Post-mortem

Post-mortem


About 5 years ago I was the program manager for STAR, Student Transition and Retention. It was a program that assisted inmates and parolees as well as ex-felons continue higher education. It was a two part program. The first part was taking college courses to the prisons in hope that the inmates could complete their AA degree. The 2nd part of the program was helping parolees and ex-felons with the enrollment into a 2 year college, LCC, which was where the program was. There were support services for all students as well as academic counseling and guidance. The program was run by myself, and two other paid staff, as well as two parolee volunteers. The difficult or most challenging aspect of the program was the recruitment of TAs or Teacher Assistants. Every semester 3-4 classes were offered to inmates at the prisons. The collaboration of the college, teachers, TAs and the prisons needed to be perfect, from the enrollment, to the actual facilitation of classes. The instructor of each course did not go to the prisons to teach as they were needed at the college to maintain their already busy schedule of courses. The fact that we all had to work around the prisons was very difficult. There were two major prisons and each prison conducted 3-4 classes, which meant that each class needed a TA to facilitate the class and go between each prison. These TAs were full time students and had their own classes to attend at the community college. The TAs, were advance students that had already passed the class they were trying to facilitate at the prisons. They were not paid by the program, except given mileage reimbursement for the drive to and from the prisons. They did this as volunteer work, so there were always new TAs to try and train.

Managing this program was not easy. It took a lot of juggling to have the program run smoothly. For example, if a TA called in sick or did not show up, I had to drop everything, drive 10-13 miles to the prison and teach the class myself. This needed to be done as the prisons were not happy with last minute cancellations. The prisons were on a schedule that needed to be followed. If there was a lock down at a prison facility, no TA would be allowed in that day and class would be cancelled. This posed another type of problem as the instructor of the college also had deadlines to post grades.

I decided, knowing these problems to conduct a recruiting/training class to incorporate into the already chaotic program. It was planned with a mission to produce TAs that would be focused and committed to the program. It was designed to create TAs that did not quickly quit by showing them the long term benefits. I was tired of the TAs not showing up because when TAs did this it would put the program schedule behind, and make the prison officials upset that they had to send all the prisoners back to their modules. The training class was to give the recruited TAs a glimpse of what to expect as well as go over their duties and responsibilities, at least a month before the start of the semester.

The first initial recruit/training class produce quite a bit of TAs eager and ready to commit to the program. The training program was very successful. At one point I had a room full of TAs, volunteers and parolee students. Towards the end of the semester they again started dropping off the roster, making me have to run to each prison both day and night to teach the classes. You know the saying, “the show must go on”. After that, what seemed to be long semester I did not have the patience nor the resources available to continue the recruitment/training class. This time I decided to lessen the amount of classes being offered at the prisons and target instructors that did not mind going to the prison to teach along with their instruction at the college. This limited the types of classes offered as well as took more funds out of our budget to cover the teacher’s expense for after hours. This system worked for several semesters. In the middle of one semester I went on maternity leave at which time someone temporarily took over the project. About two months later the Department of Public Safety, decided to not fund the program any more.

This assignment made me look deep into what I might have done wrong that made the training class a success for awhile then a complete failure. After all the classes I have taken in instructional design, this week assignment’s readings, as well as interaction with fellow classmates, I realized the component that I missed during this entire training pursuit was the analysis and evaluation . I did not try to find out what each TA brought to the program and I surely did not find out what the reasons for their dropping was. What I did right was plan, and schedule however, I did not control. Because the program was successful half way through I let it go and that’s probably where it failed