TOME — Sometimes, you need to be the person you needed when you were young.
That is how Veronica Salcido, the projector director of PASOS at the University of New Mexico-Valencia campus approaches her job and what drives her to reach back to help students find their way forward.
PASOS — Pathways to Articulation and Sustainable Opportunities for Students — may sound complicated, but when you translate the word from Spanish to English, it simply means “steps.”
“Articulation is being able to describe the pathway, the long-term sustainability for students and their families,” Salcido says. “You can articulate a degree path.”
Funded by a five-year, $2.7 million Title V grant from the U.S. Department of Education available for Developing Hispanic-Serving Institutions such as UNM-Valencia, the PASOS mission is to bring about intensive, organizational structure change, the director said, which will result in higher rates of graduation and transfer for Hispanic and/or low-income student.
The PASOS grant serves all UNM-Valencia students. As a Hispanic-serving institution, this specialized grant is strategically targeted to increasing the enrollment, retention, persistence, graduation and transfer of Hispanic and/or low-income students.
Julia M. Dendinger | News-Bulletin photo
To help meet students’ non-academic needs, the resource hub in the University of New Mexico-Valencia campus’s learning resource center provides quick and easy meals for students who might not have regular access to food. Veronica Salcido, the project director of PASOS — the grant funded program that established the open concept kitchen in the hub — says the program can help all students find their place in the university system.
“The guided pathways model is part of this and one of the goals is to implement a culturally responsive guided pathway model,” she said. “It’s a national trend that is looking at redesigning community colleges. A lot of times, historically, in a community college you kind of have a cafeteria plan — I’m going to take this, I’m going to take that — but what this does, the guided pathways model, is it streamlines the process.”
Guided pathways provides a structured pathway for students to obtain a degree and research on the model at community colleges indicates that students are more likely to complete a degree in a timely fashion if they choose a program and develop an academic plan early on.
PASOS has five objectives to get students on the right pathway forward, ready to begin a career and enter the workforce.
The first is to get students ready to enter the classroom, knowing what the steps are to work through the program of their choice by streamlining course selection for degree completion.
“The second is really the organizational structure kind of change, where we are changing to meet the needs of the student. What is happening in the classroom? What are we looking at for retention?”
The third goal of the program is to have a centrally-located resource hub on campus to support students with their non-academic needs.
The UNM-Valencia resource hub is in the campus’ learning resource center, and it offers services to students ranging from tutoring and career planning to food and toiletries.
“We aren’t a social service agency, but if you’re meeting the needs of the students, that’s retention, right,” Salcido said. “We’re all working towards the same goal on campus.”
Other non-academic needs the resource hub meets include mental health resources, and connections to housing resources and health care services.
This is the second year of the grant, Salcido said, and one of program’s next goals is to redesign the campus advisement process to incorporate more of a coaching approach.
The fourth goal in the program is to staff the resource center to help students who are “stopped out.”
“These are students who have had a break in their education. They have some college, but then something in life happened and they stopped classes,” she said. “This is very timely because during COVID, people started to re-examine things, asking ‘What do I want to do? What is my meaning?’ Things got very existential during COVID. A lot of people are trying to figure out what’s going on.”
To help those students who may have hit a stop in their educational journey, PASOS works with the ILEAD program — Integrating Lived Experiences with Academic Dreams — which helps students with re-enrollment in classes and realignment of their professional and academic goals.
“The original name of ILEAD was Return to Success, but staff felt like that wasn’t a good fit because you can be successful without a college degree,” Salcido said. “We have a peer mentor for that program, someone who has had a break in their education and has that shared experience.”
The final goal is focused on professional development, she said, looking at how faculty members are connecting with students.
“We’re building a community to embrace, to receive our students. One of the main things students are looking for is a sense of belonging, a sense that they belong here.
“A big part of the resource center is about normalizing that life happens and students still belong here.”
Julia M. Dendinger began working at the VCNB in 2006. She covers Valencia County government, Belen Consolidated Schools and the village of Bosque Farms. She is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists Rio Grande chapter’s board of directors.
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April 19, 2024
