Hear Ye! Hear Ye! The Townhalls Are Here!

It's Townhall week! 

What's that mean?

It means this is our chance to learn more about and have some input into how the new Regional Consortia system for Adult Education shapes out.

The full schedule is here.

Monday Oct 28 Southern California Meeting - Hacienda La Puente

Tuesday October 29 Central Valley Meeting - Clovis

Wednesday October 30 Bay Area Meeting - Oakland

Thursday October 31 (yes... Halloween!) - Northern California - Butte

If you go here on the AB86 website, you can download agendas.

Essentially, the meetings will consist of an introduction, an overview of AB86, and question-answer time.  If I understand the agenda correctly, you can submit your responses to the following questions:

1.  How do you envision the makeup of your consortium in this area?  

2.  What are some of the specific challenges with collaborating for the development of a regional consortium?   

3.  This is a non-competitive grant process.  What are your suggestions on how these planning funds could be distributed?  

4.  AB86 provides an opportunity to re-envision, rethink, and reshape the service delivery model for adult education. How do you believe adult learners can be better served as a result of the development of local consortia?

This last question seems to me to be the key.

We are re-imagining Adult Education.

Everything begins with ideas.

What do we want?

If you can't go to a Townhall, you can submit your responses to ab86@cccco.edu.

If you can't go to a Townhall or don't have time to ponder these questions this week, ponder them next week.

Everything doesn't begin and end with the Townhalls.  This is a process.

There is plenty of time and plenty of opportunities to be involved.

The experience, ideas, and wisdom of everyone -

community, students - past, present, and future, teachers, support staff, and administration -

are needed if we are to create a system which can support our state into a healthy future.

At San Mateo Adult School, where I work, students are creating their own survey to find out what students want and need in an Adult School.

Paper and pencil are good for this sort of thing.  So are free online survey sites like Survey Monkey.

So are conversations, time spent pondering while driving, on the bus on in the bathtub, and sleeping on it.

What matters most is that we think about it.  And contribute our musings to the process.

We're creating a new system for Adult Education that will shape the future and last for decades.