NYSERDA 2nd Quarterly Report Stacks+Joules

NYSERDA Energy Efficiency and Clean Technology Workforce Training

Quarterly Report

Report for Period  January 1 to March 31 – Report due April 15

New Collar Careers in Building Automation

This report is presented in two parts, split by the closure of schools and the institution of the stay-at-home order:

·      January 1st to March 15th
·      March 16th to present

January 1st to March 15th

NYSERDA supported activities continued with the three original cohorts at two partner schools (Urban Assembly Maker Academy (UA Maker) & South Bronx Community Charter High School (SBC)), and expanded with the January launch of the all-girls cohort in collaboration with City As School and Lower Eastside Girls Club.

From October 30, 2019 through March 15, 2020 the three original cohorts had completed all modules of Component 1; had engaged in Component 2: Strands 1, 2, 3, & 4; and had completed Component 3: Modules 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5.

Urban Assembly Maker Academy

UA Maker is hosting two cohorts totaling 36 students.

Cohort 1 with 22 students meets on Wednesdays from 1:00-4:00. The first hour is during the school day and is co-facilitated with the school’s computer science teacher as part of her regular Physical Computing class. The last 2 hours are after school and therefore participation is voluntary. Cohort 1 maintained 87% attendance up to March 15, a slight increase compared to the first quarter.

Cohort 2 with 14 students meets on Wednesday from 2:30-5:30. All three hours are after school with all students participating voluntarily. Cohort 2 has maintained 81% attendance, which is also an increase compared to the first quarter.

According to informal surveys, students attribute their increased attendance to excitement and sense of purpose coming after the event when they presented on their lighting audit, and to the engaging, hands-on approach of Tauris Tech.

Of special significance: 34 of 36 (94%) students passed the Lighting Controls Association Introduction to Lighting Controls Certificate exam.

UA Maker Work-based Learning Activities:

Industry Mentor Thomas Quinn of Venco Sales has now volunteered over 250 hours with both UA Maker cohorts, participating in almost all classes and activities and providing personalized coaching on leadership, resume development, and other professional skills.

Tauris McBride and his team from Tauris trained both cohorts for over 15 hours each. Students learned the refrigeration cycle by disassembling small window unit AC’s and then putting them back together. They toured their school’s mechanical rooms to learn about the steam systems used in the building under the guidance of Tauris Tech and the school’s Facilities personnel. Students were just beginning an intense focus on preparing for the EPA 608 certification exam when school was canceled.

The CTE internship, paid to each participant at $15 per hour, continued up through the second week of March.

South Bronx Community Charter High School

SBC is hosting one cohort of 13 students.

A major positive shift for this cohort was that their Monday meeting times changed from 2:30-5:30 to start an hour earlier, from 1:30 – 4:30. This brought the first hour of the meeting to within the school day and SBC’s internship coordinator was assigned to support the class for that first hour. Attendance improved significantly to 88%! This is clearly the most effective model and will become a standard requirement for collaborating with schools.

Of special significance: 8 of 13 (62%) students passed the Lighting Controls Association Introduction to Lighting Controls Certificate exam.

SBC Work-based Learning Activities:

Dual Fuel Corp continued to support the student intern with eight hours per week at $15 per hour in addition to the three-hour Stacks+Joules sessions. With support from Stacks+Joules trainers, the student intern was leading short workshops during class to train the rest of the students in the work he was performing for Dual Fuel, towards the intent of having 2 more students join the internship.

Tauris McBride and his team from Tauris trained the SBC cohort for over 15 hours. Students learned the refrigeration cycle by disassembling small window unit AC’s and then putting them back together. These students were in the process of being introduced to the air handling unit in their building and had made it as far examining classrooms and other spaces to identify in-take and exhaust vents, heating & cooling zones, and important features such as presence of windows and heat generating equipment such as computers, projectors, etc. A tour of the school’s mechanical room had been scheduled for March 9th, however it was canceled during the lead up to school cancelation.

Things were really looking up for SBC.

Girls Club / City As School

This program launched on January 28th, supporting an incredible group of 12 young women. The program met twice weekly, on Tuesdays from 11:30 – 3:30 and Thursdays from 11:30 to 1:30. All of the girls are seniors at City As School, a public alternative high school located in lower Manhattan. The first week met at the school and then shifted to meeting at the Lower Eastside Girls Club. The entire program is run as part of the girls’ regular school program. City As School is specially designed to support internship placements during the school day.

Attendance through March 15th was maintained at 91%. Additionally, we instituted a mandatory make-up policy, so any time a student missed a class they had to arrange for extra 1-on-1 support to get caught up.

Up to March 15th this cohort completed Component 1: Modules 1-5 and engaged in Component 2: Strands 1-3. They had completed all but one computer programming module and had just begun to work on the lighting audit of the Girls Club facility.

Of special significance: 10 of 12 (83%) students passed the Lighting Controls Association Introduction to Lighting Controls Certificate exam.

Girls Club Work-based Learning Activities:

RAB Lighting’s Ravi Parikh, Business Development Manager, and Davis Rothenberg, Product Marketing Manager volunteered for a combined total of approximately 22 hours, including career and company overviews, advanced lighting controls technical demonstrations and workshops, and an introduction to lighting auditing by identifying and taking inventory of lighting in one floor of the Girls Club facility. The full audit, under the continued mentorship of Ravi and Davis, was scheduled to be completed during the 3rd week of March.

March 16th to May 15th

Starting the week before and extending into the first week of school cancelation, we made sure that each student had access to a laptop and internet at home. All students from UA Maker and SBC were issued either a laptop or Chrome Book by their school, and those that needed it were issued wifi hotspots. Our students in the Girls Club/City As School cohort needed PC laptops and lighting controls training kits that they could take home. With generous extra support from a number of individuals, we were able to provide each student with the technology needed to continue the Stacks+Joules training remotely. In a number of cases we delivered the laptops and training kits directly to students at their homes.

All three schools canceled classes and programs during the first week of remote learning in order to give teachers and students time to adjust. In addition to getting supplies to students, we spent the week selecting and training ourselves on Zoom for our remote learning platform and retooling the curricula for EPA 608 prep and closing out the lighting controls. We also worked closely with our school partners to be sure we had multiple ways to contact each student, including school email, personal email, mobile phone, and parent/guardian email & phone number.

During the second week after school closings we kept to the regularly scheduled meeting times and just shifted them to Zoom. We had good participation from each cohort and any students that did not attend were directly contacted. Turned out this was not the best move. Every teacher and school program was doing the same, resulting in a flood of communication that overwhelmed the students, parents, and other teachers alike.

After the second week things began to differentiate for each cohort.

SBC

On the third Monday after school closure, we had no students join the Zoom session. In following up with the school we learned that they had completely changed the schedule. Most significantly, they had decided that they needed to focus only on core subjects and the social/emotional health of their students. They eliminated all extra programs and waived the internship requirement for seniors. They gave us permission to continue our program after school but could not continue to offer any support.

We contacted all students and 8 of 13 expressed that they wanted to continue. We had to schedule the class at 4:00 as regular school went to 3:30. The next week all 8 participated as we began digging into preparing for the EPA 608 test. The following week only 5 showed up. After that, despite intensive outreach, attendance waivered to around 4 with only 2 students regularly participating.

We have continued to work with the 2 students, both of whom were making excellent progress on practice tests. We had scheduled for them to take the test last week. That was cancelled due the high levels of stress in the Bronx community as protests erupted.

While we will continue to do everything that we can to maintain contact and the progress of these 2 students, reengaging them without the support of the larger school community is proving to be a huge challenge.

UA Maker

The UA Maker Stacks+Joules program has persevered. While it has been a challenge requiring intensive and continuous outreach, we have managed to maintain regular, consistent contact with 26 of the 36 and limited contact with another 4.

Initially, attendance during the weekly zoom sessions for each cohort was sporadic. The entirely after school cohort suffered the worst drop as students struggled with the transition to remote learning in general as well as with the stress and fear of the pandemic. Home environments for many of our students are clearly not ideal for remote learning. With whole families cooped up in small apartments the background noise and constant distractions slowed the pace of learning for even our most consistent students. Sometimes we could hear several siblings trying to do video meetings with classes all in the same room. Wifi signals were also stretched, leading to the frustration of frozen screens, computers shutting down unexpectedly, and software running incredibly slow. Illness also started to take its toll. First, we had several students who reported that they couldn’t participate because they had a sick parent and had to take care of younger siblings. Then we had sick students. And then we started to learn of the stress of parents who had lost their jobs. Additionally, on our own team, Jon Spooner suffered the terrible loss of both grandparents in the span of less than a week. We were deep into it, and it was a struggle.

Spring break, while officially called off by the mayor due to the loss of the week of school when they first closed, was used by UA Maker to slow down and take stock. Gratefully, they included us in their reflection and replanning process. In fact, they have come to consider the Stacks+Joules program as the capstone of their computer science pathway and worked with us to develop a new schedule and structure to best support the struggling students. It was decided by the school and the incredible computer science teacher that we had been working with throughout the year, to make our curriculum the full focus of the class, rather than just the one day each week. We also decided to combine the two cohorts so that they would all “meet” together twice each week so that we could give added attention and support. Therefore, the students who had been in the after school only cohort had their schedules adjusted to be able to participate during the school day. Lastly, we decided to pull back from the intense test prep that was turning students off due to increased stress. We did a push to contact our industry partners and lined up guest speakers as a way to offer virtual work-based learning, and to send a positive message to the students that there are still many adults who care and that there is still a positive future on the horizon. All of these changes begun to show positive results as we entered the last weeks of April.

Industry Partner visitors:
Ravi Parihk, Business Development Manager, RAB Lighting
Samilys Rodriguez, Small Business, Diversity & Inclusion Program Manager, NORESCO
Derek Christian, Energy Engineer, NORESCO
Annmarie Bhola, CEO, Enhanced Building Solutions
Michael Stabile, Director of IoT Sales, Tridium
Kelly Westby, Commissioning Director, Steven Winter Associates

In between visitors and with the continued support of Tauris Tech, students took to studying and doing practice tests in preparation for the EPA 608 test. The added incentive of the stipend for passing was a big draw. To date 16 UA Maker students have passed all four sections, thereby earning the Universal EPA 608 certification. They have two more weeks to work on it, and we anticipate having several more pass.

Girls Club/City As School

The Girls Club program has maintained a high level of engagement and enthusiasm. There was an initial scare similar to what happened with SBC. City As School did in fact cancel their internship programs and waived the requirement for seniors. However, the girls in the program were not having that. Unknown to us, and certainly unsolicited, a number of the girls wrote to their principal with appeals to be able to continue the program as a part of their academic plan, as had been the case pre-Covid. Here are a few quotes, which their teacher forwarded to us:

“I am in the stacks and joules coding internship with Kendra and it is honestly the best internship I’ve taken all year. I really want to be able to continue it in someway because I was really excited about getting certified and potentially gaining a job after graduation from it. I know that John the head of the internship said that we can potentially take the lights home to work on them there. I feel like if we did that we would get the most learning and would be much better than just having to do written work. I am dyslexic and a very hands-on learner and I know writing and doing research is not the best way that I learned so I strongly believe that if I want to get the best learning out of this internship and being home is if we are able to do some sort of project with the lights from home if that is possible.”

“I know we are going through something really crazy and everything has escalated but I’m highly upset because it’s setting us back also to a lot of kids who are as close to graduating not in June but like next month not only do we need the 2 certification For stack and joules but we need to acquire as much information as possible. Also we need these jobs”

And then this plea from the teacher to the girls:

“Admin is being inundated with emails right now and you're way too fast. She asked me to tell you girls to stop emailing...for now. Wait until tomorrow or Thursday. Official school begins next Monday anyway.”

We are so incredibly honored to have them value the work that we began together.

Needless to say, Admin relented and allowed Stacks+Joules to continue – the only internship to be allowed this status. These girls are amazing.

In the first weeks there were similar tech challenges especially with remotely presenting their light shows. And just as we were all getting things figured out parents started getting sick, and then several students, and the stress and uncertainty mounted. Again, having the direct support of an incredible teacher at the school was invaluable. All three of us used every form of communication available to stay in touch with and motivate each of the girls to continue their efforts. But it did slow down the pace of instruction significantly. It took until the end of April to finish all of the light shows and presentations.

8 of the original 12 students completed all requirements needed to earn the $100 Lighting Controls stipend. This included completing all modules of the coding and controls curriculum, passing that LCA certificate test, presenting a light show and explaining the code, and completing a written personal statement for a LinkedIn profile.

It should be noted that 2 of the original 12 graduated just before spring break and therefore discontinued the program. City As School is an alternative high school so students graduate as soon as they finish all requirements.

The other 2 students that did not complete all requirements of the lighting unit dropped the program for other reasons.

Moving into the HVAC/EPA 608 component required major retooling. Tauris Tech provided curriculum materials and a virtual simulation of a small AC unit and the recovery process. We also enlisted the support of Annmarie Bhola of Enhanced Building Solutions to lead a session on the refrigeration cycle. Derek Christian of NORESCO contributed his engineering expertise and introduced the students to working drawings of air handling units as designed for a school. While there is no substitute for hands on experience, the girls have demonstrated strong theoretical understanding of the systems and a number of the key components.

In between guest instructors we worked on preparing for the EPA 608 certification test. So far 7 have passed all sections and therefore have earned the Universal EPA 608 Refrigerant Handling Certification.

Major Impacts

·       Participation is down to 36 (26 from UA Maker, 8 from Girls Club, 2 from SBC)

·       23 EPA 608 Certifications, significantly below original expectations

·       Have yet to start Niagara integration framework training. With just 2 weeks of school left, this will require an extension

·       Summer internships with industry partners on hold or canceled. Depending on how reopening goes, there is still possibility for August internships

·       Have yet to hire a facilitator-in-training – we had a candidate and were preparing an offer when Covid hit

Request for NYSERDA Assistance

·       Concentrate the Niagara integration framework training into an 80 hour intensive summer workshop/internship. We propose a schedule of five weeks, four days per week, four hours per day, with 2 hours of team video conferencing for lessons and 2 hours for individual and one-on-one support sessions to complete activities or engage with industry partners either remotely or in person if doing so can be safely accomplished. We propose to pay participants $15 per hour for a total of $1200 (this would require a budget adjustment approval). This would be eligible only to students who have earned the LCA Lighting Controls certificate and EPA 608 certification. While that currently stands at 22 eligible students, we anticipate more becoming eligible in the next two weeks, but also already know of a number that will not be able to participate due to other commitments. 20 is a likely number, which is significantly below original expectations.

·       Training additional facilitators is essential for program expansion, which we still intend to accomplish. We already have four additional schools interested in launching programs next year. Therefore, we propose to hire and train two facilitators, keeping the same total hours constant by having each for 820 hours. This would require a budget adjustment approval and an extension through the end of November.