40-92400-24-CP234_Sole Source Rockefeller.pdf.PDF

2021 Sole Source Form

STATE OF NEW MEXICO

SOLE SOURCE REQUEST AND DETERMINATION FORM

A sole source determination is not effective until the sole source request for determination has been posted for thirty (30) calendar days without challenge, and subsequently approved in writing by the State Purchasing Agent or, for Professional Services Agreements, the Secretary of the General Services Department. The foregoing requirement is regardless of whether the sole source request for determination has been signed by the Agency and/or the Contractor.

I. Name of Agency:

New Mexico Public Education Department

Agency Chief Procurement Officer:

Ann Lucero

Telephone Number:

505-469-9893

Agency Contact for this request:

Phoebe Walendziak

Telephone Number & Email Address:

505-396-1992, phoebe.walendziak@ped.nm.gov

II. Name of prospective Contractor:

Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors (Prepared To Teach)

SHARE Vendor Number (must be active):

0000177013

Address of prospective Contractor:

120 Broadway, STE 3475, New York, NY 10271

Contact Name, Telephone Number and Email Address:

Yvette Diaz, Senior Advisor; (562) 980-6405; ydiaz@rockpa.org

Amount of prospective contract before tax:

$407,837.50

Estimated tax amount (tax is subject to change):

$0.00 (RPA is a not-for-profit organization)

Term of prospective contract:

July 1-December 31, 2024

DocuSign Envelope ID: 6E31F2F9-71C4-4080-A8B1-64A8E92584F2 mailto:phoebe.walendziak@ped.nm.gov mailto:ydiaz@rockpa.org

Note: For terms longer than one year, Request for Policy Exemption from DFA MUST be included.

III. Agency is required to state purpose/need of purchase and thoroughly list the services (scope of work), construction or items of tangible personal property of the prospective contract (if this is an amendment request to an existing contract, include current contract number issued by SPD):

The Public Education Department (PED) has been awarded a five-year, EIGHT MILLION DOLLARS AND ZERO CENTS ($8,000,000.00) federal grant through Education Innovation and Research funds from the U.S. Department of Education. The grant, NM Residencies, intends to grow high-quality teacher residency preparation programs, where aspiring teachers work for a year alongside an accomplished mentor teacher before being hired. Paid residencies, when designed in strong partnership with districts, have been documented to increase the diversity, effectiveness, and longevity of the teacher workforce. The NM State Legislature has invested significantly in teacher residencies, and this grant will allow the work to scale across the state and to undergo rigorous evaluation.

NM Residencies has three goals:

1) Strengthen recruitment and selection processes across preparation programs to attract, prepare, and retain a strong teaching force that reflects the state’s student population;

2) Reduce variability of implementation across different residency program types and localities to ensure equitable access to well-prepared teachers; and

3) Create sustainable funding streams with competitive wages so paid residencies can grow and become the norm in New Mexico.

Goal 3 of this grant was designed to ensure that the state’s investment in teacher residencies can help the state shift its current residency initiative into a sustainably funded, equitably accessible teacher preparation ecosystem. The scope of work required to achieve this goal is significant, including the following major domains of work and sample activities and outputs across the five years of the grant:

• Develop New Mexico-specific approaches to braiding resources across local residency partnerships (for example, from tutoring funds, open positions, cost savings from reduced remediation and turnover) that can be used to help fund residents’ health benefits and equalize their take-home pay with other pathways into the profession.

o Activities and outputs: Study current approaches in New Mexico that use local resources to support aspiring teachers; create materials for different audiences—superintendents, principals, finance officers, legislative bodies, PED—that clarify possibilities for funding; gather ongoing data on efforts to fund residents and document developments.

• Work with teacher preparation programs and their district partners to implement, study, and document various funding models across the state.

o Activities and outputs: Ongoing in-person and virtual meetings to identify possibilities and barriers across districts in their efforts to fund residents;

DocuSign Envelope ID: 6E31F2F9-71C4-4080-A8B1-64A8E92584F2 lead a learning network/community of practice focused on funding; support the development of sessions for the state’s annual district budget workshop.

• Work with teacher preparation programs to increase program affordability, including by tapping into U.S. Department of Labor dollars that currently are available through Workforce Solutions in New Mexico.

o Activities and outputs: Engage financial aid departments across higher education institutions to support reassessment of financial need for aspiring teachers engaged in internship-type work; develop models for using work study dollars to support aspiring teachers; document current approaches in New Mexico that use labor dollars to support candidates, including the range of amounts that individual candidates receive; work with programs to strengthen supports for financial aid literacy among aspiring teachers;

create a statewide teacher residency apprenticeship.

• Build the case, as the data merit, for continued legislative investments in teacher residencies o Activities and outputs:Conduct surveys of aspiring teachers to understand their financial burdens; ensure high-quality data needed to understand the impact of residencies is collected; draft data-informed presentations to help state legislators understand the strengths and growth areas for residencies;

create staffing analysis reports to help identify high-need licensure areas and hard-to-staff schools’ long-term teacher workforce needs.

In addition to Goal 3 efforts, the grant itself requires a significant amount of project management and leadership, which the PED does not currently have the staffing for. Our determination is that outsourcing the grant’s project management will allow PED’s permanent staff to continue to focus on core activities required for the Division, leading the grant’s vision and alignment with state goals through weekly check-ins and a strategic advisory group that makes all substantive decisions. The work involved in project management and leadership includes the following:

• Ensuring processes exist and are followed to collect needed data to inform performance management and formative evaluation reporting

• Monitoring the evaluation to ensure the design and data provide New Mexico relevant insights

• Managing communications and coordinating with PED and other consultants to ensure project integrity and alignment with grant goals

• Drafting grant reports and other documents for the PED

• Dissemination, including a web presence

• Supporting the PED with Steering Committee meetings

• Co-planning, facilitating, and managing all aspects of in-person meetings, including venue booking and coordination, food and supplies orders, AV rentals, and invoicing and reimbursements

IV. Provide a detailed explanation of the criteria developed and specified by the agency as necessary to perform and/or fulfill the contract and upon which the state agency reviewed available sources. (Do not use “technical jargon;” use plain English. Do not tailor the criteria simply to exclude other contractors if it is not rationally related to the purpose of the contract.)

The PED identified several overarching criteria and associated descriptors for what would be necessary to succeed with the EIR grant, which fell into four categories:

1. Capacity to support state-level systemic change. State systemic shifts across an entire ecosystem of preparation programs and districts would require a consultant or group to already be or to be able to quickly become an integral part of the overall effort to shift the system. At minimum, the following descriptors would need to be true for any awardee:

• Deep familiarity with the New Mexico context and the state’s existing teacher residency work

• On-the-ground presence to move work forward

• Strong existing relationships and/or likelihood of the capacity to build strong relationships with key players across state agencies and programs

• Record of and/or evidence of capacity for responsiveness to PED and field requests and communication needs

2. Capacity to ensure grant activities occur and the grant is on target to achieve its goals. Delivering on an $8,000,000, five-year grant designed to shift an entire state ecosystem is complex. Any group receiving a contract to work closely with PED to achieve grant goals would need the following:

• Strong leadership and project management skills

• Ability to take direction from PED leadership

• Staffing and dispositional flexibility to address emerging needs

• Strong national networks for dissemination support

3. Capacity to manage technical aspects of the project’s needs. Several aspects of the grant require work that does not currently fit within the scope of the Division staffs’ jobs, but without these more technical implementation pieces, the grant would not succeed.

Accordingly, any contractor or group would need the following:

• Organizational capacity to manage vendor contracts, reimbursements, and budgets

• Track record of creating high-quality reports and materials

• Ability to support data collection and systems development

4. Capacity to lead statewide shifts towards financial sustainability. Goal 3 of the grant also itself requires specific capacities, including the following:

• Expertise in teacher residencies and their sustainability

• Expertise in registered apprenticeships for teachers

• Willingness and ability to travel regularly throughout the state to support and document sustainability efforts

V. Provide a detailed, sufficient explanation of the reasons, qualifications, proprietary rights or unique capabilities of the prospective contractor that makes the prospective contractor the one source capable of providing the required professional service, service, construction or item(s) of tangible personal property. (Please do not state the source is the “best” source or the “least costly” source. Those factors do not justify a “sole source.”)

Prepared To Teach, a fiscally sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors

VI.

(RPA), has been identified as the prospective sole source contractor to lead sustainability and start-up leadership activities of the grant for two core reasons: they are the nation’s only organization that focuses directly on the financial sustainability of teacher residency programs, and they are the only group that has worked with the PED to develop the state’s residency framework and so can manage the grant’s implementation in the absence of PED human resources to do so.

Prepared To Teach is the nation’s leader for both resources and technical assistance around how to braid resources to create sustainably funded teacher residencies, one of the three major goals of the grant. Founded in 2015 to address the issue of creating sustainable funding for teacher residencies, they are the national experts on this topic, leading keynotes and featured panels at national conferences, serving as the experts for reporters and policymakers on the question of teacher residency sustainability, developing the research needed to grow sustainably funded residencies, and facilitating partnerships’ work to find sustainable funding sources. No other group focuses on this work. They also have played a key role in the PED’s having been lifted up in national and federal webinars that highlight the potential inherent in the work the PED has engaged around teacher residencies to date.

Sustainability and dissemination of the lessons learned in New Mexico are both required outcomes of the grant.

In addition, relational and organizational qualities will be core to the successful execution of the grant activities in NM Residencies, and Prepared To Teach has a multi-year track record of working in New Mexico with the PED to launch teacher residencies, build a strong statewide community, and support PED in its development of a strong, coherent educator pathway system for the state. They have managed hundreds of thousands of dollars that they brought to the state’s residency efforts through private philanthropy, including all the contracting, invoicing, and reimbursements, processes greatly strengthened by their being a fiscally sponsored project of RPA.. They have built information systems that track progress across the state across multiple workstreams. They have drafted reports, training materials, and communications that respectfully represent the PED’s perspectives. They are uniquely suited to helping PED manage the implementation of the work that is promised in the grant and leading the efforts necessary to achieve Goal 3.

Provide a detailed, sufficient explanation of how the professional service, service, construction or item(s) of tangible personal property is/are unique and how this uniqueness is substantially related to the intended purpose of the contract.

There are six distinct services related to NM Residencies goals and management processes that Prepared To Teach would provide NM Residencies, listed below along with the explanation of how Prepared To Teach is unique in its ability to deliver these services:

• Build capacity across residency partnerships to braid resources: Prepared To Teach created the core approaches for braiding resources across the teacher preparation ecosystem to promote sustainability, including having supported Albuquerque Public Schools in its development of the first sustainable funding in the country for their residency partnership with the University of New Mexico and the Albuquerque Teachers Federation. Their relationships in the state are deep and strong, which is necessary for the successful implementation of a statewide residency system.

• Improve cost efficiencies and access to financial aid at IHEs: Prepared To Teach is the only intermediary organization to have documented their partnerships having created significant improvements in affordability across preparation programs.

• Create a teacher residency apprenticeship program: Prepared To Teach is the first organization in the sector to publish guidance on aligning education and labor goals to create state-level teacher apprenticeships. They have supported apprenticeship development across multiple states, served on the national working group to create the now approved Department of Labor National Guideline Standards for K-12 Teacher Registered Apprenticeships (RAP), have drafted a proposed RAP for New Mexico, and have written a Department of Labor proposal for PED.

• Solidify legislative support for residency investments: The research from Prepared To Teach has been part of the state’s legislative decision to provide teacher residency supports, including a study of candidates’ financial burdens that surveyed aspiring teachers in New Mexico. They have also conducted analyses of New Mexico’s teacher preparation system’s financial sustainability. These activities would continue as part of NM Residencies.

• Develop an integrated data system: Prepared To Teach has worked for over a year with teacher preparation programs, universities’ institutional research offices, and PED to create a framework to streamline and improve the quality of data collection, a necessary component for the NM Residencies evaluation to be successful. They are the only group working on data needs at the program level in the state.

• Engage project leadership activities: Planning and convening the NM Residencies community of practice, managing logistics for events, coordinating across project workstreams, and communicating with stakeholders about the NM Residencies work requires dedicated project management and leadership, which PED does not currently have the capacity for. Prepared To Teach has worked side-by-side with PED on all residency activities for the past two years, making them the sole prospective contractor who can seamlessly support this work.

No other organization in the nation has engaged the New Mexico teacher preparation context so directly, and none has the expertise in sustainability that Prepared To Teach has.

VII. Explain why other similar professional services, services, construction or item(s) of tangible personal property cannot meet the intended purpose of the contract.

A few other organizations focus on how to develop residencies—for example, the National Center for Teacher Residencies (NCTR) and US PREP. These experts can serve as important resources for partnerships that want to create quality programs, but they are not experts in helping partnerships do the long, arduous work of figuring out how to financially sustain their programs over time. Without the specific focus that Prepared To Teach has for sustainability, projects such as this are ultimately either unsustainable or unaffordable for most aspiring teachers—or both. In addition, these groups do not have a presence in New Mexico, save one connection with one preparation program, whereas the Executive Director of Prepared To Teach has an apartment in New Mexico where she spends large portions of her time so that she can work with the PED more closely. Without a deep commitment to and presence in the state, it would be impossible to build the kinds of relationships and understandings that will help PED create the kind of collaborative ecosystem that we envision for educator preparation.

VIII. Provide a narrative description of the agency’s due diligence in determining the basis for the procurement, including procedures used by the agency to conduct a review of available sources such as researching trade publications, industry newsletters and the internet;

contacting similar service providers; and reviewing the State Purchasing Divisions’ Statewide Price Agreements. Include a list of businesses contacted (do not state that no other businesses were contacted), date of contact, method of contact (telephone, mail, e mail, other), and documentation demonstrating an explanation of why those businesses could not or would not, under any circumstances, perform the contract; or an explanation of why the agency has determined that no businesses other than the prospective contractor can perform the contract.

PED leadership is engaged with many national leaders supporting state-level change in educator preparation, and Prepared To Teach is seen as an important leader and state-level collaborator in these arenas. The U.S. Department of Education, Pathways Alliance, Learning Policy Institute—these leading groups all see the work of Prepared To Teach in New Mexico as having supported the PED’s transformational goals. With no other contractors in New Mexico who have the capacities to engage this work, the PED believes that Prepared To Teach is the only prospective contractor who can perform the work needed.

Certified by: Date:____________________

Agency Chief Procurement Officer

Agency Approval by: Date: ____________________

Cabinet Secretary/Agency or Entity Head or Designee

APPROVED: Date:____________________

State Purchasing Agent

If this sole source is being submitted by a governmental agency or governmental entity not under the final authority of the State Purchasing Agent, the State Purchasing Agent’s signature is not required. The signature line may be removed from this form or marked as N/A. Hard Copy Documentation for Courtesy Postings do not need to be submitted to SPD for approval.

DocuSign Envelope ID: 6E31F2F9-71C4-4080-A8B1-64A8E92584F2

6/14/2024

6/14/2024

I. Name of Agency: