The Education Partnership of the Permian Basin on Tuesday revealed the five-year strategic plan it has been working on for eighth months.
Officials from area school districts, colleges and other organizations came together at the Region 18 Education Service Center in person and virtually for the event.
The Education Partnership, which unified with Educate Midland almost exactly a year ago, is a regional collective impact backbone organization that aligns educators, employers and partners so students have seamless pathways through education and into the workforce, Executive Director Adrian Vega said.
He said the plan provides a “very clear roadmap with very specific priorities and objectives, whereas what we were doing prior was much more organic.”
There are three main goals of the organization — student impact, regional leadership and organizational excellence.
“We exist to impact students, so that’s where we want to contribute meaningfully and equitably to improving cradle to career student outcomes,” Vega said.
“We believe that if we can anchor on these pillars … that’s really going to make an impact on our region and help make a difference for the lives of kids cradle to career,” he added.
There are nine priorities they want to focus on such as increasing kindergarten and ultimately getting students to read on grade level, increasing college going and career entry.
“Right now, we’re 8,000 positions shy that require a certain literacy level. In 10 more years, it’s going to be like 20-plus thousand. It’s going to keep going up, so we know that we need to increase college going and career entry,” Vega added.
He said students are going to need something after high school such as a certificate, credential, an associate or four-year degree.
Vega added that the Partnership wants to grow its geographic footprint and build buy-in and awareness of the organization’s mission strategy.
“We want to be seen … as a highly respected convener and partner. We want (you) to feel … that we bring value to our community. … We want to be seen as a reliable source for regional education data and knowledge, to be able to help move the needle in all the work that we do. We want to use communications to drive impact. …,” Vega said.
Under organizational excellence, the Partnership wants to optimize the governance structure which means as they continue to grow they might need to look at their board configuration and different or additional representation, Vega said.
They also want to grow organizational capacity and resources with sustainable funding.
The Education Partnership currently participates in Advance Together, an initiative of the Dallas Federal Reserve, and a Pathway grant through the Gates Foundation.
Vega also talked about expanding the Education Partnership service area into other parts of Texas and New Mexico. In the Basin, he said, a lot of student indicators and outcomes are lower than other parts of the state, which impacts the community in many different ways.
“If we can make sure that more students are having success in school and after graduation that’s going to be a positive impact on our workforce development. … Right now, a lot of our industry and a lot of our companies are struggling just to fill positions, so they are trying to recruit outside of the region. But if you look at just being able to grow our own workforce, that would be a major impact … so that is really the focus of this work,” Vega said.
The Partnership has an Early Childhood Action Network and Grow Our Own Action Network. It had a separate middle school action network, but Vega said COVID curtailed that because they were going into the campuses.
“What we will probably be doing with that is folding that into the Grow Our Own (network), which just means we’ll … start sooner with some of those initiatives by starting in middle school,” Vega said.
Lorraine Perryman, president of the Board of the Education Partnership of the Permian Basin, said the strategic plan has been a long time coming.
“We have a very drill down, 18-month step by step of what we want to accomplish in that time. Otherwise, it can become overwhelming because we have big goals in a big region. We have developed this in a way that we have benchmarks that we can keep ourselves focused on … Then we’ll present follow up information and discussions at this level and in our action networks, which are the boots on the ground because they’re the people that are really doing the work,” Perryman said.
The Education Partnership and Educate Midland were separate organizations that came together almost a year ago. As a result, they were able to focus on being an effective regional organization that would bring the entire region together. During the work on the strategic plan, Perryman said they talked to nearly every stakeholder, parents, community members, leaders of organizations and business and industry about what they would like to see and what their focus areas should be.
“We are very pleased with the outcome of this strategic plan because you need to have goals and steps along the way that are achievable and this plan gives us that, so that we can be accountable and we can work with our partners throughout the very large Permian Basin,” Perryman said.
Perryman added that there were a lot of ups and downs for a number of years because the organizations were doing duplicate work.
When the organizations unified, that clarified “so much of that ambiguity and overlap so that our work could be done in a unified fashion for the benefit of all the educational outcomes throughout the Permian Basin,” Perryman said.
She noted that it’s going to be a long process to reach the organization’s goals.
“We will work diligently. We will be hiring more staff. We will be working with our partners to bring people to the table to come up with the plans to solve these problems. The Education Partnership of the Permian Basin does not conduct the projects. The work is actually done within the education sector, within the child care sector, early education, through community colleges, the university,” Perryman said.
She added that the Partnership acts as a convenor to bring everyone to the table to solve these issues regionally.
“We will bring data and a unified approach to those solutions for the entire region,” Perryman said.
She said the issues that need the most immediate response are early childhood education and graduating students that are prepared for careers, the military and higher education.
“So we need to help those kids as they go on into those different areas after they graduate from public education,” Perryman said.
