Accreditation Forward: Embracing the Rogues and Rulebreakers
There is this saying—a stubborn myth, really—that accreditation agencies accredit based on the weight of your self-study and the sheer volume of the documentation you present to your visiting team. A school with a self-study report that weighs more than 14 pounds is very likely to get reaccredited—but   woe betide the school that turns in a report that comes in under 14 pounds. (In imperial measurement. 14 pounds is equal to one stone, and that would be the academically acceptable measure of quality – in 1585 at least.) By this quality metric, our student’s bookbags must be the equivalent weight of a 1969 VW Beetle, otherwise real learning isn’t taking place.
               Maybe it is time to rethink this approach. SAIS schools have been going green for several years,  transitioning to paperless business offices,  paperless (or nearly so) classrooms, and making concerted efforts to reduce the quantity of consumables. E-books are moving beyond the fad phase into everyday acceptance, and B.Y.O.D. (bring your own device) or a school sponsored laptop/netbook program is becoming commonplace. With this remarkable evolution in the tools we use to educate and in the way we expect students to access information, why in the world would we remain on the outside looking in as we present our accreditation materials to teams (in a big stack of binders filled with reams of photocopies)?
As a community, we firmly believe that accreditation serves the school—the school does not serve the accrediting agency. SAIS encourages schools to approach their accreditation with the same uniqueness they approach the education of each child in their school. One of the unwavering hallmarks of the independent school is that every student is celebrated for their individuality; why shouldn't accreditation help celebrate the individuality of each school? Quality is never formulaic and as we heard Rush Kidder, keynote speaker at the 2011 SAIS Annual Conference say (www.sais.org/talks), “innovation will flow from independent schools."
Here are a handful of examples in which schools leverage technology to present their accreditation materials in a way that reflects their commitment to a digital experience for themselves, their stakeholder community, and their visiting teams.
Leaders of the reaccreditation efforts at McCallie School in Chattanooga, TN worked collaboratively to collect all documents in support of the SAIS standards and indicators into a shared drive on their internal network. After a thorough self-study process, the school was able to devise comprehensive plans for their continued growth and wrote a multi-phase school report documenting the school's response to the four critical questions - Who are you? Where are you going? How will you get there? How will you measure your progress towards your destination? Â The various elements of the school's support for the four questions were stored in folders on their shared accreditation drive. The accreditation coordinator copied the contents and file structure of the folders onto thumb drives (conveniently branded with the McCallie logo) and sent the drives to the team members in advance of the visit.
A school in Georgia approached the process in the same way McCallie did, but instead of sending a thumb drive, the school used an FTP upload/download site (yousendit.com) to transmit the data to each of the team members. Nothing had to be shipped and because all of the data did not exceed the size limitations of the free version, the school didn't pay anything to get the materials to the team members. The folders had to be zipped into one file and then, after download, had to be unzipped on the other end. (What a great example of good stewardship—not just of the school’s finances, but of the environment, too!)
Similarly, a school in Florida converted all of their supporting materials to PDF, and packed them in a portfolio using Adobe Acrobat X. The school sent a thumb drive to team members with the content-rich files embedded into each other, and hyperlinked to other files within the portfolio. The linked files mean that the days of flipping through page after page to find one highlighted line or applying adhesive index tabs by hand is over—or at least very close to it.
Pace Academy in Atlanta decided to create a website on an internal server dedicated to documentation of all aspects of school operation—and I really do mean all aspects of school operation. Have you ever needed to find your school's business license or articles of incorporation or student admissions procedures or bulk mail permit number and had to go to multiple people on campus to track them down? The forms may differ, but we’ve all experienced the frustration of trying to locate a document that is both absolutely critical to the school, and yet seemingly homeless within it. Realizing that there was an opportunity to streamline all kinds of operations, Pace took about six months to scan and digitize every document they could and put them into an easy-to-navigate, web-based format. Some caveats before you commit to so ambitious a reorganization: The job was so extensive that Pace had to assign a person to this scanning/cataloging task almost full time for about six months, and they had to have the internal expertise to create something easy to use. As a word to the wise, the team at Pace Academy cautions that you should really think through your naming protocols and hierarchy of subpages as thoroughly as possible - they found themselves having to go back and rename files which can slow the process down dramatically. They wound up with 533 files in 236 folders taking up about half of a gigabyte. Here are some screen shots.
For Pace’s accreditation visit, they easily responded by linking to resources in their school report and responses to standards that showed their strategic vision for themselves and the future. The long-term value of the process is that they can now update changes very easily, and this level of digital organization will allow them to put their hands on documents very quickly.
Darlington School in Rome, GA made their report and materials accessible to the visiting team on a section of their website. Because their entire web site is formatted according to a global CSS, the report has the same look and feel as the rest of the school’s branding. But here is where it gets really cool—they converted the report to PDF and to an e-pub format, which could loaded onto any supported device (like an iPad, Kindle, Nook or other e-reader). All of the links and embedded materials are live, so the level of detail is very rich and the ability to drill down to multiple levels is remarkable. Paper accreditation reports and materials rarely reach that level of thoroughness, and never achieve that kind of portability.
Westchester Country Day School in High Point, NC uses Google Apps for Education for email, documents, collaborative projects, calendars etc. The school created their materials with Google products and uploaded them and created a web site using Google Sites. This site can be shared with accreditation steering committee members so that there could be multiple collaborators.Â
The school created login accounts for all of the team members and gave them access to the accreditation materials – in the Google docs world, managing permissions is called “sharing.” By creating accounts within the Westchester domain rather than sharing the documents with the visiting team through their own individual email addresses, the school maintained an added level of control over their own domain and the ability keep it from public view.Â
What a difference a few years makes—We are safely beyond the notion that we accredit based on tonnage, and actually, SAIS has always accredited based on quality and a school's commitment to its mission and its growth mindset. What a great way to demonstrate to the visiting team—or to an entire school stakeholder community—that a school works to fulfill its mission by encouraging high levels of collaboration and right brain, school of the future, 21st century modalities. The cynic in me does wonder if we will have a new saying soon that we accredit based on megabytes (or gigabytes, or even terabytes!).
Oh, and by the way, the 1969 VW Beetle comes in at 126 stone.
While I spent the Thanksgiving break with family in Virginia, I popped into a Barnes & Noble  looking for a new book. I stumbled across a serendipitous treasure: The Stuffed Cougar, the collaborative cookbook of The Collegiate School in Richmond.Â
A little back story: I come from a family of collectors. Each of us seems to gravitate to one marginally functional slice of pop culture ephemera and then make it our life’s mission to possess them all, whatever it is. My particular collection happens to be community cookbooks– the kind that churches, schools, fraternities, Junior Leagues and tennis clubs throughout the country produce. I love these, and I snap them up wherever I find them, bound with plastic combs, occasionally faintly stained with barbecue sauce or cake batter from long ago. For me, community cookbooks are perfect forensic explorations of what we find important: how a group feeds itself, nurtures its traditions, honors its past and takes pride in its future. Maybe I’m overthinking it, but I believe that in between the cookies and the casseroles, community recipe collections carry all of the mission and mythology of a shared experience. (Or maybe I’m just trying to justify buying more of them.)
This is the first I've found from one of our member schools! I'm so excited to start looking for more of them, and discover the nuances and differences that make each community unique-- by their food.Â
(Hey, school leaders-- have an extra cookbook from your school laying around? I'd love to add it t my collection!)
“My dream is to help these children, without compromise, and I will see it done.”
-Luma Mufleh, Fugees Academy, Clarkston, GA
One of the things I like most about my job– okay, I admit it, THE thing I like most– is learning the amazing stories and missions of our member schools. The words “mission-driven” don’t really cover it; independent schools are mission-committed, mission-defined, and mission-inspired. And just like the students they serve, each school has a completely unique and individual mission.Â
Here’s a good example: Fugees Academy in Clarkston, GA was recently accredited by SAIS. Here’s an article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution explaining a little about their mission and how it's changing a whole community-- for the better.Â
