Accreditation Celebration

For the past two years, we have been preparing for the renewal of our school's accreditation.  For the past two days, we have been visited by the accreditation review team.  This is a great, scary, tiring, exhiliarating, interesting, and unsettling process.  Anyone who gets inspected on their job understands how weird it is to have someone you don't know come in and watch you do your job.

Here's a ridiculously brief summary of how it works.  We start by dividing into committees involving teachers across multiple levels of the school, parents, a student representative, and often an administrator.  Each committee is assigned some aspect of the school to examine.  My committee examined the teaching and learning aspects of the school.  Others involved resource allocation, leadership, etc.  We rated ourselves on various criteria related to that aspect of the school.  We examined everything from whether we think we do it well to whether we think we do it from a distinctly Christian perspective. We gathered evidence to support our opinons (in my case, student work), and we write a report.  Those reports are then compiled into one large report and sent to the external review team.

The team read our report and examined our evidence for about a month before they showed up on our campus.  They wrote questions of things they might like more detail on or would like to see verified.  They toured our campuses, met our leadership, and began their discussions with each other.  Then, they spent most of a day and a half observing our classrooms.  Between them, these six people sat in on 50 lessons.  That's an impressive cross section of our school.  They rated on us the learning environment we provide for our students.

Yesterday afternoon, they delivered their findings (our report card if you want it in school terms) to the administration in detail and then the summary to our entire faculty and staff.  As he began his presentation, I was interested in one thing, the slide with the ratings.  All the other information is helpful and useful, but I wanted to see the brass tacks numbers.  For seven different fields, we were given a rating between one and four during every observation.  Those ratings were then averaged together, and our LOWEST average rating was 3.54!  I believe in what we are doing, but that was an incredible validation of what we knew.  Yes, there were things to improve on, but those were things we had already identified ourselves as needs and are in progress.

I spoke to one of our administrators, who said that our technology program was praised in particular.  He told them that they see a lot of computers and many one-to-one programs, but they didn't see people using it as well as we did.  I would like to point out that this is due to the tireless effforts of several people.  Sean and Diane, you may not be with us any more, but you got us started on the right foot, noticed our plateau / regression year, and took action to move us forward.  Laura, Tomeka, Daniel, and Carol, you have continued to coach us and encourage us to use the technology, not just in new ways but in more meaningful ways.  Dana and Anthony, you tirelessly put out fires and prevent them.  None of this would happen without your continued efforts to make it all work.  Thank you to all of you because we know you work hard to make our work easier.

The other statement made yesterday that stuck with me was that they felt our Biblical worldview integration was natural and unforced.  They even said students had commented on that.  It stuck with me because I came from public school and really had to learn to do it.  For years, I felt that I was perhaps forcing it, and I appreciate that people have taken the time to really help us INTEGRATE, not add, biblical teaching into our curriculum.

We will see the details of this report in days to come and begin work on the areas of suggested improvement; but for right now, we all get to take a deep breath and thank God for the incredible community in which he has placed us.