RVPDC Teleconference Minutes

December 7, 2005

Present:  Mickey, Conley, Powell, Alfonso, Smith, Bryan, Frederick, Chang, Lido, Kostrub, Allen (sent regrets),Reed, Pelser, Caruso, Brill

Ms. Mickey welcomed the Council members as they joined the conference call and then introduced the newest member to the Council, Ms. Enid Conley. Ms. Conley is a Professor of Johnson & Wales University, in Criminal Justice; a State Representative for the United Confederation of Taino People, a federally recognized American Indian group; and a doctoral student at Florida Atlantic University.

Ms. Mickey also shared some news from Carol Renick and Bobby Gornto of  Dade County. She indicated that both have new assignments and will continue to participate in the Council. Their current roles within the system are not clearly defined as of this date. Ms. Mickey also noted that several members, including Dr. Bryan and Mr. Pelser, are still impacted by the remnants of the hurricane.

Ms. Mickey called for a review of the minutes. Mr. Pelser moved to accept and Ms.Kostrub seconded.  Minutes were approved.

Ms. Mickey then called for a revision in the agenda in order to confirm the addition of the new member, Ms. Enid Conley, to serve as a representative for the Native Americans. Dr. Bryan moved to accept and Ms. Kostrub seconded. Voting was unanimous. Enid agreed to send current information about her to Mr. Powell.

Discussions then followed as to possible other persons that needed to be contacted regarding Council membership: Amanda Duffy, Key West, Florida Keys Community College; And Lacy Johnson, Broward Workforce.

Legislative update was provided by Mr. Powell regarding upcoming bills that may be of interest. Mr. Powell suggested that the Council members review the bills online for clarification. Bills are there regarding vocational interest, such as the nurse assistants. There is some funding available through the Met Life Foundation and the PICO provisions for colleges.

Dr. Smith then introduced Yaway Chang, as a coordinator for the career and technical grant for the Council. He noted that Mary Alfred will also be involved in some Region V activities in the future. He noted some successful programs of last year’s grant that dealt with non-native speakers.  He noted that plans are underway to involve vocational education coordinators from a four county area in a training event for this year that will also focus on non-English speakers in the vocational classroom. Dr. Smith also noted it was possible to provide the FCAT and CRISS trainers for vocational as Dr. Bryan had done last year if needed.

Dr. Smith indicated he has plans to bring down the Federal DOE personnel that work with the Perkins grant to share information with the vocational educators. He noted Broward could be a good location to service several counties if the training could be done as our previous joint conferences where adult ed and voc ed teachers are invited and presented vignettes of training opportunities. If necessary the group indicated that this process could be repeated in other counties as well.

Discussion then addressed changes in training opportunities due to the canceling of self-development days due to hurricanes. Several council members suggested having one big event when speakers from state were brought in to share regulations, guidelines, current assessment techniques, transfer of learning, how to handle testing crises, process training, focus on performance training, etc., to reps from all four counties at the same time. Several other issues about the training were also discussed: the crossing of county lines; better days to offer such a training event; need for stipends; need for separate meetings for teachers and administrators; and how different counties needed different things.  Some discussion ensued as to how this may be formatted. No definitive plans were made. 

Dr. Smith then shared some information about the creation of an online module for vocational teachers based on the web-based trainings developed through the adult education council through Dr. Bryan.  Dr. Smith also indicated that he planned to call all the vocational directors in the four counties and address Perkin needs in his effort to foster collaboration.

Dr. Bryan noted that all of the professional development trainings that were devised and presented at the last meeting were not successful because the dates of offering were during the same time as three hurricanes. Dr. Bryan reported for the RVPDC Adult Education that a training scheduled with Palm Beach for an anticipated two hundred people was cancelled, as was noted earlier, due to the lost of self development days because of the hurricane.  She noted that instructors had been hired. These individuals had committed their time and still had to be paid even when the event did not occur, because the event had to be cancelled at the last minute. Mother Nature was not concerned about the lost of services.

Dr. Bryan indicated that she was concerned for the first time in meeting deliverables of seven trainings, four council meeting and maintaining the web presence, web calendar, web trainings, etc..  She encouraged Council members to send their events so she could advertise them on the calendar. She suggested that a more coordinated approach into offering training could assist all parties, enhance the training that was provided, and help to reduce expenditures.

Dr. Bryan noted that the Adult Education group is trying to attract more online users during the interim. Ace of Florida and Tech Net were contacted and asked to identify some procedural things that need to be done to enhance the online training in order to assure that there are more people participating.  One of the things that they have suggested is to provide a full online certificate programs for would-be administrators.  That has been done at FAU and hopefully we can advertise it to meet the need in the Region in the future. Plans are also underway to add another Web Based Interactive Tutorial Writing Lesson Plans which should have a wider appeal than the current offerings. More marketing is needed of the Region V PDC website.  Dr. Bryan invited the Council members to assist in that matter.  

Report was provided by Dr. Bryan regarding attending a meeting on Professional Council Meeting for all of Florida at the ACE of Florida Conference to represent Ms. Mickey and Dr. Smith. No specific agenda was provided at the meeting.  It was apparent that there were some concerns that the RPDACs were not as effective as they should be.  Most of these concerns were expressed by Dr. Bouie regarding how professional development councils 1) were not being as collaborative as we should be, 2) that we were not sharing our expertise across county lines or across region lines, etc., etc.

Most of the comments were directed at what the Councils are not doing, not what Councils are doing. Several of the Council heads that were there were offended by the tone of the meeting and did express that displeasure. The thoughts being expressed were: 

The next topic from Ms. Mickey asked what needed to be worked on from here.  Example was given of more collaboration with the literacy center and each other, programs for the Native Americans, focus group on literacy (with stipends provided), and creation of skills and online training.

Question was asked about the success of the online training. Dr. Bryan responded that it works well when people use it.  She indicated that apparently she had failed to market it effectively. She noted that the first year was developmental and this year was to be more marketing of the training and getting people to utilize the training. Unfortunately, the online training was removed from the grant when it was returned from grants people. Dr. Bryan still plans to do mini-trainings in a train-the-trainer format to assist in the marketing of the tutorials. 

Dr. Smith and Mr. Pelser share concerns that some skills like conversational English may not be totally suited to the online environment. The discussion was then re-focused to train-the-trainer, and not “train the student”. Even then the Council members express concerns that teachers sometimes just need to share concerns with one another in a face-to-face training. Generally consensus was that there still needed to be face-to-face training in Region V and not totally online. Several also suggested a web-assisted environment where you did some online work, then did face-to-face training, and then did online work again with your resources coming from online. That suggestion was viewed as a cost-effective measure because all the training materials could be available online.

Conversation suggested that more action research needed to be funded at the state level but for many it was viewed as not feasible to apply even when the dollars are available.  It was pointed out that the turn-around time for the grants does not allow for approval at many of the institutions for research because to do action research you would have to have IRB approval and that is not feasible in less than six weeks. Grants that come out this week and are supposed to be completed and returned three weeks later do not allow time for the research process to occur.

Request was made to Mr. Powell that a directory of funded projects be reinstituted so that all grantees know who was funded, what their objectives are, what services they are to provide, so the regions could collaborate more effectively with people that received funding. It was noted that many grants are funded that required dissemination of training and we could have that training in our region. Mr. Powell indicated he would follow-up on the suggestion.  It was also noted that in the past, all those that received funding met and strategize as to how to make the dollars go further.

Next meeting was scheduled for January 27, 2005 at the FIU Pines Center, 11:00-3:00 PM.

Meeting adjourned.