District One of Two Nationwide Awarded for Dramatic Improvements in Student Success

The Alamo Colleges District is one of only two community colleges in the nation to receive the 2020 Leah Meyer Austin Award from Achieving the Dream (ATD). This national recognition is given annually to a college or colleges in the ATD network that show measurable improvement in student outcomes driven by top-to-bottom cultural change in the institution.

“To be selected as a Leah Meyer Austin Award winner, a college must have the commitment to make big, bold changes throughout the institution,” said Dr. Karen A. Stout, president and CEO of Achieving the Dream. “Alamo Colleges has the courage to make those changes in everything that impacts the ability of their student to be successful.”

“The Alamo Colleges District Board of Trustees drew ideas from ATD’s best practices and principles and the institutional capacity areas, on which it modeled its strategic framework for measuring progress on student success,” said Alamo Colleges District Board of Trustees Chair Marcelo Casillas. “Today, focused innovations have yielded increases in student completion overall and in equity for our most vulnerable populations,” he added.

“At the Alamo Colleges District, we are increasingly focused on economic and social mobility because we know that a college credential provides a ticket to the American middle class,” said Alamo Colleges District Chancellor Dr. Mike Flores. “We use discovery, incubation and acceleration to build proof-of-concept at one college, then develop it and bring it to scale at another,” he added.
 

Read more via Alamo Colleges District News.