JOB SUMMARY:Â The Student Success Center (SSC) is a youth and adult-staffed college and career access center that offers services on college awareness, college preparation, and individual college counseling. The goal of the SSC is to create a college and career going culture for the school campus. The SSC provides additional resources and tools necessary for each student to reach his/her post-secondary education goals. The SSC is a full-service college and career counseling model designed to ensure that all students at the school campus have the support they need to apply to and matriculate into college and other alternative pathways. Each of our partner schools has a full-time college and career advisor, two youth leaders, and a college bridge coach. This is an evidenced-based and comprehensive model that has proven to work for our schools to better service our students throughout their entire post-secondary application and matriculation process.
The New York City Public Schools aims to ensure every student is prepared for and on a path to a rewarding career aligned with their passion and purpose and offering long-term economic security. Today, too few students have the information and advising support required to explore and understand their career entry options and develop a robust, high-quality, personalized plan to pursue their desired path after high school. Academic research suggests regular, individualized postsecondary advising improves key student outcomes, including career readiness metrics, FAFSA submission, and college enrollment rates. Quality advising enables students to make more informed decisions on their postsecondary paths, including which colleges they apply to, where they enroll, what major they select, what skills and experiences they consider building, and how likely they are to persist. These factors are tied to postsecondary graduation rates, employment rates, and wage outcomes.
The Strong Plan/Head Start pilot will offer personalized college and career pathways advisement as an additional, critical layer of support to students in temporary housing through their high school experience. Advising will be designed to build on the system-wide expansion of career-connected learning and to link students to high quality work-based learning opportunities in market-aligned career pathways. The pilot will be implemented in partnership with existing Student Success Center at the Taft Educational Campus. Programming will be designed to support students starting in freshman year through the summer after graduation, and will be grounded in multiple individualized advising sessions each year to support students in developing and refining a personalized college and career plan.
The Assistant Director will manage day-to-day program management responsibilities to ensure that the Student Success Center is running efficiently and meeting its program goals of ensuring that students are receiving college and career guidance and all seniors are graduating with a post-secondary plan, while also leading the initiative to support students in temporary housing. The Assistant Director will support and work closely with the director to create and manage partnerships with a smooth transition for our program participants.
Job Duties include but not limited to:
- Directly supervise 5 Advisors: 3 College & Career Advisors, 1 Early Awareness Advisor, and 1 Career Readiness Advisor and guide their professional development.
- Be the liaison for our 11 youth leaders, including leading biweekly meetings, approval of timesheets, etc.
- Manage partnership with DreamYard Project to ensure that youth leaders are part of DYCD’s Work, Learn & Grow and Summer Youth Employment Program for youth leader training.
- Support with the hiring, training, and managing of 11 youth leaders and 5-7 bridge coaches.
- Provide strategic, innovative and data-driven programmatic direction to successfully execute program goals.
- Effectively communicates New Settlement’s mission and programs with a focus on increasing college access and success for participants.
- Assist with the hiring and onboarding of Access and Success staff positions.
- Conduct orientations, and trainings to staff by sharing knowledge, best practices, tools, and resources.
- Maintain, develop, and strengthen collaborative relationships with New York City high schools, community-based organizations, higher education institutions and community partners.
- Participate in planning and expansion of our services and sites by ensuring high-quality programming.
- Remain abreast of trends in higher education, college access and success, and college admissions to inform organizational best practices; shared with college access and success participants, families, and organizational leadership.
- Provide leadership in curriculum planning, evaluation, and coordination of recruitment.
- Oversees and manages the logistics of all joint events on the campus: Family Nights, Summer Boot Camp, College & Career Kick-Off, College & Career Fair, Youth Leader Workshops, College Application Days, college and career trips, and more.
- Utilize various popular social media platforms for effective participant outreach and program engagement.
- Drive program delivery through organizing workshops, developing systems, and resources that help the team to provide support to participants on their caseload including ongoing development, refinement, and organization of postsecondary programming.
- Analyze data on the Salesforce database on a biweekly and/or monthly to inform programmatic and organizational needs.
- Track, evaluate and report on student and program performance for on-going program improvement, growth, trends in college admission and graduation success rates.
- Assist the Director in assessing needs and recommend budget management practices designed to implement college, success, and career readiness plans and goals.
- Help to establish data driven program goals and create an adaptive advising model.
- Collaborate with the SSC Director and New Settlement’s College Access Center’s Director and Assistant Director to create a pipeline for CAC and success to develop program initiatives that ensure transition from programming to post-secondary pathways.
- Work collaboratively to develop and grow formal and informal partnerships with colleges and universities that improve students’ access and advocacy within the college admissions process.
- Cultivate, manage, and grow relationships with internal and external partners creating post-secondary opportunities: fellowships, internships, job shadowing opportunities and others.
- Participate in conferences, networking events, work groups, professional developments, and in advocacy related events to support the ongoing commitment to leadership development, community building, and community organizing as strategies for social change.
- Attend and participate in-school / community-based meetings, administrative meetings, professional development trainings relevant to student needs/ issues and other meetings as needed.
- Meet established goals and objectives and other tasks as provided by the Director.
- Perform other duties as assigned.
QUALIFICATIONS & EXPERIENCE:
- Must have a Bachelor’s Degree and 4+ years of college/career access and success work experience.
- Master’s in Social Work (or related field), preferred.
- Bilingual, preferred.
- Experience supervising full-time staff.
- Working knowledge of college admissions, postsecondary pathways (certificate, 2-year, and 4-year programs) and college retention.
- Experience working with diverse populations, including students in temporary housing, English Language Learners, students with disabilities, etc.
- Commitment to further strengthening the Student Success Center pipeline with other programs within New Settlement.
- Strong leadership skills, organizational skills, time management skills, and attention to detail.
- A demonstrated ability to work collaboratively in a team; demonstrated willingness to take initiative and aptitude to work independently.
- Proven ability to multitask and work effectively in a fast-paced environment.
- Experience working in a school building, preferably DOE high schools.
- Significant experience working with adolescents and young adults.
- Familiarity with the college admission process, career services, application procedures, or related.
- Experience in facilitating groups and providing individual counseling.
- Exceptional verbal, written, and oral communication skills.
- Computer literacy: experience using Microsoft Office Suite including PowerPoint.
- Experience with Google Drive platforms, electronic communications and databases.
- Strong interpersonal skills and ability to build and maintain professional relationships with students, alumni, employers and colleagues.
- Commitment to youth development and strengths-based perspectives.
- Commitment to leadership development, community building, and community organizing as strategies for social change.
- Must clear DOE fingerprinting and background authorizations.
POSITION REQUIREMENTS:
- Candidates must be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 to be considered for employment. Proof of vaccination is required upon hiring. Applicants may seek medical or religious exemption from this requirement in accordance with applicable law.
PHYSICAL DEMANDS AND WORK ENVIRONMENT:
Physical Demands:Â The physical demands described here are representative of those that must be met by an employee to successfully perform the essential functions of this job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of this job.
- The ability to sit, stand, walk and use hands and fingers to operate a computer keyboard, mouse, and telephone to talk and hear.
- The ability to frequently sit and reach with hands and arms.
- The ability to occasionally lift and/or move up to 20 pounds.
Working Conditions:Â The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.
- Must be able to utilize office equipment such as desktop/notebook computers, copiers, printers, scanners, telephones, and calculators.
- The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.
The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job. The work environment characteristics described here are representative of those an employee encounters while performing the essential functions of the job. Reasonable accommodations will be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions of the job.
Employment is at will and employees will undergo 45- and 90-day check-ins during their 90-day probationary period.
NOTICE:Â The above statements are intended to describe the general nature of the environment and level of work being performed by this job. This job description in no way states or implies that the duties and responsibilities listed are the only tasks to be performed by the employee in this job. The employee will be required to follow other instructions and to perform other job-related duties requested by their supervisor. This job description supersedes prior job descriptions. When duties and responsibilities change and develop, the job description will be reviewed and subject to changes of business necessity.
New Settlement is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer, and considers qualified applicants without regard to race, color, creed, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, veteran status or any other protected factor under federal, state or local law.
This job description indicates in general the nature and levels of work, knowledge, skills, abilities and other essential functions expected of an employee. It is not designed to cover or contain a comprehensive listing of activities, duties or responsibilities required of you as an employee. You may be asked to perform other duties as required.
Full Time
SALARY
$68,000.00 – $70,000.00 per year
POSITION
Assistant Director
EXEMPT/NON-EXEMPT
Non-Exempt
REPORTS TO
Allison Palmer, Magdelinne Pimentel
We are an equal employment opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.