An agreement furthering dual enrollment in Navajo County schools was approved last week by the Navajo County Community College District Governing Board.
Project TALON (Technology to Advance Learning and Outcome at Northland) has been in effect since the 2016-17 school year and has served 12 schools across the county since its implementation, with plans to partner with 16 before the end of the grant funding in 2020.
The grant is provided by Title III Part A, Native American Serving Non-Tribal Institution Grant from the U.S. Department of Education. Title III provides funding to institutions to help them become self-sufficient and expand their capacity to serve low income students.
According to the Northland Pioneer College website, “The goal of TALON is to provide college level courses to underserved Native and rural students.” Students enrolled in TALON attend both high school and college level courses through live video instruction and online course work. Upon completion of the course, students receive credits that are fully transferable to any Arizona community college or public university.
Vice President of Learning and Student Services Mark Vest explained during the meeting that the governing board plans to continue the TALON program beyond the 2020 grant end date. “We will be going to the NavApache School Superintendents meeting to initiate a conversation on the future of TALON. We have two years left on the grant after this year. At that point, we will be at 16 participating schools and we hope to be up to that threshold of 50 percent Native American student participation rate,” he explained.
Vest continued to address the funding question, noting, “The real question is what happens when the grant funds dry up? We are going to be proposing to the group that we begin conversations now of a distance learning consortium between the college and participating school districts. It is going to be complicated. It’s going to be a lot of negotiation, there are things ranging from who owns and maintains the technology, to how do we pay for the teachers, to how do we pay for the support structure behind all of this, to how do we pay for the equipment. That conversation needs to begin now.”
Currently mathematics, Spanish language, composition and American government are offered to select high school students through the TALON program. According to Vest, a typical problem facing these courses is the non-retention of qualified instructors in rural areas. He mentioned focusing on the recruitment of instructors who hold master’s degrees in their fields and the desire to teach in the rural areas of Navajo County.
“We know that our campus based enrollment is up,” Vest said. “I am anticipating that dual enrollment counts will be down significantly (this semester), and that is largely driven by the lack of ability of the school districts to identify, hire and retain dual enrollment qualified instructors,” he added. “So we literally are racing the clock as we roll out and try to expand TALON.”
The governing board approved continued partnerships with the Red Mesa, Show Low and Winslow Unified School Districts to keep TALON as an option for their students. Others taking part in TALON include the Holbrook, Joseph City and Snowflake school districts.
The TALON program has contributed to Navajo County having a larger percentage of first generation college students than most other areas of the state, according to Vest. “Dual enrollment students have a high passing rate, higher than the general enrollment population,” he said, emphasizing the importance of continuing technology based educational options.
