s4story -- NS4ed LLC, a rising leader in actionable research and professional guidance in education, worked side-by-side with the New Mexico Public Education Department, the Bridge of Southern New Mexico, and the Partnership for Workforce Innovation to develop Comprehensive Local Needs Assessments (CLNAs) for educational consortia across New Mexico. These assessments represent a major addition to the requirements of Perkins V federal funding, which supports the development of students' academic and career and technical skills. The CLNA process helped districts closely align priorities, planning, spending, and accountability activities to ensure more strategic use of federal dollars and an overall increase in CTE program quality and equity.

To assist New Mexico's districts in this process, NS4ed built an online portal to deliver state-based labor market information and manage the collection of local data to inform both decision-making and data reporting requirements. According to Dr. Joseph Goins, CEO of NS4ed, "the New Mexico CTE Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment portal, seen at http://nmcteclna.com/, streamlined the process for local school districts, business and industry, and higher education by providing a central point of connection for both state and local consortia where they can collect, review, and disseminate critical information."

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Assessments of the current states of CTE programs were collected from educators in each region and assembled via the technology of the NMCTECLNA portal. Detailed professional labor market analyses were conducted by Trevor Stokes of the Partnership for Workforce Innovation and shared at each of ten CLNA summits across the state, where stakeholders from private industry, economic development and education collaborated to establish regional priorities, strategies and partnerships.

Using its NMCTECLNA portal, NS4ed was able to help align local economic and workforce projections with state funding opportunities and student needs. According to Dr. Elaine Perea, Director of the NM PED, "83% of New Mexico's high school students take one or more CTE classes, and 25% are CTE concentrators. By linking CTE programs to local workforce needs in areas of growth, we ensure students are on a pathway to educational and career success." Dr. Perea goes on to say that "NS4ed's support for these efforts is making a big difference."

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For the past four years, NS4ed has partnered with state agencies in New Mexico to provide effective labor market tools and career readiness resources to eighty-nine school districts in the state, http://www.careerpathways-nm.com/. Continually, NS4ed supports the state by updating its labor market information for data-informed decision-making, especially for the evaluation and development of programs of study for CTE.

In locations nationwide, NS4ed provides state and local educational and workforce entities a unique perspective on gathering market-based information to develop models that yield mission-critical policy change options. NS4ed, seen at www.ns4ed.com continues to build on and scale up the next generation of research, policy, and practice deliverables that yield high value and actionable results.