The CLNA cycle is the moment work-based learning evidence matters most

Perkins V is federal, and it comes with a requirement that resets every school's clock: the Comprehensive Local Needs Assessment, or CLNA. Every Perkins recipient completes one, and every recipient revisits it on a two-year cycle. Work-based learning is one of the needs a CLNA has to address, which means the question isn't whether your program will be asked to show it, it's when the next review lands and what you'll have ready.

Most CTE programs run into the same gap here. Work-based learning happens, but it happens informally, tracked in whatever a teacher jots down or doesn't. When the CLNA review comes around, there's no clean record, just the memory that students did real things. That's a hard case to make to an auditor.

KANU closes that gap the direct way, by recording the evidence as the work happens instead of trying to reconstruct it after the fact. Students run real customer interviews, launch real storefronts, pitch real ideas, and every outcome gets logged automatically as part of doing the work, not as a separate reporting task layered on top. It runs inside the courses a program already teaches, so it doesn't require a new class period or a new curriculum to adopt. And because completion and outcomes are tracked automatically, there's no grading pile waiting at the end of a unit, just a record that already exists when the CLNA conversation happens.

For a CTE director, that turns a two-year deadline from a scramble into a formality. The evidence isn't something you build in the weeks before a review. It's something that was already being built the whole time, one real student outcome at a time.