Gladys Velazquez:
The FAFSA becomes the portal to opportunities that maybe students didn’t realize they had. So when we have them apply and they receive a grant or some sort of award, or they’re eligible for loans and we discuss what all of that entails, they can now see a bigger picture of possibilities.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Gladys Velazquez. Gladys is an academic administrator for the Downey Unified School District in Los Angeles. But until last summer, she was an assistant principal at Warren High School in Downey, and that’s the school we’re talking about in this episode. According to school reference website niche.com, Warren High School has 3,451 students making it the 11th largest high school in the state of California. This makes the following statistic pretty remarkable. Last year, 90% of Warren High School students completed either their FAFSA or Dream Act form. Across California, that number was just over 60%.
If you’re listening to this, you probably know why that’s a big deal, but just in case, those forms are what you need to submit in order to qualify for federal financial aid. They’re also required for most state level and even school-specific scholarships. This means that for a lot of students, if they don’t submit one of those forms, they won’t be able to afford college. High Tech High Graduate School of Education Improvement Coach Garet Brownlee Plantz talked to Gladys about how Warren High School achieved this. I was there too, so hear my voice a couple of times. To begin, Garet asked Gladys, who hated school as a child, how she ended up doing this work. If you’re strictly here for the FAFSA, that gets going about nine minutes in, but I recommend listening to all of it. Here’s Garet to kick it off.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
I know I get a chance to know you a bit, but would you mind sharing a quick introduction with people about who you are and how those identities have formed and the way you move in the world?

Gladys Velazquez:
Oh, yeah. Well, thank you so much for the opportunity and for allowing us to share. Some of our struggles and learning experiences through this journey, more than anything, I think we’re mostly proud of, not necessarily the work we’ve done, but the access that our students now have. So that’s really what we use as a driver for sure. So a little bit about me. I am a Latina. I am a mother of two smart and beautiful souls who are trying to find their way in the world. As for myself, I’m a teacher at heart, but I always struggled significantly as a learner, and I fought, I literally fought going back into education. Once I graduated from high school, I thought, “I struggled in school so much, I don’t want to spend another day on another campus.” It turned out to be my life’s calling, my soul’s calling. I just find so much pleasure and satisfaction in helping other struggling learners or individuals find their way in the system that oftentimes isn’t set up to help everybody succeed. So that alone is part of my driver.
But I am born in Mexico, Guadalajara, Mexico. I was an immigrant my earlier years, so I have that experience. I’m the firstborn in my family, and when my dad realized he was going to have a daughter, he thought, “Well, unfortunately, our homeland doesn’t bring as much opportunity especially to women.” So he had quite a few family members living in the U.S. at the time, and he crossed the border illegally. He was a migrant worker in the fields, but by trade, he’s a jeweler. So that just took a turn when extended family learned that he was here, one of his cousins reached out and said, “Hey, what are you doing working the fields when you know a trade and you’re skilled?” So we ended up living in LA where he eventually, after quite a few years, ended up owning his own jewelry shop in the jewelry industry.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Wow.

Gladys Velazquez:
So he’s got some great stories and adventures to tell as well, but that is what brought us to the U.S. Then being that I was a very young immigrant student in the system, just coming into it, I was already fighting an uphill battle. I was not an English speaker at five years old when I started kindergarten. On top of that back then, I’m a September kid, an early September, but a September kid and I had just turned five. So I was incredibly immature when I started school, not knowing the language, very social. I got to admit I was too social maybe, but I was constantly getting in trouble because I was a social butterfly and I didn’t speak English, so I struggled to even understand, “How do you ask to go to the restroom?” Or, “How do you say you want to go drink water?” I served as an interpreter for my parents who were full-blown adults, and I was only in elementary, kindergarten, first grade. Having to navigate that world was just not easy.
So on top of that, you’re asking me to learn concepts and understand and express my understanding in a language I have not mastered? That was already a dislike already. As I got older and the concepts got more difficult, I did grow, and I met many of the expectations. At some point in elementary, I was actually even identified as a gifted learner. But because the learning output by the school was not meeting my need, I just felt severely under challenged and disconnected. While I should have been a straight A student, I just felt like I would just take a passive approach to things. I didn’t see the value in it necessarily. I struggled the struggle that many students go through when they just do not find their way or connection in the public school system. After high school, which is so funny, I tried to apply for all sorts of part-time jobs while I went through community college just to make ends meet, of course, and I wouldn’t get anything but teaching assistant positions.
I thought, “Why? Why is this happening to me?” Eventually, I made a connection with supporting young learners and I thought, “Okay, well, maybe a preschool teacher wouldn’t be so bad, or an elementary teacher wouldn’t be so bad.” I became an assistant at the elementary level and I thought, “Oh, my God, these teachers work so hard, and I don’t know that the students would give me at this age the satisfaction I need in return. I need to have full-blown conversations with people, and I’m not getting that at this level.” So then I tried middle school, and I did better. I connected much better with students, and I found a little more interest single subjects.
I found that I was connecting more in the language arts and so forth ’cause I always struggled in math. As I moved on to be an assistant at the high school, I totally bonded with that student population. I thought, “This is my niche,” but it was a lot of trial and error. I was not a successful student in my public education career, but that’s where I found the motivation, and it pulled at my heartstrings when I would come across students that struggled the same struggle I was going through or I had gone through. I thought as an adult, I can support them. I can be that adult that helps them connect or see their education or the value or try to have these conversations with them that were meaningful. I fell in love with education at that level, and that was the rest of what drove my education.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
What I love so much about the story you’re sharing is the honoring of the complexities and sometimes the paradox that you experienced not only as a student but as a young professional and your total resistance, and then to the 180 acceptance of your role in education as someone who not just honors complexity in others, but supports a process for the individualization that it requires, which I know special ed educators are just really excellent at. So it’s interesting to hear this story, and it helps me understand your approach to both seeing the system and the individualization that is required. So I’m just thinking as you went into Warren, you have all these new administrators-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… and all this new leadership. We all know the strain that has on a school system. When were you thinking, “You know what? It’s college acceptance and FAFSA. That’s what I want to focus on.” How did you get there?

Gladys Velazquez:
Right. So my first couple of years at Warren, I’m not one who is… my heels are never in the sand, per se. I am so open to learning from everyone. So as a new leader in this particular area that my predecessor in that area had already done significant work with strengthening the College and Career Center and the services that they provide. He was the administrator, Mr. Jeff Giles was the administrator overseeing these two departments when they started the work with CARPE. So he was already very data-driven, goal-oriented. I’m going to guess that he brought and strengthened a lot of that within these two centers or these two departments. When I came in, so much was already in place, I wasn’t about to shake it up because I had other thoughts or other approaches. I really needed to come in and learn what was in place.
I am a big believer in strengthening the individual’s capacity and while always maintaining. My role was to be a keeper of the vision to keep us on track, but not be a micromanager. When it comes to FAFSA where we’ve really soared, it really did become data-driven and it became what we now know as a tiered system. You’ve got your universal approaches and you’re going to reach so many. Then as you continue to analyze that data, we start identifying clusters and we reach out to them to meet those needs. We would get creative when we would identify areas like let’s say parent resistance, then we need to inform parents, and we would go back to that universal approach, “Let’s put out this communication. Let’s make ourselves available.
Let’s make sure that we highlight our services in those areas that we’re now identifying in these clusters of need so that that is heard by the parents we’re trying to reach.” We would send out very targeted messages to those clusters of families with those specific needs. As we dwindled, and we moved into the third tier, we started identifying individuals whom we just were not reaching or were not responsive. Our principal, Dr. Cari White has this term she uses when we get down to the few, it’s, “Warren’s Most Wanted.” So we started using that school-wide. When we would publish our lists and send them out to our staff, like, “These are students we haven’t been able to reach,” and we would title it, “Warren’s Most Wanted,” and so teachers would support and send students in.
But then you still have those students who will not show up, who will not respond to the summons, and so we call in the troops. We’ve got individual counselors. Everybody in the admin team, we take a part of that list and we call out those individual students and the families, and it all just comes from being creative as a team. We’re not afraid of reaching out to the wider school for their support, to specific departments for their support. Everybody, including admin, has to own this shared responsibility to reach every single student. I cannot claim to be a part of that culture. So much of that was already in place when I came in, but reaching out and being creative and always appreciating and expressing the value of the effort, the value in their work, I think, has also made a huge difference.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Gladys, you’ve talked about so many things that I want to touch a little bit more on, but first, help me just get a picture of what that looks like at Warren. How many students are we talking about? How many staff are supporting them and in what roles are they playing? So I have a sense of what kind of team we’re looking at.

Gladys Velazquez:
In general, we have been maybe somewhere between 3,500 to 3,700 students, close to about 170-ish teachers, another close to 150 classroom classified members. On top of that, you’ve got a large staff support. Our guidance center is made up of nine academic counselors. We have, I would say, well, at the time when I started supporting the College and Career Center, we had three advisors. Now we’ve grown to four, and so it’s a large, large team for sure. Everybody’s got their set of responsibilities, but we go through waves. We are in FAFSA season. We are in college app season.
We are now at the very, very end of the academic year reaching out to our juniors to get them ready for the following year. So we do reach out to the different teams. We don’t want to exhaust just the English department because that’s an easier access to grade-level students. We have to reach out to some historys, some sciences. We got to share the love. Well, because every single student takes English and they’re going to take their grade-level English doesn’t mean that they are at grade level. They might have additional English courses, but that is an easy entry or access point for grade level students. But then they also have their pacing guide and their own goals that they want to achieve, so we can’t continue to tap into that source all the time.

Alec Patton:
Okay. So just to check, so you had three college advisors-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Alec Patton:
… at least at the start of it, yes?

Gladys Velazquez:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
So they all have a 1,000+ student caseload, each one of them?

Gladys Velazquez:
If we go by grade level, yes, for sure. It is a little over 1,000 when you think about it.

Alec Patton:
I can’t begin to conceive of that.

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Alec Patton:
That’s so many kids.

Gladys Velazquez:
But that is exactly why we have to have a very close partnership with the guidance counselors. Every single guidance counselor, and we have nine of them, which is still, in my opinion, not enough for the amount of students we have, but that’s the way it’s worked out, they’re in the average for caseloads, and they have to see every single student by a certain point in the school year. They also set their own goals and deadlines, and so they have to maintain this pace to be able to reach every single student. So we have to tap into them and their access to students to inform. So the guidance counselors, host grade-level parent meetings at the start of the year to cover just grade-level basics. But that is also an opportunity that we take in the College and Career Center to also add information that applies to their grade level.
So for example, for ninth graders, College and Career isn’t going to reach out to try to get them to identify what career path they might be interested in, but we’re going to share with them all of the resources that we offer to explore careers and universities. Just start tapping into that. At the 10th grade, we might get a little deeper than that. Let’s promote vocational assessments. Let’s promote interest inventories. Hopefully, by this point, they’re already tapping into preferred electives to explore certain areas, CTE courses to learn about concentrated skills and trades. By the 11th grade, let’s start talking a little more about universities that meet your interests. Let’s start really researching some of those universities that are strong in your area of interest, your career interest and meets your family’s needs. Therefore, by the time they get into their senior year, they have an idea of what colleges they’re interested in and would apply to.
We start talking about college apps, and they receive the guidance for that. Then, of course, for FAFSA, we get them through that process. There have been some of those students in the Most Wanted list that tell us when we get to that individual level conversation, “Well, college isn’t for me,” or, “I’m interested in joining the military or going to trade school or something else.” So that’s where that individual conversation with college advisors, college center advisors, and the guidance counselors have to come into play as well. If this is your area, these are the resources that could support you. When we do pull in those last few students that are not applying, it’s about helping them see the value in the application because they may actually be granted an award that they thought they were never going to be eligible for. That just creates a whole new window, whole new spread of opportunities for them that maybe they didn’t see for themselves before, but it takes the whole village.

Alec Patton:
Something I’m noticing is that we wanted to talk to you, and certainly when Garet told me about this, it was like the jump in your FAFSA completion rates is what we were excited about. But that’s only one of 1000 different things that you just talked about in the last couple of minutes that you’re thinking about here. So let me ask, in my head, Warren’s this place that got this amazing FAFSA result. Clearly, it’s one of the things, does that feel like a big deal to you-

Gladys Velazquez:
Yes.

Alec Patton:
… that particular thing? Or is that just one of a million things that you were-

Gladys Velazquez:
No, no, no-

Alec Patton:
… juggling?

Gladys Velazquez:
… it is a huge deal for us because again, the FAFSA becomes the portal to opportunities that maybe students didn’t realize they had. So when we have them apply and they receive a grant or some sort of award or they’re eligible for loans and we discuss what all of that entails, they can now see a bigger picture of possibilities. I can give you a story, for example, one of our career center advisors shared. She’s also the rugby team coach, and so she had a particular student who was very talented in rugby. He had no interest to attend a four-year university.
He said, “Maybe I’ll do trade school.” But because rugby was such a talent, he was being approached by universities. So her being an advisor in College and Career Center had already spoken to this student multiple times about applying for FAFSA. But when he started getting scouted and approached, she said, “A starting point is that FAFSA.” So he went ahead and applied. The family was all in. Turned out he received a Pell Grant, he received other sources of funding. He was accepted to the university, and he received additional academic scholarships, whereas now, he’s a full-time university student and about 80% of his living and university costs, all costs are covered-

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Wow.

Gladys Velazquez:
… and it’s awesome. This is a student who just never really cared to take it that far, to take that path. But the FAFSA and all the awards and all of the opportunities that came with that, obviously because he had other talents, but now he’s got all these opportunities that he just didn’t see before.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
So when you got there, you inherit this team. You inherit this relationship to this improvement network called CARPE, and you see them starting to look at data and making sense of data. They have an aim they’ve identified that they really want to target in terms of who might be missing out of that multi-tiered support system you were just talking about-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… how did you then start to learn… You’ve talked a lot about creativity, but how have you been able to see data, track the data and then leverage creativity once you got there that has amplified that sort of learning that happened?

Gladys Velazquez:
So I have a very small team doing a very big task, and my number one role with them is to give them the space and the freedom to take risks that fit within our systems. So for example, if they want to do a certain promotion or certain activities to call out on students and bring them into the college and career and just simply expose them, but they want to start with some rewards or something that takes some funds to entice students, sometimes it’s successful. Other times nobody shows up. So I do my best to facilitate the resources that they need without saying, “Oh, well, that’s not going to work, dude. We’ve already tried that a couple of years ago,” because the reality is this particular group is a different group. They’re not the same individuals from two years ago, so not squashing their ideas or their efforts or what they think might work, but, “Let’s go with it. If it doesn’t, okay, then we move on to something else.”
I do strongly encourage them to think outside of the box, but it’s very important that it also meet their individual needs. They’re human, their parents, their children of older parents, aging parents, they have needs outside of the work environment. But we know the work environment is so demanding, so I have to also acknowledge the human in them. When they need support, I need to be there for them so that when they do come to the table or they do show up to work, which they do every single day, and they’re very present, I have to keep them in a healthy position, in a healthy way where they’re willing to take those risks. They’re willing to work the long hours. They’re not going to be micromanaged. They’re not going to be squashed.
It’s everything in positive terms, growth oriented. Yes, let’s give it a try, and through trial and error, they will see what works and what doesn’t. I think that that really does feed a lot of their own motivation, that intrinsic motivation, knowing that they have a say and they have a voice at the table, and it’s not just someone coming in. So it, I think, really promotes that flow of creativity because they know that they can have these conversations. Let’s be honest, sometimes they think so far out of the box and it’s like, “Okay, let’s think about that a little more. Let’s unpack it. How do we make that happen?” In that conversation, they may realize, “Okay, maybe this one is a little too farfetched.” We’re not going to dump it, but let’s just set it aside. It might work down the line, or we might find a different approach to help that. So it’s all about nurturing them as individuals and as a team. I think that really makes a difference.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Yeah, I think it’s noted too, because you can’t get the success you’ve had at Warren without a culture of risk taking or maybe mistake making to make those-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… things happen, right? So it’s-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… remarkable that you’ve been able to cultivate that in such a large system with so much complexity, but also that you have built a culture where people know that they’re all a part of that.

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
So where did you learn that? I hear a lot about micromanaging, but there’s also a response that you’re doing when things don’t work out. What are you doing there that has cultivated that and that failure is as important as a measurement of success?

Gladys Velazquez:
To be honest, I think a lot of that comes from my own struggles and being told what to do, what not to do, and that’s what made me feel like I was not a part of a system. That is what facilitated that disconnect for me and school. So when I do anything, I want to encourage a connection. It is so important for me to help individuals, others to feel included and like they do have a seat at the table, and when they do come to the table to value their effort. It is important for me to really motivate them to continue to put in the effort and find that grit, bring that grit to the table, because this is not an easy job. It is long and exhausting, and they take time from other needs in their personal and work life. But as a team, we have to remind them that they’re not in it alone.
We’re going to come as a team and support each other. Every single advisor in the College and Career Center, for example, they have other responsibilities outside of FAFSA and college apps. We have one that serves as a liaison to the middle schools. We have another one that directly supports the CTE program on campus. Then we have another one who takes on more of the lead within that center, and he oversees just about every aspect of the college app and FAFSA. So we all work in waves, and we support each other. It’s important that they feel heard, valued. When they need a break, when they need to take a step back, I hear them and respect that because when they come back, I know they’re going to come back willingly and motivated to continue. I’m not sure if I really answered your question. I think I may have gone way off track.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
I think what is remarkable about you, Gladys, is you just started by saying, “I bring myself to work so others can bring theirs.” Through improvement science, we learn a lot about a process. That whole idea of leadership or team excellence or just even building this culture where people can try on new things and push against status quo-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… it requires an authenticity that will sustain. I know we’re running out of time, and I wanted to just highlight a couple of pieces that I think are really important that I think you’re sharing, which is, you created a name of the students you wanted to approach, and you came up with a plan to meet them. You had data-

Gladys Velazquez:
Yes.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… to make sure that that actually happened. You built a college-going-

Gladys Velazquez:
Right.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… culture that started in ninth grade and had touch points throughout, and you made everyone a part of that team. Are there other pieces about this improvement journey that you would say have been really critical to that success?

Gladys Velazquez:
I think celebrating each other, and when we have those student successes, those stories of they’ve achieved or they’ve met their goal or these particular individual students who have a story and have gone through a journey, making sure that our teams, that our staff also hear about that. Our staff also keep in touch with students, and they know so many more other individual stories, so creating opportunities to celebrate that. Because even if they don’t realize it as they’re doing the work, in hindsight, our hope is that in those celebrations they see how they had an impact in that particular journey. So when we come together giving them opportunities to share out.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Well, Gladys, you really are someone to celebrate, and I just want to honor not just the work of the young people, the work of that staff that you’ve supported, but the work that you’re doing now at the district is really significant. I just want to-

Gladys Velazquez:
Thank you.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
… take a second to celebrate you and knowing all those pieces, honoring those pieces for yourself and others and really creating the systems for students to succeed. The last question I have is there might be someone listening who relates to working at a big school like Warren. I guess I would just ask to that person listening, what is one step they could make in their journey to raise their FAFSA numbers, to raise that college-going culture that you’ve been able to do? What’s one step they could actually take?

Gladys Velazquez:
I would say have your team come together and identify what’s already working for them. As a leader, being willing to meet them where they are, continue from that point moving forward. It’s so important to acknowledge the work that’s already been done and to value the steps already taken to motivate them and allow them an opportunity to get creative and take those risks. As the leader, you become the facilitator, not their manager. So that autonomy and creativity to keep the motivation going, always reminding us that data analysis is critical because that’s where we’re going to find and really clearly identify what’s working and what’s not so that we can move forward with intention.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Yeah.

Alec Patton:
Thank you so much.

Garett Brownlee Plantz:
Well, thank you so much again for your time and your story and your success. We so appreciate you.

Gladys Velazquez:
Thank you so much for the opportunity to share. Warren High is definitely a very, very special place. I know every other site has its special traits, and I hope that they’re all valued and cherished because that’s how we find that motivation and family ambiance, right?

Alec Patton:
High Tech High Unboxed is hosted by me, Alec Patton. This episode was edited by Brent Spirnak. Huge thanks to Garet and Gladys for this conversation. Check out our show notes for more resources and stories about helping more kids get access to college. Thanks for listening.