Special Populations

Supporting the success of special populations is a core expectation of the Perkins V legislation and a central focus of Minnesota’s Career and Technical Education mission. Postsecondary institutions play a critical role in ensuring that learners from these groups have equitable access to high-quality career pathways, informed transition planning, and the academic and technical supports needed to complete their programs and achieve meaningful employment.

This section leads to the Postsecondary Transitions Handbook and provides guidance, tools, and recommended practices for identifying the needs of special populations, implementing evidence-based supports, and strengthening collaboration across secondary, postsecondary, and workforce partners to improve learner outcomes.

Postsecondary Transitions Guide Website

Advance CTE: Making Good on the Promise

The four-part Making Good on the Promise series from Advance CTE examines how Career and Technical Education leaders can identify and address inequities in access, participation, and outcomes. The series begins by exploring CTE’s historical equity challenges and the barriers that continue to affect learners. It then explains how disaggregated data can be used to identify access and achievement gaps and examine their root causes. The third brief focuses on rebuilding trust with learners, families, and communities that have not been served equitably by CTE. The final brief offers strategies for removing financial, geographic, institutional, and other barriers that limit access to high-quality CTE programs of study.

  • Understanding the Equity Challenge in CTE — Examines CTE’s history, the continuing effects of tracking and bias, and the need to ensure every learner can access high-quality programs.
  • Examining Access and Achievement Gaps — Shows how leaders can use disaggregated data, transparency, and root-cause analysis to identify and address inequities.
  • Building Trust to Promote Equity in CTE — Provides strategies for acknowledging past inequities, engaging communities, strengthening transparency, and building support for equitable CTE.
  • Expanding Access to Opportunity — Identifies common barriers to participation and highlights approaches for improving access to high-quality CTE programs.
  • — Examines barriers that English learners may face in accessing and succeeding in CTE, including impersonal curricula and assessments, competing work and family demands, and limited opportunities to elevate learner voices and outcomes. The resource also offers strategies for improving instruction, wraparound support, data collection, and engagement through the CLNA process.

Applying an Equity Lens to Your CLNA Process

The comprehensive local needs assessment helps consortium CTE leaders identify, understand, and prioritize their needs and strategies to improve student performance and program quality. The results from the CLNA, when done effectively, can provide meaningful information and be a catalyst for transformative systems change. A successful needs assessment leads to actionable priorities and meaningful, long-term change.

This creates an incredible opportunity to:

  • Better help all students achieve career success.
  • Align the Perkins budget with priorities and ensure programs are aligned with and validated by local and regional workforce needs and economic priorities.
  • Ensure that consortium programs are serving all learners equitably and enable consortia to better direct resources toward programs that lead to high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand occupations and activities that address equity and opportunity gaps.

It is critical to apply an equity lens to community engagement efforts to ensure that the communities most impacted are included in the development and information-gathering processes rather than only reacting to questions and data presented to them.

This requires active, meaningful engagement of those communities in a process to examine, identify, and diagnose challenges that must be addressed for meaningful change to occur. Communities are defined as the internal and external groups most impacted by the CLNA process and the implementation of CTE.

Equity Guiding Principles for the CLNA Process

The CLNA process can provide a roadmap for identifying inequities that affect the participation of marginalized communities in CTE programs. These barriers can exist at the institutional, district, or systems level. Applying these principles can help uncover meaningful findings and potential actions that address persistent barriers and inequities in CTE programs.

The National Alliance for Partnerships in Equity, or NAPE, offers three guiding principles for an effective and equitable needs assessment process.

Asset Orientation

Learners most impacted by the CLNA and the implementation of CTE programs have valuable knowledge to contribute about their experiences, perspectives, and abilities.

Grounded Action

Learners experiencing depressed outcomes are influential in describing problems in CTE programs and challenges in their educational experiences. Their shared experiences can provide rich data about inequities in current policies and practices, along with diverse solutions for addressing those inequities.

Systems Are Not Neutral

Systemic bias exists within policies and practices that may be implemented without awareness or acknowledgment of harm, particularly to marginalized communities. Accountability includes reviewing the historical context that contributes to persistent patterns and challenges highlighted by disaggregated data.

Additional information: Review NAPE’s .

Perkins V Special Populations for Reporting: Data Sources

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August 23, 2019

Special populations and identified source of data for postsecondary reporting
Special Population Identified Source of Data for Postsecondary Reporting
Individuals with disabilities ISRS.PS_DISAB_DEMO (permanent disability indicated/not denied that overlaps the cohort timeframe).
Individuals from economically disadvantaged families, including low-income youth and adults Includes students who were Pell-Eligible and/or were recipients of Pell, BIA, or SEOG (Fed Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant) financial aid awards during the cohort timeframe.
Individuals preparing for non-traditional fields Include students who, in the cohort data, have a first major and/or award listed that is Perkins eligible and nontraditional AND the individual earned more than zero cumulative college level credits AND the individual’s gender is the same as the program’s nontraditional gender.
Single parents, including single pregnant women Include student if Accuplacer item #27 or FAFSA are indicative (marital status indicates single or divorced/widowed AND FAFSA item #51 indicates the individual has or will have children who will receive more than half of their support from them for the next year).
Out-of-workforce individuals Include student if Accuplacer item #28 or FAFSA are indicative (marital status indicates single or divorced/widowed AND FAFSA item #102 indicates individual or spouse are dislocated workers).
English learners Include student if is enrolled in an ESL course during the cohort timeframe OR Accuplacer items #20 and/or #21 indicate another language was learned first or another language is spoken most often at home AND individual is enrolled in a developmental reading or writing course during the cohort timeframe OR cohort code 5000 (limited English) is applied to the student’s record with dates overlapping the cohort timeframe.
(New for postsecondary) Homeless individuals described in section 725 of the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act (42 U.S.C. 11434a) Applies only to YOUTH enrolled during the cohort timeframe. If the individual is a youth and FAFSA items #56, 57 or 58 indicate the individual is/was homeless or at risk of being homeless, include.
(New for all) Youth who are in, or have aged out of, the foster care system Applies only to YOUTH enrolled during the cohort timeframe. If the individual is a youth and FAFSA item #53 indicates the individual’s parents are both deceased and individual was in foster care or was a dependent or ward of the court, include.
(New for all) Youth with a parent who –
i. Is a member of the armed forces (as such term is defined in section 101(a)(4) of title 10, United States Code); and
ii. Is on active duty (as such term is defined in section 101(d)(1) of such title)		 No identified source. Most financial aid awards or related questions only identify if the person is a spouse or dependent of someone in the active military or is himself/herself in the active military or a veteran. There is not enough detail in our data sources to identify individuals who are YOUTH and the child of someone who is currently a member of the armed forces and on active duty.
(New for postsecondary) Migrant students No identified source. The definition in ESEA refers to children who are or who have parents who are migratory workers and have moved from one school district to another or moved within a single district from one administrative area to another, etc. This is not information collected in a standard way for postsecondary students.

Youth = individuals not younger than 14 and not older than 24 (state-defined)

System Research, Academic and Student Affairs