Program Review
Executive Summary
Latino Center
Fall 2012
General Comments
The Latino Center is a counseling service dedicated to promoting and encouraging the
academic and personal growth of Latino students. The Center provides a wide variety of
support services, examples of which include tutoring, counseling, workshops, and a variety of
academic and cultural events. The Center has operated for nearly 30 years and
encompasses the Adelante Program, which is an academic and support program focusing on
academic achievement, cultural awareness and personal growth for the students it serves.
Students benefit from their participation in the Adelante Program in several ways: enrollment
in specially designated Adelante sections, networking opportunities with Latino students and
faculty, and eligibility for Latino scholarships.
Although the Latino Center and Adelante Program target Latino students, students of other
ethnicities are also served. In 2011, the Latino Center served 854 students and the Adelante
Program served 1,148 students. Of the students served by the Latino Center/Adelante
Program, 91% and 95% (respectively) of the students served were Latino/a. A majority (54%)
of the students are female. More than 90% of the students fall within the 19 (or younger) to
24 age group. The number of students who have an academic goal of transferring to a four
year institution has risen in recent years, including a 12.1% jump between Fall 2010 and Fall
2011. Students qualifying as AB540 (i.e., students who are undocumented individuals but
who graduated from a California High School and attended high school in California for three
or more years) are a growing segment of the students served by the Latino Center.
The Latino Center and Adelante program staff members are deeply committed to the students
they serve. They host numerous workshops for students as well as sponsoring the Latina/o
Youth Conference and involving families in the activities to ensure that students gain the
support of their parents, siblings and others outside of the college setting. The staff
collaborate with a variety of departments across campus and partner with many external
constituent groups to bring guest speakers to campus.
The report details how the program responded to the recommendations made during the last
six-year program review. Overall, the Center has responded to most of the recommendations
in a positive vein. The program did not respond to Recommendation 1 (Implementing a plan
to examine the impact of counseling courses on student success for Latino and African
American students) due to staffing shortages and the assertion that the task should be
addressed at the department level. The Center should be a major participant in this
evaluation as it is the primary student service focused on the needs of Latino/a students.
The number of Latino Center and/or Adelante students has more than doubled since the last
report but staffing has not. As a result, the program is currently at capacity and relies mainly
on word-of-mouth recruitment rather than actively seeking new student participants. However,
an imbalance of male students to female students exists and the Latino Center plans to
address this through focus groups, literature reviews and/or student surveys. It may be
advisable to reflect on the web site information as another way to recruit Latino males.
Latino Center counselors meet once a semester to engage in self-evaluation and determine
the programmatic improvements upon which they want to focus. The original set of SLOs,
developed in 2007, was revised in Spring 2012 in order to narrow the scope of the SLOs and
clarify the outcomes. Surveys administered in Spring 2012 show that students are meeting an
expected outcome: gaining an understanding of socio-economic issues that affect their
educational and personal development through attendance at Adelante workshops. The
Latino Center has developed three new objectives but these need refinement to reflect
measurable outcomes.
Commendations
The committee commends the Latino Center for:
1. Demonstrating a high level of commitment and passion for students served by the
program as documented by the impressive list of accomplishments.
2. Maintaining strong relationships and interactions with community agencies, other
institutions and college constituents. Specifically the committee commends the
program for its support of student clubs, sponsoring of workshops and the Latina/o
Youth Conference, and collaboration with other student services.
3. Using intrusive counseling as a model for helping its students achieve their academic
goals.
4. Including families in the provided services.
5. Increasing the number of students served and maintaining, among Adelante students,
persistence levels which are higher than the college rate.
6. Efforts to systematically use data to identify student needs, assess the program’s
effectiveness and to use those assessment data to improve program practices.
7. Improving the program’s web site in response to survey results and being aware of
accessibility issues with regard to web page design.
8. Developing specific student learning outcomes and the subsequent assessment of
those SLOs.
9. The breadth and variety of cultural activities and workshops provided by the program.
Recommendations for Program Strengthening
The committee recommends that the Latino Center and Adelante Program consider the
following to further strengthen the program:
1. Enhance the outreach and recruitment capability through the Center’s web presence
by working with the college’s Facilitator of Web Content and Digital Marketing to
increase the web site’s relevance, interactivity, and links to social media.
2. Examine how the college’s new drop policies will affect program participant course
completion rates.
3. Implement a plan to assess the impact of counseling courses on success rates of
students served by the Latino Center and Adelante programs.
4. Consider using graduates from the Adelante program as role models and/or
Supplemental Instruction leaders.
5. Participate in the development of the college’s recent GRIT initiative, capitalizing on the
expertise of Latino Center counselors with regard to intrusive counseling.
6. Continue efforts to address ways to improve the success of Latino students in remedial
mathematics courses.
7. Work with the Institutional Research Office to ensure that the Center’s annual
objectives are measureable and attainable.
Program Review Chair _____Mary
C. Colavito_________ 4/16/2013