Stanislaus State has taken on a significant role in a Stanislaus County action team called StanFutures to help K-12 students become college ready and to help college students become career ready.
StanFutures is one part of the Stanislaus Cradle to Career Partnership, a Stanislaus County initiative that aims to create a community built on educational and economic success. The initiative is comprised of five action teams based on educational milestones: StanReady, StanReads, StanMath, StanFutures and StanCareers.
Each team has its own goals that contribute to the big picture, with StanFutures aiming to ensure that high school graduates are post-secondary or career-ready and that post-secondary students complete their education.
“The Cradle to Career partnership is a systems-wide, all-time sector effort,” said Marian Kaanon, the president and CEO of Stanislaus Community Foundation. “President Ellen Junn is on the steering committee, helping lead this work in our community.”
While President Junn is focusing at the University level, she is also sharing her experience with the community to align county goals and strategies.
“At Stan State, we have a graduation rate initiative in the Chancellor’s office where we’re called to improve Warrior four-year and six-year graduation rates and also reduce the gap for underrepresented minorities and federal Pell Grant recipients,” said Erin Littlepage, assessment and accreditation specialist in the Office of the Provost. “That would be our institution-specific activity. All of these different organizations have their own activities, and the work of Cradle to Career is to try to align those initiatives so that they’re all working together instead of just working in siloed spaces.”
By working together, the Cradle to Career partners are noticing interesting patterns within the data they are examining.
“We’re disaggregating all the data for our community,” Kaanon said. “And what we’re beginning to find out is that the greatest chance of someone’s future success is linked to their household income along with race. Racially, we are falling very behind. And income matters.”
Fortunately, the Cradle to Career partners are able to discuss and strategize solutions to these issues in a collaborative and supportive environment.
“I think Stanislaus Community Foundation has done a great job of providing us with the space to have those conversations — a safe space where we can look at the data together curiously without getting caught in defensiveness about who’s to blame or not to blame,” Littlepage said. “We can all just look at the data together. Our work is together. We’re all aiming for the same thing and what we can do together to find the best possible way to support students.”
The Cradle to Career initiative officially began in Stanislaus County in 2018, but the idea is not new to the state or to the nation. The first Cradle to Career communities began ten years ago in Cincinnati, Ohio.
“Those communities are now called proof-point communities because they’re actually showing population-level outcomes for each of those critical gateways,” Kaanon said.
All of the Cradle to Career communities are part of a greater network called StriveTogether, which provides coaching and resources across the United States. Stanislaus County is one of 68 communities in the nation and one of six in the state that are part of the StriveTogether network.
While Cradle to Career is new to the county, the plan is to continue the initiative long into the future and to enhance data storage and sharing between partners in the community.
“It’s sort of like a data warehouse concept,” said Daniel Marker, the district partnerships manager for the Foundation for California Community Colleges. “We can address institutional and community issues in live, actionable data versus waiting a year to figure out what the results are from our region. That’s the goal — not just to have data, but to know that if we respond well to that data, students will hopefully see improvements across the board.”
The next step is to gather qualitative data to match the quantitative data with real stories from people in the community. Littlepage encourages anyone who is interested in being interviewed or participating in training to conduct interviews to contact her.
“I grew up here in the Central Valley,” Littlepage said. “I went to MJC and to Stanislaus State, and my kids now go to public school in the region. I’m deeply invested in the initiative because I know it will strengthen our community.”