Sacramento City Unified School District's (SCUSD) college and career readiness initiatives, as cited in the "2016-2021 Strategic Plan," only equip students with half of the skills and requirements necessary for graduates to succeed in their post-secondary options (Conley, 2012). Namely, SCUSD fails to assess critical soft skills, such as perseverance, growth mindsets, goal-setting, collaboration, etc., that have shown to play a critical role in successfully completing college, finding, and keeping a job. This brief recommends that the district work with individual school sites and Envision Learning Partners to create a Defense of Learning (DOL) Community of Practice that would facilitate the creation of DOL models for each school site and establish best practices that would reinforce and assess critical academic and social enterprise skills that are necessary for graduates to thrive in the post-secondary options of their choice in order to better prepare SCUSD graduates for post-secondary success. [The brief was prepared in partnership with Sacramento City Unified School District (SCSD).]