Early Results Are In

As I shared with you last time, we just hosted and completed our school improvement audit. The visiting team of five educators was here last week for more than two days. During the visit there were formal conversations with 41 stakeholders and informal conversations with countless others. All in all, I felt both the process and feedback we have received so far have been very worthwhile.

As mentioned earlier, there are seven standards that constitute the school improvement process. Many facets are included in the process, with the visiting team looking for artifacts or evidence of vision and purpose, teaching and learning, wise use of resources and effective communication.

Within each of the seven standards, there are four potential categories:
1. Not evident
2. Emerging
3. Operational
4. Highly Functional

The visiting team found South H.S. to be "highly functional" in five of the seven standards. For the other two, we were deemed to be "operational". The two standards needing attention are Leadership and Governance and Use of Data.

To improve in Leadership and Governance, we must spread our vision and commitment to goals throughout the South community. The visiting team felt that not enough stakeholders were on board with clear goals and the commitment to improvement. The good news is that this is an area we can address with improved communication.

To improve in the area of Use of Data, we need to gather and utilize data more frequently than we have to this point. We need to capture data on student performance on individual assessments and have teachers use that data to drive instructional decisions. As with the previous standard, we can address these deficiencies with a commitment to better utilize data.

It has been more than six years since South experienced an external audit for the purposes of accreditation, and we won't receive the official written report until January. In this case, we passed the test and are deemed "accredited" by the visiting team. However, we have work to do and we have already begun to address those concerns.

We will keep you posted regarding our progress and I would like to give particular thanks to those that participated in the process.