System for Adult Basic Education Support (SABES)
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SABES is a comprehensive professional development system for
Massachusetts. It was created in 1990 and is funded by the
Massachusetts Department of Education (MDOE) with both state and federal
funds. It consists of one Central Resource Center located at World
Education and five Regional Support Centers (RSCs) located at a public
college and four community colleges. Each entity is funded separately
through a competitive multi-year funding process.
The model for SABES evolved from discussions with groups of
practitioners. Along with the creation of SABES, policies were
developed at the state level that required all adult basic education
staff to dedicate 2.5% of their paid time to staff development and that
required each program to have a staff and program development
facilitator.
A Massachusetts ABE Teachers license (voluntary, not mandatory) was
created which is equivalent to k-12 licensure. SABES provides support
for teachers seeking the license through courses and cohorts that meet
monthly to work on portfolios. See www.sabes.org/license for more
information.
The Central Resource Center is responsible for coordinating the work of
the system as a whole and coordinating teams working on specific
initiatives and services. In addition, the CRC produces a quarterly
field-based publication, Field Notes. There are seven staff at the CRC.
Each regional center has a staff of five to eight people who work
primarily with the programs and practitioners in each region that are
funded by the state Department of Education. (We also work to a lesser
degree with staff at programs that are not funded by the state DOE.) The
offices are located on the campuses of the five sponsoring state higher
education institutions.
All of the RSCs sponsor a wide variety of activities throughout the
year, which usually take place either on-site at the SABES RSC or at
some other site in the community, such as one of the local adult basic
education programs. The staff and program development activities that we
provide include single-session workshops, multi-session mini-courses,
longer semester-length courses, on-going sharing groups that meet
periodically, activities that are offered in whole or in part through
some form of distance learning, as well as technical assistance to
individual practitioners and programs. Most of our activities are
offered regionally, but some are intended for a statewide audience,
while some are program-based and focused on meeting the needs of a
particular program.
Each year, SABES negotiates a detailed workplan with the Massachusetts
Department of Education. The professional development activities
detailed in the workplan for any given year are a result of practitioner
needs assessment, federal and state initiatives and the collective
perspective of the SABES staff. The Massachusetts DOE supports the
concept of building capacity within the field and recognizing the
expertise of practitioners and ABE program directors. In light of this,
the majority of activities are facilitated by practitioners, with
training of trainers as needed for specific content areas. All of the
SABES activities and other ABE-related training events are accessible
via an on-line calendar and registration process. (calendar.sabes.org)
We have also maintained regional resource collections intended for use by practitioners and are this year in the process of consolidating these into a statewide resource library as required by the MDOE. Besides the on-line training calendar and licensure materials referenced above, the SABES website provides a range of topical ABE resources to meet the needs of teachers, practitioners, policy makers and researchers.
