Wednesday, May 16, 2018

AO Conference: Accepting Proposals

The GEAR UP West/Advanced Opportunities Conference is scheduled for October 14th-16th at the Boise Center on the Grove!  We are excited to bring together national speakers and stakeholders from the College and Career Readiness community to the state of Idaho as we partner with GEAR UP West!   For the event, we would love to showcase some of Idaho’s best practices and progressive initiatives. If you have a presentation, workshop, idea or success story that you would like to present at the conference, please follow the link to the Presentation Proposal form.  Presentation proposals are due June 15th.  We look forward at bringing Idaho’s best to the conference!

 Topics of interest include, but are not limited to the following:
·         Advanced Opportunities
·         College Career Readiness
·         College Partnerships
·         Building resilience for students and practitioners
·         Apprenticeships and other postsecondary pathways
·         Cross-sector collaboration, partnerships, and collective impact
·         Equity and support for underrepresented populations (gender equity, ELL, students of color, youth who are in foster care and/or are experiencing homelessness)
·         Financial literacy
·         Family engagement
·         College transition, first-year experiences, summer melt, and persistence
·         Grant management
·         Growth mindset and non-cognitive skills
·         Evaluation results that demonstrate effective program practices
·         Data collection and analysis, strategies for demonstrating program success and identifying areas of  improvement
·         Research-based practices and strategies
·         Continuous improvement and sustainability
·         Advocacy in the school and community

Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Update: May 15th, 2018


Dear Advanced Opportunities Users,

 

Today we have released the new and improved Advanced Opportunities Portal 3.0.  Our support team and developers have worked diligently to make the portal a little more user friendly, as you work to approve funding requests for students using their Fast Forward funds. This coming August, we will have portal trainings available to go over all of the features and also provide rights for school districts to use “mass upload” functions. Dates for these trainings will be sent out over the summer.


Here are a few other things to keep in mind:
  • The exam submission deadline for this school year is May 25th, 2018.  This will give you the opportunity to pull out any students who do not show up for their scheduled test.
  • June 30th is a very critical date: if you are planning on submitting any make-up requests for the FY18 school year, they must be in the portal by June 30th.  Statutorily, our department cannot fund any courses or exams that are not requested within the same fiscal year.  Please take time to look over student requests and make sure that a make-up requests are in the portal by the end of the fiscal year, which is June 30th
  • The summer request window is now open. Summer of 2018 is considered to be part of the 2018-2019 school year for purposes of Advanced Opportunities. Summer school requests must be in the portal by June 30th, 2018.
  • In FY19,  deadlines will adhere to a Semester structure.  Therefore, if you are a school that operates on Trimesters, Trimester 1 will adhere to Fall deadlines, and Trimesters 2 & 3 will adhere to Spring deadlines. We will have an extended entry window to accommodate for Trimester 3. However, you will not be required to submit Trimester 2 courses separately.
  • Below, you will see the dates for the Portal for FY19.
 

Please contact our support team if you have any questions.

Warmly,

 Tina