MATH BRIDGE UPDATE: providing tools for postsecondary journeys

January 16, 2025

Nathan Savig teaching a Math Bridge prep course to students at Mariposa High School in the fall 2024 semester. These students are part of the 332 program enrollees who will take their first Math Bridge college class this spring at their respective high schools.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Since the Central Valley Math Bridge program was funded in late 2022 in partnership with the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium, the Rand Corporation and several community college members of the consortium with funding from the California K-16 Collaborative (Central – Fresno, Madera, Kings Counties; and We Will! – North Valley), its small but energetic College Bridge team has made headway into 18 high schools in the consortium’s 10-county region. The first Math Bridge cohort at 13 of those schools began in the fall with a prep course and now the 332 high school students enrolled in the program at those schools will be taking their first college course this spring (see list below). The other five schools will start in fall 2025. This update submitted by Audra Burwell, College Bridge communication coordinator, presents the program’s 2024 progress as it moves into 2025 with its first cohorts.

‘… facilitating meaningful discussions about

how math applies to the real world …’

As we step into spring 2025, College Bridge is making significant strides in expanding its Math Bridge project to reach more high school students across the Central Valley.

This innovative initiative aims to ease the transition from high school to college-level mathematics by offering a rigorous college-level math curriculum alongside the support of high school and college instructors. This collaboration is laying the foundation for academic success and providing students with the tools they need to succeed in their postsecondary journeys.

Across classrooms, high school math instructors are teaming up with college faculty who bring their credentials and college-level expertise to the learning environment. Together, they combine their knowledge and experience, brainstorming examples, solving problems, and facilitating meaningful discussions about how math applies to the real world.

In many classrooms, high school instructors are also dual-certified, holding credentials that allow them to teach at the college level. This professional development is often made possible through the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium’s (CVHEC) Master’s Upskilling Program, which equips educators with the tools and expertise to teach college-level material to high school students.

In 2024, thanks to the dedication of educators, counselors, and administrators, Math Bridge expanded its reach to serve 13 high schools across the Central Valley (see list below). But College Bridge isn’t stopping there—2025 marks a year of even greater growth. Five new schools will join the Math Bridge initiative, helping to expand the program’s impact across the region. Le Grand High School, El Capitan High School, Merced High School, Dos Palos High School, and Gustine High School will be the newest members of the Math Bridge network. These new partners will help ensure that even more students have access to the support they need to succeed in math, breaking down barriers to higher education.

This expansion is made possible thanks to the WE Will! K-16 Educational Collaborative grant, which helps provide additional resources for high school students preparing to enter college. The partnership between K-12 and higher education institutions is creating a more seamless transition for students into postsecondary education, and the inclusion of these new schools is expected to further enhance the success of the program.

Beyond Math Bridge, College Bridge remains committed to supporting students’ overall educational pathways. One of the key components of this broader support is the concurrently with the Math Bridge program.

CT Bridge is designed to provide students with the tools and information they need to succeed in their transition to college such as filling out applications; making their fall college schedule; accessing their college portal; understanding FAFSA and financial aid options; gaining career advice; and how to access college support services—all in just 10 hours of course material per year. By offering students insights into both academic and career pathways, CT Bridge is helping them prepare for success not just in their math courses, but in their future college and career endeavors.

As College Bridge continues to evolve and expand, the organization remains focused on ensuring that students have access to the resources and guidance they need to thrive. In the coming months, College Bridge will be hosting several Student Info Sessions to encourage high school students to apply for the Math Bridge program for the 2025/2026 school year. These sessions will provide students with a chance to learn more about the opportunities offered by Math Bridge and CT Bridge, as well as how they can benefit from these programs.

Additionally, College Bridge will continue hosting Planning and Strategy Sessions for Central Valley educators and counselors

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to move forward with these vital initiatives!

Math Bridge Cohorts 2024-2025

(Breakdown of 332 students currently enrolled in the Central Valley Math Bridge Program at 13 high schools,
listed by community college partners that are CVHEC members):

DELTA COLLEGE
Stagg: 24
Weber: 26

MERCED COLLEGE
Buhach Colony: 18
Atwater: 26
Golden Valley: 36
Livingston: 33
Mariposa: 34

REEDLEY COLLEGE
Dinuba (2 sections): 34
Orosi: 23
Sanger: 30
Sanger West: 11

TAFT COLLEGE
Taft: 12
Riverdale: 25

(Five additional high schools will onboard in the fall semester: Le Grand, El Capitan, Merced, Dos Palos and Gustine).

CVHEC Notes – 2025

January 16, 2025

CVHEC Notes (January 2025)

CVHEC office changes to Zoom telephone – new number

As of Jan. 1, the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium (CVHEC)

is transitioning to Zoom phone. Our main office number is now 559.278.0576.

Click here to add your own text

What the CV-HEC is Happening Blog – December 2024: Year-In-Review

December 18, 2024

CVHEC’s Mid-Year Review 2024

August 1, 2024

MATH BRIDGE UPDATE- April 2024

April 17, 2024

The road to Orosi, California typifies the rich rural areas of Central California where CVHEC and College Bridge are reaching
out to provide Math Bridge services that help prepare high school students for college. (Tom Uribes photo)

Math Bridge campaign identifies nearly

1,000 students for college-level math courses

BY DR. NICOLE KORGIE
Vice President of Operations – College Bridge

The Central Valley Math Bridge project is off and running as 13 committed high school partners with College Bridge and the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium are completing a student recruitment campaign that has identified nearly 1,000 students ready to take on college math and nearly half of those indicating their interest to participate.

The impact Math Bridge is having on education in the region is seen in one general characteristic of these students: they were likely NOT to have taken an advanced math course, or even math at all, in their senior year.

Now, as more high school students graduate with solid/advanced math skills though Math Bridge, more students will find success in college and career, filling vital local workforce needs.

The participating high schools stretching across the Valley’s nine-county region from Taft to Stockton are partnering with six community college members of CVHEC to offer the math dual enrollment courses at their respective campuses beginning next fall (student breakdown in parenthesis. The community colleges and their participating feeder schools are::

DELTA COLLEGE: Stagg High School, Weber Academy;

MERCED COLLEGE: Atwater High, Buhach Colony High School, Golden Valley High School, Livingston High School, Mariposa High School;

REEDLEY COLLEGE: Dinuba High School, Orosi High School, Sanger High School, Sanger West High School;

TAFT COLLEGE: Taft High School;

WEST HILLS COLLEGE LEMOORE: Riverdale High School.

The campaign: no longer running from math!

The nearly 1,000 Central Valley students from these high schools identified as great prospects to participate in Math Bridge have solid academic GPA’s — between 2.3 – 3.4 — but have struggled in high school math.

Beginning at Taft High School in January, the prospective students were presented with information about Math Bridge and the benefits of participating such as allowing these students to complete a college level math course before they graduate from high school.

While you may think that many if not all students who fear or dislike math would run screaming if presented with the opportunity to take a college level math course, you may now re-think that: of the nearly 1,000 students identified, NEARLY HALF completed a form AFFIRMING their interest in participating in Math Bridge. They expressed a desire to take on the challenge of college level math that the Math Bridge project provides the high school including extensive support to help students pass the course.

For the upcoming academic year, all Math Bridge partner sites will offer a statistics course though their local community college. Math Bridge will be working with the college faculty and high school math teacher at each site to ensure that appropriate support services are provided to the students in the course.

We are currently following up with the 500 students who completed the interest form in the recruitment sessions to ensure that they meet with their school counselor to confirm that Math Bridge is the correct option for them for senior year and their post-secondary goals.

To date, 230 students have signed up. And we’re not done yet as Dinuba and Stagg have yet to begin their student recruitment process so even more students will be given this opportunity by the time we provide a final enrollment number in a future update.

Prepping participant high schools for Math Bridge

As this student recruitment campaign wraps up this spring, we now move into the support phase for the educators from the high school participants with a special event May 3 in Fresno to help prepare teachers for the Math Bridge project’s launch in the fall semester.

On that day, College Bridge will host our Math Bridge Instructional Planning Meeting where college and high school math instructors and their support teams (math coaches, chairs, supporting faculty) will collaborate with our project team around the who, how, when, where and what for the Math Bridge courses to be taught in Academic Year 2024-2025.

Activities for the day will include reviewing curriculum, assessments and commonalities between college courses and any necessary local differences. We will also review the requirements for instructors to earn the project stipend as well as calendaring all future planning and collaboration times per college service area.

It is understandable that some feel the slight mention of math is enough to squash any conversation but the groundbreaking role these Central Valley high schools and their community college partners are taking on with College Bridge and CVHEC is a new level of excitement for educators seeking to arm their students for a successful higher education experience.

BACKGROUND: College Bridge’s mission is to identify and eliminate barriers that prevent underrepresented students from progressing to and through college specifically focusing on Black, Latino, low-income and rural students. One of its two objectives is to expand strategic dual enrollment partnerships to serve low-income, rural and Latino students in California’s Central Valley. In December 2022, College Bridge was awarded a five-year $4 million US Department of Education grant for the Dual Enrollment Math Bridge Project so six CVHEC community colleges could provide college-level math classes that will improve and support college readiness for underprepared students in the colleges’ respective service areas. In April 2023, the project received a $1,075,340 award from the California Regional K-16 Education Collaboratives Grant Program through two Central Valley K-16 programs – the Fresno-Madera K-16 Collaborative and the Tulare-Kings College & Career Collaborative. Then in December 2023, a $2,196,928 federal grant was awarded for expansion of the College Transition Bridge project that, among other features, will advance collaboration with CVHEC’s Central Valley Transfer Project and its college course-planning software, Program Pathway Mapper, as well as with consortium member colleges.

What the CV-HEC Is Happening Blog: Math Bridge Update

February 23, 2024

UPDATE: Math Bridge Program eyes productive 2024

January 18, 2024

What the CV-HEC Is Happening Blog: Math Bridge Update

November 3, 2023

This month’s “What The CV-HEC Is Happening” guest blog is an update of the Math Bridge program presented by Owynn Lancaster, vice president for Academic Strategy with College Bridge, a California non-profit based in Los Angeles County dedicated to forging a path towards both college access and success for underrepresented students. College Bridge is a partner with the Central Valley Higher Education Consortium in the innovative program designed to improve math outcomes for struggling 11th and 12th graders and streamline Math pathways into college. Funded by a five-year $4 million grant through the US Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program in January, this ambitious endeavor was kicked off in May with a convening of more than 150 valley K-16 educators in Fresno to begin the onboarding process for this historic intersegmental collaboration between CVHEC member community colleges and high schools in their respective service areas. That initiative was followed in April with a $1.1 million state grant to CVHEC/College Bridge partnership through the Central San Joaquin Valley K-16 Partnership creating the Dual Enrollment (DE) Math Bridge that will provide equitable access to transfer-level math courses with embedded support for high school students who are disproportionately impacted, and/or are not traditionally college-bound. This fall, the College Bridge and CVHEC Math Bridge teams have been visiting campuses to continue the onboard process in preparation for the program’s launch next fall.

Expanding the Reach of the

Central Valley Math Bridge

BY OWYNN LANCASTER
College Bridge

After our successful College Orientation meetings in September, the College Bridge team has been darting up and down the San Joaquin Valley, meeting with interested feeder highs schools to onboard and launch them for the coming academic year’s CV Math Bridge Project.

Inspiring our efforts, two amazing CVHEC member colleges have “jumped to lead the pack” as Dr. Lynn Cevallos, our College Bridge president, often says. The first of those with an impressing showing come from Merced College where their team has helped us garner interest from seven possible high schools! Showing the region’s commitment to opening options for their students in math and the impressive connecting power of the college’s administration.

In equally exciting efforts, San Joaquin Delta College helped to secure two committed high school partners from Stockton Unified, with interest from others in their region. Those two Stockton schools, Amos Alonzo Stagg High School and Captain Charles M. Weber of Applied Science and Technology have been two of the smoothest schools to onboard so far! More importantly addition of these schools and the partnership with Delta College now helps us open the CV Math Bridge Project across the breadth of the Valley.

With schools as far north as Stagg High School and as far south as Taft Union High School the reach of this project is now slightly smaller than the state of South Carolina! This means several more flights and drives are still ahead for our College Bridge team to continue to onboard and launch these high school partners, but in the end, we are excited by this transformative work.

The CV Math Bridge’s first cohort of schools will be starting in the coming academic year, 2024-2025, and there’s still room for more in the second cohort starting in academic year, 2025-2026. We invite high schools interested in participating to reach out and contact me at Owynn.Lancaster@college-bridge.org.

Also see: https://bit.ly/CVHECblog1223-GiftOfMath

MEMBER NEWS: Reedley and Merced Colleges host Math Bridge orientation for feeder high schools

October 10, 2023

Reedley College President Jerry Buckley addresses math officials from feeder high schools Sept. 21. Earlier in the day, his counterpart at Merced College, President Chris Vitelli, addressed his north valley districts. Both are CVHEC board members.

Central Valley Higher Education Consortium members Merced and Reedley community colleges hosted high school math educators and administrators from their respective service area schools Sept. 21 for an orientation and onboarding about the Central Valley Math Bridge Program that is now in full swing.

In a morning, session, Merced College hosted about 30 math officials from its service area feeder school districts who were welcomed by President Chris Vitelli. At the afternoon session in Reedley 30 were welcomed by President Jerry Buckley.

They met with the CVHEC and College Bridge teams led by Dr. Benjamín Durán, CVHEC executive director, and Dr. Lynn Cevallos, president and cofounder, of College Bridge to discuss how the program could benefit their students and follow up steps.

“We wanted to bring all the feeder high school leaders for Merced College and Reedley together to create a Math Bridge cohort of high schools involved in the project and create a regional community of practice for networking and collaboration,” Cevallos said.

She said interactions with participating high schools has been positive and supportive, “focusing on opening up options for their students and helping them to strengthen their connection between their college and feeder middle schools.”

Among several program features, the educators learned that this funding opportunity earmarked for the Central Valley specifically, will bring $160,000 in services per high school at no cost to districts.

Funded by a five-year $4 million grant through the US Department of Education’s Education Innovation and Research (EIR) Program, the ambitious endeavor was kicked off in May with a convening of more than 150 valley K-16 educators in Fresno to begin the onboarding process for this historic intersegmental collaboration designed to improve math outcomes for struggling 11th and 12th graders and streamline Math pathways into college for their students.

See: