CalWORKS
2022-2023 Program Review

California Work Opportunity & Responsibility to Kids (CalWORKs) is a state program to assist means-tested, low-income individuals with dependents while they reestablish their career goals through training and education. CalWORKs through the California Community College system is directly tied to county eligibility of the statewide CalWORKs program and focuses on the academic and educational goals of CalWORKs recipients. Our program was written into Education Code in 2017, but had been a long-term temporary program since the inception of CalWORKs in 1998. CCC CalWORKs collaborates with local counties and practices a case management model in order to help assure the persistence, graduation, transfer, and overall academic health of our student population.

American River College strives to provide an academically rich and inclusive environment that fosters the support of equity, humanity, and dignity of every student. CalWORKs meets that brief as it provides educational and career case management services to socio-economically disadvantaged individuals with dependent children. We uphold individuals with a cohesive and holistic plan to promote success and well-being in each of our students. We provide support through our direct connection to the community-based county CalWORKs programs whose goal is to elevate our needs-assessed community of parents into the middle class through access to certifications, degrees, training and work-study opportunities. Through the college CalWORKs program, we assist parenting students in meeting academic and career goals in pursuit of sustainable financial self-sufficiency for themselves and their families.

Goals/Objectives - Intended Effect:

• Direct Support Services - Provide students with personalized, proactive support
• Case Management - Provide exemplary academic and student support services
• Comprehensive Services - Connect students to people, programs, and services as an integrated educational experience
• Education to Career - Provide easily recognizable pathways to employment
• Success & Retention of CalWORKs Students - Provide proactive, effective, and efficient operational systems
• Outreach & Recruitment - Engage students early and often
• Community Connection - Connect students to people, programs, and services as an integrated educational experience
• Value Added Programs - Provide exemplary academic and student support services
• Training & Staff Development - Pursue comprehensive and integrated professional development

Achievement:

• Direct Support Services - Over the last six years we have provided students with a variety of direct financial supports and indirect financial supports including lending library or advance purchase of textbooks, gas cards, campus-based meal vouchers, campus parking passes, supply vouchers for college bookstore, and grocery cards. After surveying students and analysing usage of vouchers, we determined that students needed more flexible financial support to meet the specific needs of their individual households. Assessment: Not all households had vehicles so gas cards were not beneficial to that particular household and could not be used for another purpose; many students did not utilize meal vouchers or book store supply vouchers (based on receipts of usage from vendors); anecdotally, we found out there was a "black market" for our gas cards where students without vehicles would sell their $25 gas card for $20 in cash to another person. Achievement: In fall 2020, partially due to the pandemic and partially due to the usage analysis, we began to send students grocery cards and visa cards as a more flexible type of support. Beginning spring 2021 we transitioned to direct monetary grants distributed through the financial aid disbursement process (or direct checks for the few students without financial aid profiles). This has been the most successful model of direct financial support as it allows each student to determine what costs to cover to maintain success in their academic pursuits. Since then, we have only had one unused returned check from a student.
• Case Management, Community Connection - Case management - we make contact with students on probationary or dismissal status through our counselors, as well as connect with "danger zone" students - students who have a 2.0-2.25 GPA where doing poorly in one course could put them into probation; we made new relationships with other support programs (particularly with Beaver Cares with a focus on food insecurity; NES); we’ve contracted with the Mentorship Collective to pilot a parent-to-parent mentorship program; we’ve made our orientation material easier to access (as well as relaxed eligibility requirements in order to break down institutional barriers that exist at the college AND county level); we have conducted needs-based surveys to determine common barriers and to plan our programming accordingly - for instance, shifting the types of or allowing students to select the type of direct support that best suited them; with the pandemic and the immediate shift to remote academics and services, we conducted technology needs surveys - in spring 2021, 12.4% of our students reported not having a computer, 39.4% were sharing a computer with a partner or child and 53.5% of those respondents said sharing created a hardship, and 25.2% shared that their computer was not adequate for their academic needs. We also surveyed students on what additional supports they needed with the top two academic support requests being tutoring and peer mentoring.
• Success & Retention of CalWORKs Students, Outreach & Recruitment - ARC continued to average just over 900 unduplicated students per year up until the pandemic impacted retention and persistence in 2019-2020. From 2020-2021 to present, we have only had about 42% of our usual student population (we are seeing an increase in the 2022-2023 year). With our program supports, and despite the struggles of the pandemic, CalWORKs students continue to persist at greater rates, complete more units per semester, and maintain a higher GPA than students without program supports. We continue to outreach and recruit students via marketing and community word-of-mouth. We have a strong relationship with the counties we work with, primarily Sacramento County, but there is not a formal referral process in place. The majority of our students (information via survey) find us after their first semester of classes typically via word-of-mouth or campus referral.

• Program strengths: Quick access to academic counseling with dedicated CalWORKs counselors, quick access to class and study materials through lending library including both required and recommended materials, multiple opportunities for direct support services, multiple contact methods for students regarding available services (including email, canvas, and physical resources fliers)
• Opportunities: Determine more opportunities for direct support that encourages equitable contacts with program representatives
• Challenges: Identifying the best support methods for parenting students that still encourages contact with program representatives
• Equity gaps: Transportation assistance for those that don’t have access to cars, meal vouchers for people that don’t take any campus classes, workshop support when people may not have the same access of time or transportation in two parent vs. single-parent households
• Influencing factors: Legislation (up to 2022) - SB 1232 removed many required contacts with community college which removes barriers for students but creates a negative impact on engaging students; financial aid limitations/constraints negatively impacts work-study opportunities for students:, pandemic, course delivery platform (online, hybrid, in-person) have increased barriers for students
• Data limitations: Surveys tend to be completed by individuals that are already engaged with our program, so we don’t always have access information from those most likely not to have easy access

As CaWORKs has identified equity gaps we’ve determined that the best way to support students is through flexibility, so we’ve instituted grants as opposed to supporting individual activities.  We’ve also transitioned all of our forms to google forms in order to allow the highest level of access to students that have time and transportation constraints. We have paper forms available, but for students struggling with access to the google forms, we first take a teaching approach and utilize the labs to teach students how to access our forms.  

Our transition to online services has allowed us to offer strong and immediate access to resources, but also acts to limit student engagement as we’ve automated processes.  We’ve chosen to start exploring additional ways to encourage engagement, including online and in-person events, to help establish connection and community with our students. We have rotated between mandatory activities and optional but encouraged activities. With the legislative changes reducing required materials from the college, we plan to restructure some of our activities to be mandatory when they are directly necessary for student success to help establish a touchpoint between our students and our program.

CalWORKs ideal future is to have a clear and consistent pipeline of referrals from our partner counties and to identify potentially CalWORKs aided current and new ARC students that are socially, economically, and educationally disadvantaged, whom would consider themselves the least likely to attend college and assist them with on their education to career journey. CalWORKs state-wide serves a diverse population albeit a population that reflects disproportionately impacted and marginalized populations. This means the CalWORKs program serves the most vulnerable students and promotes the mission of academic access equity and closing the achievement gap for underserved students.

CalWORKs will continue to survey students on a variety of needs, barriers, and successes, to determine how to continuously shape and grow our student supports. We have determined that each semester and year the needs of our students shift so we have to continually evaluate and adjust our programming.

Please click link: CalWORKs Support Services - Student Support Outcomes 2023

By providing a more robust community engagement with our students and being sensitively responsive to surveyed barriers and needs, we will create a space where underserved, marginalized, and disproportionately impacted students find equity, inclusion, and clear pathways to academic achievement.