schools and you know for
for Michigan families at no cost this summer we're offering a program called Ed Ready Math
and it's an adaptive technology program that through a short diagnostic targets knowledge
gaps and generates a personalized study path designed to help students get ready for their
next level in math in the fall and it's a great program to add to your summer learning plans it
probably might help out with that that innovative component that tammy talked about where you can
embed this into some of that summer program it's available for grades 4 through 12. And
we have a customized dashboard option if if you're if you're interested in that as well
and last in partnership with the governor's office and our SEL content creators Michigan
Virtual developed the Michigan Cares Portal and this space has been available for about a year
now and it houses hundreds of lessons designed to help children engage grades K through 12. Each SEL
lesson correlates with an age-appropriate parent lesson that offers tips for having conversations
with your students all content is aligned to CASLE which is the Collaborative for Academic
and Social Emotional Learning and they are the national recognized governing body on SEO content
and programs Michigan families can gain access to this content at no cost for the remainder of the
school year and if a school were interested in a customized program we can make this available
to you at no cost over the summer providing you the opportunity to share specific lessons
and topics of all the programs I shared this program is I believe the most critical to help
address student mental health and the trauma that students have experienced over this past year
so you know please feel free to reach out to me I'd like to thank you all for joining us today
and a special thanks to Tammy for providing us that guidance on section 23b. I encourage you
to review the documents she's created and visit our website at michiganvirtual.org/section23b
and there you'll find information information from today's presentation and you'll find a form that
if you'd like to have an appointment with me to discuss your summer plans
I'd be happy to meet with you thank you all and I look forward to hearing from you.