Ector County ISD officials and community members recently attended and presented at the AVID National Conference Dec. 9-12 in Dallas.
“We presented the connections between AVID and the community. We were able to showcase ACCESS and ACCESS for Success and how technology has facilitated that connection between the community and the AVID classrooms,” AVID District Coordinator Virginia Hunt said. “And now more than ever before we went from the classroom, to CT classrooms and now opportunities for districtwide collaboration between our students and the community members as career coaches through ACCESS …,” Hunt said.
She said the district presented a few years ago on its middle school coaching initiative. A few years before that, they presented the collaboration with Complex Community Federal Credit Union and their AVID senior celebrations.
AVID and ACCESS representatives presented and there was a panel of community members such as Jonathan Fuentes, vice president for academic partnerships, Mike Miller, program coordinator at the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin, Allan Espina from Odessa Regional Medical Center, Ravi Shakamuri from ACCESS and Abigail Anderson, a graduate.
“We had all those different perspectives being discussed and talked about how we have been able to bring opportunity knowledge to our district because of ACCESS. It was a really fun event and there were almost 2,000 people at the national conference,” Hunt said.
“We had two sessions on day one and then we were able then to explore the other sessions as well.”
AVID has come up with a new measure for districtwide AVID success. There are indicators that show which pieces of AVID can be used to take AVID districtwide.
“A lot of those, of course came from research of districts that are doing it and so we’re really excited about that incorporating AVID into our strategic plan as well, on how to grow college and career readiness for all students,” Hunt said.
They attended another one on keeping the focus on being culturally relevant in our districts.
Hunt said the senior AVID teacher from Richardson ISD presented some strategies that she uses to make sure that AVID students align from ninth, 10th, 11th, and 12th. “So that the students, by the time they get to be seniors, they have almost a portfolio ready to start the application process as soon as they enter their senior year,” Hunt said. “Some of those practices we already have in place here. But she made it so systematic that you could easily replicate that in all the schools.”
