Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention (SPEAR)
For the past nineteen years, Samahang Pilipino Education and Retention Project (SPEAR) has worked hard to serve the community by continuing the past successes from previous academic years, improving upon the weakness that have been brought to light, while still upholding a vision of progress and growth. SPEAR will continue to utilize and refine tracking methods from previous years in order to continue to understand the growing need of students while staff members will continue its work on facilitating the growth of students’ ability to practice self-advocacy, self-learning, peer organizing, community service while maintaining their overall health and wellness. This year’s particular focus will be on increasing the students’ ability to peer organize and participate in community service. With an outcome-oriented approach, SPEAR plans to continue to work towards 100% retention and community advancement through academic empowerment and holistic development.
One Step Ahead Mentorship plans to get students to build strong systems of support for academic, personal, and holistic aspects of a student’s life. With that, Mentorship will emphasize community building and engagement and provide programs that address community and the meaning of support, especially with having an All-SRC event during fall and winter. In order to further the development of the participants, the family system will continue through its 5th year of implementation. While direction of these families will still be facilitated by SPEAR, co-family heads will be selected through application. This will provide further investment from other pairs.
These families will be tracked through the database as well as by having a monthly reflection journal to address their strengths and weaknesses to the mentorship workgroup. Evaluations of mentorship participants will also be used to keep both mentors and mentees accountable to one another and the mentorship program. These will probably be conducted on a quarterly or bi-quarterly base. All in all mentorship hopes to develop students that realize community does not just stay within the program, but can be extended on campus and beyond.
SPEAR’s Peer Counseling Component envisions our students to be academically and holistically retained by beginning a process of taking ownership of their education. To ensure that all of our students are best served, we will focus outreaching to Academic Action and Dismissed students by making these students a priority from the beginning. AA outreaching and tracking sheets will be implemented like last year. One-on-ones with a counselor and Peer Counseling coordinator and counseling squads will help counselors develop plans of action address counseling challenges or deficits in the number of sessions. Counselors will engage each of their students in the process of the spiral model so students can begin to personalize their education and make it their own.
Counselors will continue to use the updated Record of Interview to track student development in terms of the student outcomes, which will be color coded and reviewed by the Peer Counseling Coordinator so the component can see which outcomes need to be focused on in the future. Student Outcome surveys will also be utilized to assess the needs of the students at the beginning of the quarter and at the end to evaluate how well our students have progressed for the duration of that quarter.
This year, the responsibility of the All-SRC Internship and Samahang Teaching through Experience Program will continue under the Internship Workgroup consisting of the Assistant Student Director and one staff member. The internship workgroup has proven successful in executing the program's needs. The Assistant Student Director will continue to oversee the planning and evaluation of the All-SRC and Project Specific spaces, while the staff member will help with the facilitation and execution of the Project Specific space. Additionally, the Internship Workgroup will have staff member directly involved with the planning and facilitation of programs. As a recommendation from last year, the Internship curricula will be made visible to staff throughout each quarter via internship collectives specifically focused on understanding the process of internship and the development of the interns during staff meetings. There counselors will be able to provide input based on student trends from their sessions. A tracking tool presented during last spring quarter will also be utilize to track the development of the interns and be made visible to staff and the interns’ peer counselors.
Due to the overwhelming interest and outreach efforts of past interns, the Assistant Director has decided to have an internship in the fall to prioritize continuing students who were previously interested last spring quarter. This will enable the component to have a different approach to their outreaching efforts as it hasn’t been effective in outreaching beyond incoming students. Also do to the overwhelming interest, 8 S.T.E.P. interns will be chosen during each quarter. This increase will still allow the workgroup members to focus on individual growth and development of each intern. The Assistant Director will meet consistently with the All-SRC Internship coordinators to plan effective programming that addresses the needs of all of the students represented in the SRC. Furthermore, Samahang Pilipino's Executive Board will continue to play a more visible role within the project specific space as a move towards transitioning of the component.