Report 2021-101 Recommendation 2 Responses

Report 2021-101: K-12 Strong Workforce Program: State and Regional Administrative Shortcomings Limit the Program's Effectiveness in Supporting Grant Applicants (Release Date: February 2022)

Recommendation #2 To: Community Colleges Chancellor's Office

To enhance the quality of information the selection committees have available when determining whether applications best meet the workforce program's goals, beginning with the fiscal year 2022-23 grant application period, the Chancellor's Office should provide examples that address all of the eligibility criteria.

1-Year Agency Response

Implementation complete.

The Chancellor's Office updated the website of K12 regional selection committee

engagement meetings in their respective regions for Round 5. The selection committee engagement meetings can be found on the Chancellors Office website at:

https://www.cccco.edu/About-Us/Chancellors-Office/Divisions/Workforce-and-Economic-Development/K12-Strong-Workforce#accordion-3b897973-cf77-4ab8-8715-2965e6bd7d5f

California State Auditor's Assessment of 1-Year Status: Partially Implemented

We acknowledge the Chancellor's Office's action to post links to regional selection committee engagement meetings on its website. However, we disagree that this action fully implements our recommendation.

In the report, we describe that the Chancellor's Office provided examples on its website of the level of detail applicants should provide in their workforce grant applications, and that those examples did not address certain eligibility criteria. If the Chancellor's Office added information to those examples that addressed all of the eligibility criteria, applicants could readily locate guidance about particular aspects of their applications.

Instead, the Chancellor's Office has posted links to meetings, some of which are more than an hour long. Thus, applicants must spend time watching recorded material in the hope that it contains the piece of information they need. We encourage the Chancellor's Office to provide guidance in a more accessible format, such as posting examples addressing all of the eligibility criteria to its website in document form so that applicants may locate and refer to them more easily.

6-Month Agency Response

Each regional selection committee will be conducting RFA Engagement meetings in their respective regions. The Chancellor's office will be updating our website with the information and schedule of the engagement meetings and will post recordings of the meeting once available.

California State Auditor's Assessment of 6-Month Status: Pending

We will assess whether the information the Chancellor's Office provides on its updated website during the fiscal year 2022-23 application period fully implements our recommendation to provide applicants with examples that address all of the eligibility criteria. However, if it pursues the course of action it describes, the Chancellor's Office's success in implementing the recommendation will depend on the subject matter described in the recordings of regional committee engagement meetings that it says it will post.

60-Day Agency Response

The California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office recognizes that applicant resources, such as a range of examples for eligibility criteria, is potentially valuable for applicants, however this does not seem appropriate to include in future RFAs given that the evaluation of the proposals is determined at the local level via the established Selection Committees. It would be advisable to fund the regional leads to develop these types of resources for their regions. We will encourage local selection committees to provide more robust examples

California State Auditor's Assessment of 60-Day Status: Pending

The Chancellor's Office's response misrepresents the nature of our recommendation. This recommendation is not related to information provided in the Request for Applications (RFA). Rather, it pertains to the application examples that the Chancellor's Office has already posted on its website, which currently do not address all of the eligibility criteria established in the RFA. Further, we disagree with the Chancellor's Office's suggestion that applicant resources, such as these examples, should be developed at the local level. The eligibility criteria is established by the Chancellor's Office and thus it should provide examples of how to address those criteria. As such, we stand by our recommendation that the Chancellor's Office's examples should address all of the eligibility criteria.

All Recommendations in 2021-101

Agency responses received are posted verbatim.