Annie Knowles: Hello, and welcome to InSession, a podcast where we speak with change makers working towards safe, supportive learning environments within their communities. Our guests include state and local education agencies and their partners, all grant recipients from the Department of Education, using their funding to advance school-based mental health services, support mental health service professionals, and establish trauma recovery and prevention programs.
Brianna Cunniff: I'm Brianna and this is Annie at the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, and we produce InSession. On this episode, we speak with Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña, a Project Prevent grant recipient from the Connecticut Regional Education Cooperative, or CREC, and Rashelly Burgos, a 10th grader in the district, about the district's student-led clinician interview panels.
Annie Knowles: All right. We're so excited to have you both joining us today. We want to give you an opportunity to just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about you both before we dive into the questions.
Brianna Cunniff: Rashelly, you want to go ahead?
Rashelly Burgos: Sure. I'm Rashelly Burgos. I'm a sophomore at Comp Sci High, and I was on the panel for hiring a clinician.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: My name is Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña. I am the Project Prevent Grant Director for CREC, Capital Region Education Council. I currently manage eight schools throughout the greater Hartford area in Connecticut, where I partner with multiple community-based organizations to provide nonviolence, conflict resolution, mentorship, as well as mental health services.
Annie Knowles: Thank you both. Again, we're so, so happy to have you both here. It's so special to have a student on the podcast. So, today we're going to be talking about the student interview panels that you all have held. So, we just want to start by asking you about these panels. What are they? How did they come to be? So maybe we'll start Six, if you could kind of take us through how they came to be and then Rashelly we'll go over to you about your experience being on the panel.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah. Well the idea for the student panel came about very organically. Once we had a slate of applicants that met the requirements, we then had to find different ways to further differentiate the candidates. During our team discussion, and I want to give a shout-out to Christine Ruman and Nona Ghaffar. We thought why not just hear it directly from the students since they will be the ones working with them. A total of eight students participated on the interview panel. They met with Nona who assisted them in coming up with the questions. They took turns asking questions and shared their thoughts and concerns in a private debrief after each interview. It was awesome to see them in action. They took full control over the interview. And Rashelly can share a little bit about her experience during the whole thing.
Rashelly Burgos: So, my experience in the panel was a little nerve-racking at first because I was the youngest. Everybody else was a junior and senior and I was a sophomore. So I was really just worried about making sure I sounded very mature and making sure I didn't sound like it was a dumb question. But the experience itself was amazing. I feel like... It made you feel like you were important. Your opinion was what really mattered. But if I were doing it all over again, I feel like I would come up with a bit more in-depth questions. We asked also very broad questions to the candidates and they answered well, but there was a lot of things that we could have just ran through beforehand.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah.
Annie Knowles: That makes sense. Is there an example of a question, Rashelly, that you can give that you asked one of the candidates?
Rashelly Burgos: I think I have a similar, I don't remember exactly what I asked, but I know that there was one candidate that we asked her why she wanted to do this, just why would you want to do this? I feel like we all kind of already know why you want to do it. More of what inspired you to do this? What was the main reasoning behind you wanting even this position?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Annie Knowles: That's a good question for sure. And something you can think about for further panels, I'm sure. And then also to go off of that, so Six mentioned that you all met with Nona to kind of help prepare the questions. So, who is Nona? And then Rashelly maybe if you can talk a little more about what it was like to meet with that group and to come up with those questions beforehand.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: So, Nona is our CREC lead clinician. So we have three, she's the lead, she's a licensed clinician. She was part of another grant. Very knowledgeable about our schools, very passionate about this work. So, I mean, who better than her to help us connect the students. She already had a relationship with many students in multiple schools.
Annie Knowles: Oh, great.
Rashelly Burgos: There's one thing, I would just like to say I appreciate Nona for everything. Everything. If it weren't for her, I wouldn't even be on this panel. There's a lot of opportunities that she has given me that I just appreciate her to the most. She does her job really well. She can connect with someone super quickly. But for the coming up with the questions, we met up with the other panelists the day of. That's when I met everybody else. I feel we were all kind of just a little nervous around each other because we didn't know each other at all, but they were all really great people. Their stories and stuff were really great.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: No, and I love that. Thank you for sharing because this is something that we want to continue to do in the future. So we are giving the students the opportunity to not only pull the questions together, practice saying these questions, taking notes, and by them having that experience, they know, you know what, next time I want to know more, I want deeper questions. I love that. Towards the end, they all had the opportunity to say, "I recommend so-and-so for hire." We took their feedback into consideration because we really are looking, just like Rashelly said, similar to the experience that you had with Nona, we wanted to bring on board two additional clinicians that had the ability to really connect with the students. Yes, for them to have the education expertise required, but that could connect with the student. I mean, one of them said, "I totally see myself going to this person for help," and that right there is everything.
Annie Knowles: Yeah, so important to have students at the table. A question for both of you, like Rashelly, did you volunteer to be a part of this panel or what was the process of getting students to be involved?
Rashelly Burgos: So I was in her CBITS group with a few other peers and me and her created a connection because she works with one of my mom's friends.
Annie Knowles: Okay.
Rashelly Burgos: So she had already had an idea about who I was. So I didn't know her personally, but she kind of knew just about me. We had done one-on-one groups after the CBITS thing, and she had just asked me if I wanted to be part of it and I was really hesitant at first because it was a really broad, it wasn't specifics and it wasn't really fully made up when she had asked me, but of course I said yes because I feel like it would be an opportunity that I couldn't just give up.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yes.
Annie Knowles: It sounds like a great opportunity.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: And that is one of the reasons why we wanted to use this opportunity as another way of allowing students the opportunity to have their voices heard, right? CREC as a whole, they're always looking for ways to include the student voice. I mean, we run multiple students groups throughout the year to get feedback about programs. We hear their ideas about summer programs before we begin planning. Students participate in our district SEL, they run restorative circles and this was another way to get those that maybe haven't been involved to get that type of exposure.
Annie Knowles: Totally, and it seems like even just the feedback we're hearing on this call about how the planning of the questions could maybe, maybe they could meet more often, things like that. So yeah, student voice and student opinion like Rashelly is just so important and vital in this work. I'll turn it over to you, Brianna, to ask the next question.
Brianna Cunniff: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so important to have those who are impacted by the decisions a part of the decision-making process and being a part of these interviews at the table. So I think that's awesome. That sounds like you're doing a lot of incredible work with that too. And we'd love to hear just a little bit about the impact of that and how it's impacted the hiring process and if you feel like it is achieving those things that you wanted to achieve and what that has felt like for both of you?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Would you like to start? Would you like me to take this on first?
Rashelly Burgos: You can start.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Okay. So from what I've seen in terms of the impact, I would say closeness to the clinician, more productive relationship, students feel heard because they were part of the process from the beginning. The plan is including this step when appropriate in the hiring process. At this time, CREC is hiring another clinician and we will be taking the same approach. And now after hearing Rashelly's take, it will be taking time for the students to connect, for them to have more time in putting together the questions so they feel even more comfortable when they come to run those interviews.
Rashelly Burgos: So as a student on the panel, I really felt like my decision or my opinion at all was really heard because as a student in these schools, I know what these schools lack and also have gained because I, me and my counselors are really close because one of them was my volleyball coach. But it's a space where you can just walk in and be like, "Hey, I need to talk to somebody really bad," and they're always available to help.
They're always really supportive with every decision you make. And knowing what some other students at my school need and would appreciate to have is someone who has really good social skills or just knows how to talk to people because there's people who probably do get hired because they have all the credentials but they lack the empathy or just personal connections.
Annie Knowles: Such a good point, Rashelly. Such a good point. Because you need both, especially when working in a school you've got to be able to connect with students, right? Okay. And then our last question is kind of where will you all go from here? So I know you said Six, that you plan on using this same strategy for hiring the next clinician. And maybe this question is more for you, Rashelly, do you plan on being part of the next panel and maybe taking what you've learned from the previous one into the next? And I know you're only a sophomore, so you have more years to have an impact and have your voice heard. So where will you go from here?
Rashelly Burgos: From this panel I would hopefully like to be brought back on another one. I enjoyed the experience to the fullest. I would recommend it to anybody. If anybody were to ask me like, "Hey, I was just given this opportunity, should I take it?" I would say 100%. And just with Ms. Ghaffar she's also given me other opportunities because she sees that I'm capable of making these decisions or being in these scenarios. So for example, on May 30th, I'm going to a Latinas Empower meeting with her and there's just a lot of opportunities that this could just open up for you.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yes.
Annie Knowles: That's amazing. And I'd imagine that's exactly what they hoped would come out of this too, so that you can feel empowered to keep having your voice heard, right?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah, and I would have to say that is exactly it. Our goal, if you were to tell me, okay, what is the outcome? What result are you looking for? It wasn't so much, yes, the clinician, the right person to be part of the team, but how awesome is it that we're able to just help the students feel more comfortable. Now students are more willing to participate because they know that their input is valued. Right?
Annie Knowles: 100%. So it was eight students on the panel and you were the youngest, right, Rashelly. So it's all juniors and seniors. So when the seniors graduate, obviously, you'll have to fill their space. So will you look to also have more sophomores or is this going to be mostly a junior senior thing or what's the plan?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: So at this time, to be honest, Nona was the one that took the lead and based on students that were already receiving services and they knew what they needed or what helped them, that's why we needed them on the panel because they already been through that experience and they know how important it is to feel comfortable. Some of them were stuck on, I love her smile, the answer the question, but just her smile made me feel good.
So those were the things that we were really looking for. So for this time, I think that we would open it up to the same as all, we have middle and high schools as part of Project Prevent. So we would open it up to a few to return to kind of take the lead because they already have that experience. So Rashelly, we will be reaching out to you and then also a few new ones, especially those that probably have been through the process of receiving services but have never had the opportunity to be a part of a panel like this where their voices are heard and they get this experience.
Annie Knowles: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to try and engage as many of the different students as possible and give that opportunity to a variety of students. I would be curious, with the eight student panel, did you feel like that was a good number? Do you think that that will be the same number this time or are there things that you're looking to do any differently the next go-around?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Well, now with the new clinician, they will be part of all eight schools. So I would say maybe keeping it to still eight to 10, one of the schools had three students, so maybe we'll do two per school if possible. A lot of things have to work out, the logistics have to be worked out. It is virtual, so they need a private space, which is very hard. You'd be surprised. It's very hard to find. In our schools, they need the technology, a staff member that can get them from the classroom and inform their teacher that during this time they will be serving as part of our interview panel. So there's a lot of logistics that have to work out, but I would say I would absolutely aim to at least have 10.
Annie Knowles: Makes a lot of sense to me. And it looks like you've got your co-director right here with Rashelly.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: She can help us recruit.
Annie Knowles: All right, well, is there anything else either of you wanted to touch on before we kind of wrap up? This sounds like just such an amazing initiative. And Rashelly, thank you so, so much for joining us. I think it's just so powerful to be able to have your voice on here as well because it is so important and hopefully other districts and grantees that listen to this will be like, "Hey, why aren't I reaching out to my students more to get their input on things that really impact them?" So thank you so much. This was such a treat.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: You're welcome.
Annie Knowles: InSession is brought to you by the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments or NCSSLE at the American Institutes for Research. This podcast is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. If you'd like to learn more about NCSSLE, visit safesupportivelearning.ed.gov.
For all questions or feedback you can email us at ncssle@air.org. Thanks for listening. Please note, the contents of this podcast do not necessarily represent the policy or views of the U.S. Department of Education, nor does it imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education.
Brianna Cunniff: I'm Brianna and this is Annie at the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments, and we produce InSession. On this episode, we speak with Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña, a Project Prevent grant recipient from the Connecticut Regional Education Cooperative, or CREC, and Rashelly Burgos, a 10th grader in the district, about the district's student-led clinician interview panels.
Annie Knowles: All right. We're so excited to have you both joining us today. We want to give you an opportunity to just introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about you both before we dive into the questions.
Brianna Cunniff: Rashelly, you want to go ahead?
Rashelly Burgos: Sure. I'm Rashelly Burgos. I'm a sophomore at Comp Sci High, and I was on the panel for hiring a clinician.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: My name is Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña. I am the Project Prevent Grant Director for CREC, Capital Region Education Council. I currently manage eight schools throughout the greater Hartford area in Connecticut, where I partner with multiple community-based organizations to provide nonviolence, conflict resolution, mentorship, as well as mental health services.
Annie Knowles: Thank you both. Again, we're so, so happy to have you both here. It's so special to have a student on the podcast. So, today we're going to be talking about the student interview panels that you all have held. So, we just want to start by asking you about these panels. What are they? How did they come to be? So maybe we'll start Six, if you could kind of take us through how they came to be and then Rashelly we'll go over to you about your experience being on the panel.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah. Well the idea for the student panel came about very organically. Once we had a slate of applicants that met the requirements, we then had to find different ways to further differentiate the candidates. During our team discussion, and I want to give a shout-out to Christine Ruman and Nona Ghaffar. We thought why not just hear it directly from the students since they will be the ones working with them. A total of eight students participated on the interview panel. They met with Nona who assisted them in coming up with the questions. They took turns asking questions and shared their thoughts and concerns in a private debrief after each interview. It was awesome to see them in action. They took full control over the interview. And Rashelly can share a little bit about her experience during the whole thing.
Rashelly Burgos: So, my experience in the panel was a little nerve-racking at first because I was the youngest. Everybody else was a junior and senior and I was a sophomore. So I was really just worried about making sure I sounded very mature and making sure I didn't sound like it was a dumb question. But the experience itself was amazing. I feel like... It made you feel like you were important. Your opinion was what really mattered. But if I were doing it all over again, I feel like I would come up with a bit more in-depth questions. We asked also very broad questions to the candidates and they answered well, but there was a lot of things that we could have just ran through beforehand.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah.
Annie Knowles: That makes sense. Is there an example of a question, Rashelly, that you can give that you asked one of the candidates?
Rashelly Burgos: I think I have a similar, I don't remember exactly what I asked, but I know that there was one candidate that we asked her why she wanted to do this, just why would you want to do this? I feel like we all kind of already know why you want to do it. More of what inspired you to do this? What was the main reasoning behind you wanting even this position?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Annie Knowles: That's a good question for sure. And something you can think about for further panels, I'm sure. And then also to go off of that, so Six mentioned that you all met with Nona to kind of help prepare the questions. So, who is Nona? And then Rashelly maybe if you can talk a little more about what it was like to meet with that group and to come up with those questions beforehand.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: So, Nona is our CREC lead clinician. So we have three, she's the lead, she's a licensed clinician. She was part of another grant. Very knowledgeable about our schools, very passionate about this work. So, I mean, who better than her to help us connect the students. She already had a relationship with many students in multiple schools.
Annie Knowles: Oh, great.
Rashelly Burgos: There's one thing, I would just like to say I appreciate Nona for everything. Everything. If it weren't for her, I wouldn't even be on this panel. There's a lot of opportunities that she has given me that I just appreciate her to the most. She does her job really well. She can connect with someone super quickly. But for the coming up with the questions, we met up with the other panelists the day of. That's when I met everybody else. I feel we were all kind of just a little nervous around each other because we didn't know each other at all, but they were all really great people. Their stories and stuff were really great.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: No, and I love that. Thank you for sharing because this is something that we want to continue to do in the future. So we are giving the students the opportunity to not only pull the questions together, practice saying these questions, taking notes, and by them having that experience, they know, you know what, next time I want to know more, I want deeper questions. I love that. Towards the end, they all had the opportunity to say, "I recommend so-and-so for hire." We took their feedback into consideration because we really are looking, just like Rashelly said, similar to the experience that you had with Nona, we wanted to bring on board two additional clinicians that had the ability to really connect with the students. Yes, for them to have the education expertise required, but that could connect with the student. I mean, one of them said, "I totally see myself going to this person for help," and that right there is everything.
Annie Knowles: Yeah, so important to have students at the table. A question for both of you, like Rashelly, did you volunteer to be a part of this panel or what was the process of getting students to be involved?
Rashelly Burgos: So I was in her CBITS group with a few other peers and me and her created a connection because she works with one of my mom's friends.
Annie Knowles: Okay.
Rashelly Burgos: So she had already had an idea about who I was. So I didn't know her personally, but she kind of knew just about me. We had done one-on-one groups after the CBITS thing, and she had just asked me if I wanted to be part of it and I was really hesitant at first because it was a really broad, it wasn't specifics and it wasn't really fully made up when she had asked me, but of course I said yes because I feel like it would be an opportunity that I couldn't just give up.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yes.
Annie Knowles: It sounds like a great opportunity.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: And that is one of the reasons why we wanted to use this opportunity as another way of allowing students the opportunity to have their voices heard, right? CREC as a whole, they're always looking for ways to include the student voice. I mean, we run multiple students groups throughout the year to get feedback about programs. We hear their ideas about summer programs before we begin planning. Students participate in our district SEL, they run restorative circles and this was another way to get those that maybe haven't been involved to get that type of exposure.
Annie Knowles: Totally, and it seems like even just the feedback we're hearing on this call about how the planning of the questions could maybe, maybe they could meet more often, things like that. So yeah, student voice and student opinion like Rashelly is just so important and vital in this work. I'll turn it over to you, Brianna, to ask the next question.
Brianna Cunniff: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's so important to have those who are impacted by the decisions a part of the decision-making process and being a part of these interviews at the table. So I think that's awesome. That sounds like you're doing a lot of incredible work with that too. And we'd love to hear just a little bit about the impact of that and how it's impacted the hiring process and if you feel like it is achieving those things that you wanted to achieve and what that has felt like for both of you?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Would you like to start? Would you like me to take this on first?
Rashelly Burgos: You can start.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Okay. So from what I've seen in terms of the impact, I would say closeness to the clinician, more productive relationship, students feel heard because they were part of the process from the beginning. The plan is including this step when appropriate in the hiring process. At this time, CREC is hiring another clinician and we will be taking the same approach. And now after hearing Rashelly's take, it will be taking time for the students to connect, for them to have more time in putting together the questions so they feel even more comfortable when they come to run those interviews.
Rashelly Burgos: So as a student on the panel, I really felt like my decision or my opinion at all was really heard because as a student in these schools, I know what these schools lack and also have gained because I, me and my counselors are really close because one of them was my volleyball coach. But it's a space where you can just walk in and be like, "Hey, I need to talk to somebody really bad," and they're always available to help.
They're always really supportive with every decision you make. And knowing what some other students at my school need and would appreciate to have is someone who has really good social skills or just knows how to talk to people because there's people who probably do get hired because they have all the credentials but they lack the empathy or just personal connections.
Annie Knowles: Such a good point, Rashelly. Such a good point. Because you need both, especially when working in a school you've got to be able to connect with students, right? Okay. And then our last question is kind of where will you all go from here? So I know you said Six, that you plan on using this same strategy for hiring the next clinician. And maybe this question is more for you, Rashelly, do you plan on being part of the next panel and maybe taking what you've learned from the previous one into the next? And I know you're only a sophomore, so you have more years to have an impact and have your voice heard. So where will you go from here?
Rashelly Burgos: From this panel I would hopefully like to be brought back on another one. I enjoyed the experience to the fullest. I would recommend it to anybody. If anybody were to ask me like, "Hey, I was just given this opportunity, should I take it?" I would say 100%. And just with Ms. Ghaffar she's also given me other opportunities because she sees that I'm capable of making these decisions or being in these scenarios. So for example, on May 30th, I'm going to a Latinas Empower meeting with her and there's just a lot of opportunities that this could just open up for you.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yes.
Annie Knowles: That's amazing. And I'd imagine that's exactly what they hoped would come out of this too, so that you can feel empowered to keep having your voice heard, right?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Yeah, and I would have to say that is exactly it. Our goal, if you were to tell me, okay, what is the outcome? What result are you looking for? It wasn't so much, yes, the clinician, the right person to be part of the team, but how awesome is it that we're able to just help the students feel more comfortable. Now students are more willing to participate because they know that their input is valued. Right?
Annie Knowles: 100%. So it was eight students on the panel and you were the youngest, right, Rashelly. So it's all juniors and seniors. So when the seniors graduate, obviously, you'll have to fill their space. So will you look to also have more sophomores or is this going to be mostly a junior senior thing or what's the plan?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: So at this time, to be honest, Nona was the one that took the lead and based on students that were already receiving services and they knew what they needed or what helped them, that's why we needed them on the panel because they already been through that experience and they know how important it is to feel comfortable. Some of them were stuck on, I love her smile, the answer the question, but just her smile made me feel good.
So those were the things that we were really looking for. So for this time, I think that we would open it up to the same as all, we have middle and high schools as part of Project Prevent. So we would open it up to a few to return to kind of take the lead because they already have that experience. So Rashelly, we will be reaching out to you and then also a few new ones, especially those that probably have been through the process of receiving services but have never had the opportunity to be a part of a panel like this where their voices are heard and they get this experience.
Annie Knowles: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's important to try and engage as many of the different students as possible and give that opportunity to a variety of students. I would be curious, with the eight student panel, did you feel like that was a good number? Do you think that that will be the same number this time or are there things that you're looking to do any differently the next go-around?
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: Well, now with the new clinician, they will be part of all eight schools. So I would say maybe keeping it to still eight to 10, one of the schools had three students, so maybe we'll do two per school if possible. A lot of things have to work out, the logistics have to be worked out. It is virtual, so they need a private space, which is very hard. You'd be surprised. It's very hard to find. In our schools, they need the technology, a staff member that can get them from the classroom and inform their teacher that during this time they will be serving as part of our interview panel. So there's a lot of logistics that have to work out, but I would say I would absolutely aim to at least have 10.
Annie Knowles: Makes a lot of sense to me. And it looks like you've got your co-director right here with Rashelly.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: She can help us recruit.
Annie Knowles: All right, well, is there anything else either of you wanted to touch on before we kind of wrap up? This sounds like just such an amazing initiative. And Rashelly, thank you so, so much for joining us. I think it's just so powerful to be able to have your voice on here as well because it is so important and hopefully other districts and grantees that listen to this will be like, "Hey, why aren't I reaching out to my students more to get their input on things that really impact them?" So thank you so much. This was such a treat.
Sixmaritt Pagán-Peña: You're welcome.
Annie Knowles: InSession is brought to you by the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments or NCSSLE at the American Institutes for Research. This podcast is funded by the U.S. Department of Education. If you'd like to learn more about NCSSLE, visit safesupportivelearning.ed.gov.
For all questions or feedback you can email us at ncssle@air.org. Thanks for listening. Please note, the contents of this podcast do not necessarily represent the policy or views of the U.S. Department of Education, nor does it imply endorsement by the U.S. Department of Education.
