Michael Dennehy
Czarina Reyes
The newly developed Office of Student Retention was created to support the efforts happening at all the district colleges to initiate and maintain practices that will increase student retention, especially among first-time-in-college students. To support efforts to increase retention and to share best practices between the colleges, the Office of Student Retention developed funding opportunities for colleges or employees who want to plan, to pilot, to replicate and to add resources.
Brookhaven College received seven of these grants totaling more than $240,000 in the latest rollout in late February. The amounts range from $2,250 for a planning grant for a new initiative, to $74,684 as a seed award to grow a current program over the next several semesters.
Michael Dennehy, executive dean of the Social Sciences and World Languages Divisions, is the primary coordinator for a replication award of $39,500. The replication awards support colleges or programs that are implementing a proven model for improving retention. Michael is leading a project that will replicate the retention planning process in use at North Lake College using Strategic Planning Online, SPOL, software and CSRDE data in planning.
“To improve student retention, Brookhaven College must do a better job of tracking first-time-in-college students who enroll in the college,” says Dennehy in the project summary. “By replicating the processes used by North Lake and El Centro, Brookhaven College will have the tools to become more effective in planning and implementing retention strategies, and in tracking our progress toward attainment of our strategic goals.”
The SPOL Internet-based software will serve as a storing house for all the departmental plans that involve curriculum, administrative or process improvement. With the new software, these plans can be tracked, searched and archived. It will allow the college administration to see what ideas were proposed, which were funded, the success of funded programs and those that were not funded that could be brought back to the forefront. To date the college has only paper copies of plans and initiatives or computer files in a specific department or division. With a centralized system to store all this information, all those involved in decision-making processes can see a collegewide view of all processes and programs that are ongoing and use this data to assess student success.
Czarina Reyes and Monique Mannering are collaborating to offer a SMART College Readiness program, Summer Math And Reading Together. The program is focused on students from Thomas Jefferson High School, and both Czarina and Monique have gone to the school to promote the program to current seniors. A seed award of $65,000 will fund this initiative for two summer semesters. Seed awards are for colleges to pilot or continue an initiative that is showing promise.
Seniors who complete the Accuplacer and need just one or two developmental courses will have the opportunity to take this combined course over the summer and be ready to start their credit-bearing courses in the fall. The goal is to have these students ready for their college courses with less chance that a developmental course will keep them from or delay their gaining a degree. The grant funding from the district will support most of the cost of the course tuition, books and software for the students. The math course will have a supplemental instruction component in tutorial software and the reading course will offer a supplemental lab component.
The college’s focus on retention and assistance for first-time-in-college students has grown from ideas and successes in Achieving the Dream initiatives. Learning communities, especially ones that allow students to take “combined courses,” have proven to be popular with students and a successful developmental course option for students.
There are several other programs being supported by these grants and awards. To get a sampling of all the retention work colleagues are undertaking in the coming terms, look for additional upcoming articles on these district awards.
