At Elgin Community College (ECC), a number of students have justice records, and many are still juggling the mandates of that prior involvement while pursuing new careers. These students face myriad barriers, including scheduling conflicts, technology access, ineligibility for financial aid, lack of stable transportation, and lack of access to childcare. ECC seeks to explore the challenges faced by students who have lived experience with the criminal justice system and how to improve their experience at the college. College leaders seek to learn more about the barriers these students face and what types of support they need to succeed at ECC, as well as to develop professional development to ensure faculty and staff are well-equipped to serve this student population.
Our Role
Building from years of experience in driving and facilitating cross-agency alignment and policy development around college and career pathways, along with recent efforts to assist the Illinois Department of Corrections in better preparing justice-impacted individuals for life and gainful employment beyond incarceration, the EdSystems team applied its experience and knowledge of long-term system building efforts to support Elgin Community College as it seeks to better serve its students with experiences in the carceral justice system.
Beginning in 2023, EdSystems leveraged our systems orientation and expertise as well as stakeholder engagement processes to provide scoping and goal-setting support to ECC as they launched a task force to identify key strategies to meet the needs of this student population. Through focus groups and empathy interviews with key stakeholders, staff, and justice-impacted students, EdSystems gathered data to inform the creation of a framework for the task force to develop recommendations and programming for justice-impacted students. Through this work, in combination with desk research and sharing of state agency-level efforts, EdSystems documented guidance for the task force as it prioritized opportunities for supporting students, professional development for staff, community-based organization engagement, and developing a network of cooperating employers.
