Pacific East Comprehensive Center (American Samoa, Hawai’i, Republic of Marshall Islands)

The Pacific East Comprehensive Center (Pacific East CC) provides high-quality, intensive capacity-building services to state and local education agencies, administrators, educators, and their communities in the Pacific region (see Background section) to help them select, implement, and sustain evidence-based programs, practices, and interventions that support improved educator and student outcomes.

Funded through the U.S. Department of Education, and part of a Comprehensive Center Network, Pacific East CC is the primary capacity-building support for educators in American Samoa, Hawai’i, and the Republic of Marshall Islands (RMI).

Background

By statute, the U.S. Department of Education is required to establish not less than 20 centers, with at least one in each of the 10 geographic regions served by the Department’s Regional Educational Laboratories (RELs). These centers comprise the Comprehensive Center Network (CCNetwork), which consists of a National Comprehensive Center, 14 regional comprehensive centers, and four content centers working together to help state education agencies (SEAs), regional education agencies (REAs), Tribal education agencies, local education agencies (LEAs), and schools address areas of national need and advance several key focus areas. Focus areas include assisting states and districts on academic achievement and excellence, offering all students a comprehensive and rigorous education, eliminating the educator shortage, providing every student a pathway to multilingualism, and providing schools adequate and equitable funding.

Each comprehensive center must develop a five-year plan to carry out authorized activities. The plan of each center is developed to address the educational challenges facing students, practitioners, and education system leaders, as well as priorities established by the department and jurisdictions. Each center has an advisory board—with representation from SEAs, LEAs, higher education institutions, educators, administrators, policymakers, researchers, and business representatives—that advises on allocation of resources, strategies for monitoring and addressing the region’s educational needs (or the nation’s needs, in the case of national and content centers), maintaining a high standard of quality in performing its activities, and carrying out the center’s activities in a manner that promotes progress toward improving student academic achievement.

Pacific East CC’s unique island-based geographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity significantly impacts its educational landscape and pre-Kindergarten to 12th grade education systems. This leads to challenges and opportunities related to communication, transportation, and culture responsiveness. Additionally, the jurisdictions operate using centralized education systems that function as both SEA and LEAs for their respective school systems.

Intended impacts

Pacific East CC’s goals and impacts are determined in strong partnership with the Center’s advisory council, as well as leadership in the region’s education agencies. Included in the determination of the goals and impacts is a focus on high leverage problems (HLPs) that each state/jurisdiction indicates are critical to solve for student and system success; HLPs will be further refined for each state/jurisdiction.

Generally, the goals for all regional comprehensive centers are as follows:

• Carry out approved consolidated state plans under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended by the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 (ESEA).
• Implement, scale up, and sustain evidence-based programs, practices, or interventions that focus on key initiatives that help LEAs and schools improve student outcomes.
• Address the unique educational obstacles faced by underserved populations.
• Improve implementation of ESEA programs, including collecting and reporting program data and addressing corrective actions or results from audit findings and ESEA program monitoring.
• Work with the National Comprehensive Center and content centers to help clients select, implement, and sustain evidence-based programs, policies, practices, and interventions to make their work available to as many REAs, LEAs, and schools in need of support as possible.

Timeline

The contract for the Pacific East CC is granted from October 2024 through September 2029.

Resources

• Coming soon!

Other info

• Co-directors: Ben Cronkright and Kapono Ciotti
• Sign up to receive Pacific East CC’s newsletter, information, and events!
• Social media channels and website are coming soon.