DTC70 Progress

Superintendents from Central Texas school districts met on Friday, November 6 with leaders from business and Austin Community College to discuss progress on the DTC70 initiative. Shaun Cranston, 2015 Education Council Chair, cited the DTC70 team's dashboard of college enrollment data as the foremost tool to help increase college enrollment.

“Measurement is the key to improvement,” said Dr. Paul Cruz, superintendent of Austin ISD. “When we started years ago, there was nothing, no data. No way to see if we were doing a good job getting our kids to college.”

Cruz praised the DTC70 team's efforts to provide education leaders with the application, financial aid, college/career readiness and college enrollment information in real-time at the individual level that they need. Charles Cook, Austin Community College Provost, committed ACC to provide the student data in a protected format to the appropriate K12 counselors to help the region meet the DTC70 goal. Doug Killian, Hutto Superintendent, called on the group to dedicate additional staff resources to the FAFSA efforts since 80% of completers directly enroll in some form of post-secondary.

Husch Blackwell partner and DTC70 facilitator Julian Rivera said the launch of the DTC70 dashboard, which will be soft launched on December 4, represents a call for action. He urged superintendents to convene their senior team before the end of the calendar year to look at where they are and decide what needs to be done to reach targets for the Class of 2016.

Next Steps for DTC70 Partnership

Considerable discussion revolved around helping to free up counseling resources to deal also with student mental health. The Chamber committed that the next meeting would include extensive opportunity to explore approaches to address this and other issues brought forth by the school districts and Austin Community College. This could include advocacy for more taxpayer funding for student mental health support/services and approaches to share resources and knowledge of best practices with district partners.

This group will reconvene by the end of January, 2016, before the launch of Financial Aid Saturdays.

Posted by Drew Scheberle, Austin Chamber Senior Vice President.