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North State Together has scaled the power of data exploration throughout our five counites by expanding cradle to career data sharing agreements across our regional partners and providing critical information necessary to increase student success.
Earlier this month, Tara Schwerdt, School Counseling Coordinator at Shasta County of Education, Heather Van Slyke, School Counselor at Shasta High School, and Jamie Spielmann the Director of Planning & Development at North State Together (pictured) had the opportunity to present at the National School Counseling Leadership Conference through Hatching Results which addresses critical gaps in professional learning for administrators who oversee school counseling programs at the school, district, county and state levels across the nation.
*Chart above shows top institutions Modoc, Shasta, Tehama, Trinity, and Siskiyou high school graduates attend the first fall after high school graduation. Data for the last 8 H.S. class years. This data is provided through North State Together through our comprehensive regional data sharing agreements and our partnership with National Student Clearinghouse.
The co-presentation involved highlighting a pilot project between North State Together and Reach Higher Shasta’s Counseling initiative to increase postsecondary enrollment through our data sharing agreements. Data sharing agreements can be a successful way to share data with community colleges, districts, and schools, and they can also be a valuable resource to extract meaningful data from those institutions. Our rural students are profoundly underrepresented in postsecondary enrollment, and data reports can help remove barriers for students. Our pilot postsecondary enrollment initiative shares data from Reach Higher Shasta high schools, feeds the data securely into our server, where North State Together’s Director of Technology and Data Strategies, James Crandall, matches the data files with Shasta College applicant and enrollment data. He then sends the matched files back to the ones that need it most to best serve our students…our school counselors. Over 7,000 students are enrolled in Reach Higher Shasta high schools, of these students 2,190 have been identified as having a Shasta College application presently on file. Due to the expanding number of dual enrollment courses offered, students as young as 9th grade may have an application on file with Shasta College. These reports aid school counselors in their matriculation efforts as they identify errors and provide more time for proactive correction. As shown in the Top 25 Clearinghouse chart above for our North State Together region, the top school attended after high school is predominantly Shasta College.
Antidotal evidence and feedback from the counselors in the field supports the success of the North State Together provided student reports:
“I have used the list to find out who has started but not completed the new student orientation. I also have three students who need to provide their social security number, so I printed out the form and gave it to them. It has been very helpful to get students to finish the orientation and having access to their username and Shasta College student ID has saved me from many phone calls.” Heather Van Slyke, SHS School Counselor.
North State Together continues to scale the power of data sharing throughout our five counties to increase educational outcomes for ALL in our region.
