Fifteen community colleges have been awarded $100,000 grants from the Walmart Foundation to support faculty and staff engagement strategies aimed at improving student completion rates, Achieving the Dream (ATD) announced this week.

The Walmart PRESS (Persistence, Retention and Student Success) for Completion grant program is aimed at enhancing reform efforts among ATD Leader Colleges to ensure that more students have a better chance of obtaining a market-valued credential.

The following Leader Colleges received grants:
•    Arkansas—Pulaski Technical College
•    Florida—Valencia College, Tallahassee Community College
•    Massachusetts—Northern Essex Community College, Roxbury Community College
•    North Carolina—Durham Technical Community College (DTCC), Guilford Technical Community College
•    Ohio—Cuyahoga Community College
•    Pennsylvania—Community College of Beaver County, Northampton Community College
•    South Carolina—Aiken Technical College, Orangeburg-Calhoun Technical College
•    Texas—Alamo Colleges, Brazosport College
•    Washington—Yakima Valley Community College

Those colleges are among the 50 ATD Leader Colleges that have made a commitment to student-centered, evidence-based reforms.

Colleges awarded Walmart PRESS for Completion grants will receive technical assistance and support from ATD over a 27-month period. In addition, they each have agreed to serve as a peer coach and be active in the learning community among the more than 175 colleges in the larger ATD National Reform Network.

As an example of what the grant program is expected to accomplish, DTCC's grant proposal calls for the college to:
•    Hold PRESS for Completion convocations, which will foster “courageous conversations about quantitative and qualitative course completion data.”
•    Form PRESS for Completion teams to investigate student success data for 12 high-risk courses (courses in which student completion is particularly low and failure rates are particularly high, courses with high attendance, and “gatekeeper” courses that prepare students for higher-level coursework).
•    Conduct PRESS for Completion workshops that will be open to all faculty and staff.
•    Employ student and social media ambassadors to engage students in the PRESS for Completion work on campus.

“Achieving the Dream has helped us make tremendous differences in the lives of our students since 2005,” said DTCC President William Ingram. “Our data continues to confirm that we are seeing significant advances in student success, including gains in first-to-second semester persistence, narrowing of the persistence gap for minority men, and graduating students in higher numbers than ever.” The Walmart PRESS for Completion grant program in partnership with ADT “will enable us to expand and deepen our institutional reform efforts.”