Page 6 - Priorities #32 2005-November

Who Are We?
WPS Tells It All
—In Thirteen
Chapters
The school accreditation process verifies that schools ‘are who they say they are’ and that they have a workable plan for the next few years.
Academics
For Brother Edward Englund, standing in front
of about 30 volunteer parents, students, trustees
and administrators on a Saturday morning
in early October, this final meeting in the school accreditation process is far from new. He has been handling the demanding self-investigation for nearly a decade—and it is a never-ending process even when the accreditation is of the highest order.
To the volunteers, this is an exciting opportunity to delve into the nuts and bolts of the school they love. They are here to critique the Priory’s self-study, a 200-page, 12-chapter accreditation report and to propose direction for the 13th chapter—Action Plan for the Future.
The Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC, pronounced wahsk) is probably the most highly regarded source of accreditation among private schools in the Western US. Their protocols—the set of questions that schools must answer—push schools to think about themselves in light of research on what makes a school strong institutionally and educationally.
In the next week, students will be dismissed at noon on Friday so that the entire faculty can repeat this process. Brother Edward and his team will collect all of the information, write the final chapter, and on Dec.1 will drop the finished product in the mail. In March, a five-member team of educators from other schools will spend a week on the campus, visiting every classroom, talking to lots of people, and issuing a set of “commendations and
recommendations” with their recommendation for accreditation. The highest possible is for six
years, the rank WPS earned in 1999-2000.
Continuous Process
“A good school is always changing, and this process allows us to do
it in a systematic way towards goals we define for ourselves,” Brother Edward explains. Every
Brother Edward Englund heads WPS’s accreditation self-study team—a job he knows well.
accreditation self-study starts where the last one left off, with an update of the last Chapter 13 action plan.
“WASC’s role is like the auditors’ in a corporation, or the professional association board’s in health care. They ask us to focus on three big questions: Who are you and what do you provide? Where are you going? How do you plan to get there? They verify that we are who we say we are. And they say whether we appear to have a plan that will work,” he said.
For a volunteer working through the accreditation process for the first time, the protocols can give one the sense of a perfectionist older relative going over a small child’s room with white glove, looking for dirt.
“How is technology acquired and replaced?”
“Analyze and describe the integration of religious truths across the curriculum.”
“Describe the ways in which the library’s collection and visual displays adequately reflect various ideological, cultural and racial experiences of men and women. What strengths and weaknesses are apparent?”
“For each department, evaluate its effectiveness in meeting its stated expectations for student learning.”
The protocols ask about conservation, emergency preparedness, health programs specially designed for student residents’ needs, the selection process for the Board of Trustees—everything. To go back to the small-child analogy, if there are Twinkies under the bed, the child who put them there had better point them out and be prepared to explain.
Strengths and Challenges
The Priory’s Saturday morning volunteers broke into small groups to review specific features of the report, then came together for a summing-up. Among the strengths various individuals cited: