🏆 How Visalia USD’s ELO-P achieved 7,890 unique students enrolled in one year

In July 2022, Jeff Hohne and Michele Reid were appointed the co-directors of Expanded Learning at Visalia Unified School District to head this new department in response to the historic initiative on “Expanded Learning Opportunities Program” (ELO-P) from California Department of Education. With great funding comes great responsibility. They set off to re-imagine expanded learning for the district and to fulfill the ELO-P intent of bringing choice-driven, engaging enrichment learning to students and closing a significant opportunity and learning gap in the out-of-school time. 

From their first program launch in Winter 2023 to date, Visalia USD has achieved nearly 8,000 unique students enrolled in their expanded learning programs. Their Winter 2024 program’s enrollment has nearly doubled since the year before.  

The program has already drawn enthusiastic reviews from families: 

This is an amazing learning experience and opportunity which my child has been privileged to be a part of. She has learned SO much and has had a spark of curiosity lit inside of her. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.” 

My child loved STEM with Ms. Laney and looked forward to it daily!

My son is autistic and I love the way they try to include him with peers his age.

At California Afterschool Network’s Site Coordinator’s Symposium in February, 2024 in Fresno, CA, Jeff Hohne, Stephanie Estrada from Visalia USD along with Dr. Helen Wang, the cofounder of 6crickets, gave an inside look with their presentation on “How to fulfill ELO-P intent with efficient management“. 

It was an eye-opening experience for many attendees to see the incredible creativity and execution from staffing, to program building, to family education and engagement, to systematic organization and management in the making of their program. We provide a summary of the learnings below. Nevertheless, we highly recommend watching the entire presentation

Jeff Hohne (Visalia USD) gives the presentation on “How to fulfill ELO-P intent with efficient management” at CAN’s Site Coordinator’s Symposium in Fresno, CA on February 23, 2024 

The presentation started with interpreting the ELO-P intent from the California Department of Education. The goal is to close a glaring opportunity gap in out-of-school time learning. The programs should be:  

  • based on student choice
  • hands-on and engaging learning experience, and not just childcare
  • results-driven, measurable, and improving continuously
  • tapping into community partners, which also helps ease the staffing shortage
  • complementing and not replicating the school day 

Visalia USD program consists of a base after-school program and enrichment clubs. The base after-school program is managed by an existing community partner to provide homework help and snacks. Students then go to a variety of enrichment clubs of their choice throughout the week. The clubs are offered by teachers or community partners in the topics of STEM, visual and performing arts, sports, and CTE. The clubs span three grade ranges: TK-K, 1-3, 4-6. Each session lasts 6 weeks. Teacher training takes place in each session. The 27 schools in Visalia USD are divided into 3 school clusters. The below table shows the program line up for their spring session 2024 across the 3 school clusters. 

Jeff applauded the great support from Visalia USD’s superintendent, assistant superintendent, and area superintendent, giving him and his co-director Michele Reid the charge,  support, and the autonomy to build out the ambitious ELO-P project. 

Jeff and Michele built up an 8-person central district office team including themselves, an administrative assistant, special projects technicians, experienced coordinators who coordinate multiple sites, and utility support personnel.

To incentivize certificated teachers to teach enrichment clubs in after-school hours,  and to abide by the collective bargaining agreement with the teacher union, the team and the teacher union president came up with the creative strategy to have their existing after-school program partner hire teachers as employees to teach after-school clubs at a fair and attractive market rate. This practice attracted 225 certified teachers from both Visalia USD and neighboring districts to teach high quality enrichment clubs. 

To best manage the 225 enrichment club teachers, the team also hired “supervisor teachers” to carry out curriculum design, professional development and management. 

The district has a significant number of special-needs and at-risk students. To support them, the team recruited 64 special-education behavioral experts from within the district to support the 27 campuses. These experts are a great help to support special-education students and to make the classroom an effective learning environment for all children. 

Learning starts from home. Visalia USD’s ELO-P team wants families to be involved in working with their students to select enrichment clubs of their interest. Student choice is key to engaged learning. 

Because ELO-P is new and many families are not technology-savvy in registering for programs online, they hold enrollment events at each school to increase awareness and to offer technical assistance to families. These events paid huge dividends in increasing ELO-P enrollments and having engaged students. In this process, they also help the families step into the 21st century, a technology era.

At the end of each program session, families are emailed to write a review for the enrichment club their students attended. This gives families an opportunity to discuss with their students what they learned, how they liked the program, and to provide feedback to the program. These enrichment clubs have already received rave reviews, as shown in the beginning of the article. 

Expanded learning operations are complex. We live at an age where we AirbBnb a home away from home, Uber a ride or a meal, and Amazon any item we may need all in minutes.  Jeff and Michele set off to find a technology solution that can also simplify the management of expanded learning. They discovered 6crickets, a 10- years- old, energetic company founded by Computer Science Ph.D.s from UC Berkeley and award-winning former Microsoft and Google engineers. 6crickets, itself, has also been awarded by the prestigious National Science Foundation for its technology innovation in the out-of-school time.

Dr. Helen Wang, the cofounder and CEO of 6crickets started this part of the presentation with this opening: “Many people say that innovation in education is slow. But I want to share with you that our partnership with Visalia is the fastest new technology transfer I have ever seen.” Don’t take this lightly as before 6crickets, Helen founded and led the security and privacy research group at Microsoft Research for 14 years with a key goal to transfer novel technologies into real-world products. 

A key part of any innovation is to iteratively go through the cycle of design, implementation, evaluation to continuously correct and improve towards the optimal solution. This is no different for expanded learning. 

Research consistently demonstrates that high-quality out-of-school-time programs have a positive impact on students’ educational outcomes, school attendance, and social and emotional learning. So, we no longer need to prove that expanded learning is beneficial for our students. Nevertheless, we want to make sure that our specific expanded learning operations deliver the promise and results

This is exactly what the Visalia USD ELO-P team and 6crickets set out to do. They want to digitize the entire expanded learning operation. Such digitization gives efficient organization, minimizes manual logistic work, generates real-time operations data (such as enrollment and attendance). With data, we can continuously measure, evaluate, and improve both the programming and operations to optimize for student success. 

Helen demonstrated how Visalia USD families can easily register programs for their students with translation to 100+ languages and after synching with Visalia USD’s Student Information System with pre-filled student data. 

In the backend, Helen demonstrated the real-time attendance synchronization across all education partners as shown in the below diagram. 

When an instructor takes attendance, the district central office knows; the school site knows; and the program provider organization knows. Because the 6crickets system imported student data from the district’s Student Information System with accurate student ID and student data, the district can now collate data between expanded learning and in-school learning to measure student outcomes and to optimize the programming and operations for student success. 

Jeff reflected that when education leaders and technologists come together, ask “what if” questions without any constraints, and iterate together, we can have such creative innovation and amazing progress: “Partnering with 6crickets. and using its one-stop expanded learning management platform is a large reason for us to grow so quickly. If you are looking for a trusty, ethical, creative, and intelligent partner who is always there for you, that is 6crickets!

Jeff Hohne,, Michele Reid, Christi Mayberry, Beatriz Ochoa, Lizette Valadez (Visalia USD), and Helen Wang (6crickets)

Jeff, Stephanie, and Helen concluded the presentation with the following key takeaways: 

  • To meet the 9-hour days and 30 intersession days required by ELO-P, establish a base after-school program for homework help and snacks together with choice-driven enrichment clubs. 
  • To tackle staffing challenges, tap into the community, whether by incentivizing your own teachers or partnering with local community-based organizations. 
  • To engage students and families, let families and students register for programs of interest and let families provide reviews for programs to get feedback. 
  • Use one system to manage the entire operations in order to reduce workload and measure, evaluate, and improve iteratively to optimize for student outcomes. 
  • Innovate together with technologists to modernize and simplify operations.

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