CFES Brilliant Pathways’ 2020 conference was virtual for the first time in its 29-year history.
The new format allowed 3,400 participants spanning 10 time zones to watch and interact with experts in education, business and government. Three college presidents, two members of the U.S. House, executives from Netflix, EY, TransPerfect, Helios Education Foundation, K12 Inc., a former ABC News anchor and innovative K-16 educators in Ireland and the United States spoke virtually with the help of a team at CFES headquarters in rural Essex, NY.
The conference explored trends in K-16 education, analyzed the impact of current events for schools and students, and shared new college and career readiness strategies to overcome today’s challenges.
There’s an incredible amount of change occurring right now and it’s not going away. We need to leverage disruption. Change is our friend. Our goal was to show educators, students and our partners how to embrace change and take advantage of the opportunities that come from it.”  – Rick Dalton, CFES President & CEO
Keynote Address
Quiñones is host of What Would You Do? (WWYD), author, broadcast journalist, and motivational speaker. Quiñones attended St. Mary’s University in San Antonio as an undergraduate and he is a pioneer network news correspondent. Quiñones earned his M.A. from Columbia University’s School of Journalism. He was recently honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Hispanic Media Coalition and Guerra Lifetime Achievement Award from the San Antonio Association of Hispanic Journalists.
Since 2006, Luna has served as President and CEO of Helios Education Foundation, where he has led the foundation in its efforts to create opportunities for individuals to succeed in postsecondary education. In this role, he is responsible for guiding the strategic direction of the organization, cultivating strong community relationships, and initiating strategic partnerships in Arizona and Florida. He brings more than 25 years of public and private professional experience to leadership of Helios. A native of Miami, Arizona, Luna attended Stanford University as a first-generation college student, where he earned a degree in Civil Engineering.
Brown is Senior Vice President of K12, Inc., the leading and largest provider of virtual and online education to students in Kindergarten through 12th grade. With decades of marketing, brand, and communications experience, Brown has been named to the DM Hall of Femme, Black Enterprise’s Women in Business, and recognized by Savoy Magazine’s Top 100 Blacks in Corporate America. Brown now serves on her alma mater’s board and the Executive Leadership Council, the premier membership organization for global Black executives.
On-demand Sessions
Day One: Career Readiness in the New World
COVID-19 has shifted the higher education world from in-person to virtual. Prospective college students are using virtual campus visits to make life-altering decisions about where they will attend college. Without the benefit of getting a feel for a campus in person, students need to be equipped with the right questions and knowledge to make postsecondary decisions.
Money challenges are a growing concern for students, especially those from underserved communities. Figuring out how to pay for college can be overwhelming and too often it derails students from moving down the higher education pathway. In this roundtable, attendees will discover how to help students become financially literate and learn how to obtain scholarships and other dollars to pay for college.
As students and educators step into virtual classrooms, the digital divide is widening and becoming more apparent. Reaching students with vastly different access to digital resources requires creativity and adaptability. This session will provide strategies and tips for developing an effective virtual learning environment for all students.
Virtual interviewing has become the new reality for job candidates, and best practices and norms for this are still evolving. Leaders from TransPerfect will share strategies for how Scholars can secure, conduct, and follow up on virtual interviews to be competitive in new pathways to careers/jobs.
Hear government leaders talk about how they view the New World affecting the college and career readiness. Each participant will talk about what they see as the key elements that lead to college and career readiness today.
We live in a world of accelerating change and disruption. Technology, college costs, learning styles, and the entire landscape of postsecondary education and careers all require agility as we support students on their brilliant pathway in our new world. In this roundtable, leaders in the corporate and government sector will discuss what’s needed today for career readiness.
Day Two: College Readiness in the New World
COVID-19 has been challenging for many families who are educating their children in our new virtual world. The University of Vermont’s new Catamount Active Tutoring Corps (CAT Corps) is a volunteer-based online K-12 tutoring program serving Vermont families in need as a result of school disruptions related to the COVID-19 pandemic. CAT Corps matches UVM student volunteers to tutoring and instructional support needs of families across Vermont. Learn how the CAT Corps model can be replicated for your families.
The United States and other countries face a skills gap: a severe shortage of workers that can ensure a robust economy. Collaborations with businesses can help fill the pipeline with future workers. Virtual school-business partnerships eliminate proximity as a partnership requirement. In this workshop, school and business leaders will discuss how to find a partner, the anatomy of a school-business partnership, steps to start, sustain, and strengthen partnerships, and examples of high-impact partnerships that have changed the trajectory of students.
College, career, and life readiness requires that students and educators develop the Essential Skills™. This session will tackle strategies for weaving skills such as perseverance, goal setting, and agility into a virtual setting, an environment that requires new levels of creativity to ensure that students are college and career ready.
Learn how you can establish STEM-infused college and career readiness opportunities for your Scholars in a virtual setting. This workshop will cover strategies for enlisting STEM-based partners, delivering STEM activities to Scholars, and infusing our three core practices in STEM-related programming in a time when hands-on activities may not always be an option.
Scholars will hear directly from CFES alumni about how they overcame obstacles to become college and career ready. Alumni will not only share their pathway but engage with current Scholars in small groups to answer questions and provide advice.
Join three college presidents in a panel discussion about what college readiness looks like today. The presidents will discuss disruption in higher education and what this means for our Scholars and our world.
Day Three: Social Justice in the New World
Across the United States, too many counselors have neither the time nor the capacity to provide adequate college and career readiness support, especially for low-income students. With little support to guide them through the college preparation maze, underserved students often don’t know where to turn, and they make college-going decisions based on information that is inaccurate and misleading. To address this crisis, CFES has developed a program, where participants are trained as College and Career Readiness (CCR) Advisors. Those who participate in seven sessions receive certification from CFES and the University of Vermont. In this session, trained CCR advisors will share tips and strategies they used to put their training into practice.
This is a critical moment for those who want to create and cultivate antiracist spaces for our children. Administrators realize that we must move beyond tokenizing diversity and inclusion efforts to consciously build antiracist institutions. To do so, we must start by becoming comfortable with conversations about race. This session will address why it’s so difficult to talk about race, how we can teach antiracism in the classroom, and what can be done to address racist legacies built into educational practices in the US moving forward.
Participating in athletics has been linked to the development of time management, goal setting, and teamwork, all skills that make athletes great role models for younger students. While many athletic competitions are on pause, college athletes may have more time to participate in college and career readiness training and give back to their communities. This session will tackle how to recruit and engage these athletes.
Low-income students are 10 times less likely to attain a STEM degree than their upper income peers. Reasons for this include limited exposure to STEM pathways and few role models in their community. Mentors with STEM backgrounds can address this challenge. This session will discuss ways to develop STEM-based mentoring programs.
This session will provide Scholars with useful tools to leverage their Essential Skills and move down the college and career pathway while also juggling academics in the midst of a global pandemic and social upheaval.
Social justice has always been a critical issue, but it has more recently been publicly acknowledged as an essential dimension of existing in the world. This panel will take an intersectional approach to discussing key issues, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, climate change, and other inequities exposed by a global pandemic. Speakers will propose direction for imagining new worlds and address the role of young people in executing change.
School Performances
Irish Step Dancing
August Ahrens Elementary School Performance by Monica V.
Wadleigh Secondary School Performance
Special Thanks to Our Sponsors
PLATINUM
GOLD
SILVER
BRONZE
Ronald and Renee Rix