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Besides the numerous students and faculty, the bustling halls of Newtown High School were filled with visitors from the NEASC visiting committee in early October. This was the NEASC accreditation site visit-- an event for which teachers and administrators have spent three years preparing. The process ultimately went very smoothly, and NHS was given a positive assessment.
NEASC, or New England Association of Schools and Colleges, was created in 1885 in order to ensure that schools meet high standards. “Accreditation has been a longstanding stimulus for educational improvement throughout New England. NEASC prides itself on its enduring commitment to self-regulation and peer-review. The peer-review process brings educators from all over New England together and allows for honest, objective and comprehensive evaluations carried out with the utmost integrity and commitment to research-driven standards,” Cameron C. Staples, President and CEO of NEASC, said on the NEASC website.
According to the NEASC website, this process begins with a self-evaluation based on standards including “core values, curriculum, instruction, assessment, school culture and leadership, and school and community support and resources." While performing the self-evaluation, schools rank themselves in each of those seven categories on a scale ranging from deficient to limited to acceptable to exemplary. “You take a hard look at yourself,” NHS Social Studies teacher and Amy Deeb said. Deeb was in charge of coordinating the entire NEASC process at NHS. She assigned tasks and roles, organized meetings, and handled all of the logistics.
The first step in the self-assessment was to study the school’s core values, beliefs, and graduation standards. “To see where you are as a school, your core values and beliefs should drive everything,” Deeb said. A new mission statement was created based on feedback from Newtown community members. “We took about five months to collect data to figure out what words should be included, and then it was an eight-month-long process of redoing the core values and beliefs,” Deeb said.
Next, teachers and administrators self-reflected on the school’s compliance with the seven standards. “All the teachers worked on committees for the standards, and I was on the committee that examined Instruction at the high school. One of the best parts of serving on the committee is that all the teachers are mixed together, so I got to work with math, science, special education teachers, etc.- people from every department in the school,” NHS English teacher Elizabeth Hanna said.
Each committee worked to find evidence and create narratives demonstrating how NHS meets one of NEASC’s standards. “With NEASC, you need to provide evidence to back your claims, so we looked to what happens in classrooms and extracurricular clubs and activities; we looked to the blog and at our own departments,” Hanna said.
After the self-study was complete, the staff voted on final narratives to present to NEASC. “It became an entire faculty wide document,” Deeb said.
During this phase, the staff also came up with critical strengths and critical needs-- some things the school does well and others it needs to improve upon. According to NHS Principal Dr. Lorrie Rodrigue, strengths include the graduation requirements and rubrics used across the disciplines, the rigorous curriculum, group collaboration, assessments, the acronym HAWKS, extracurricular opportunities that are available to students of all abilities, communication with families through things like Naviance, School Messenger, and PowerSchool, and finally programming that fosters civic responsibility. “We’re proud of our core values and learning expectations,” Rodrigue said.
A critical need is the opportunity for more time for teachers to collaborate, a problem which will in part be remedied by this year’s addition of PLC days. “They really truly need that in their professional learning communities,” Rodrigue said. Other critical needs include the implementation of state-of-the-art technology, revised school wide rubrics that are functional throughout the disciplines, appropriately staffed FLEX and tutoring center programs, correctly tracked interventions, as well as a consistent advisory model. “You want to make sure what you have in place works and is successful,” Rodrigue said.
The next step of the accreditation process is the site visit, in which 16 administrators from all over Connecticut and Massachusetts came to Newtown for an evaluation in order to collect evidence regarding the school’s compliance with the standards. “They really got a taste of Newtown High School over a four day period,” Deeb said.
The purpose of the site visit was to, “see how the school is following the seven standards designed by NEASC. We are mostly looking for evidence of the self-study report and analyze whether the information in the self-study report is indeed happening in the school,” NEASC visitation team member and Torrington High School business department chairperson Andrew Marchand said.
The NEASC accreditors arrived in Newtown on Sunday, October 3rd. They were greeted by cheerful music as well as clapping by the National Honor Society and Link Crew students. Rodrigue presented the board with the critical strengths and needs. They were also given information about the town and school, including skits about graduation requirements. “I was thrilled to be one of the teacher actresses in the skit that explained our graduation standards. I played a teacher of juniors (not too far out of my repertoire!) and talked about meeting 3 grad standards through Proteus,” Hanna said.
The NEASC visitation team looked at many aspects of Newtown High School during its time at the school. “They went into as many classrooms as the possibly could to look for evidence that what we said in our self-study was actually what we’re doing,” Deeb said.
“We meet in the morning and go over the schedule for the day. Talk about the focus point the school would like us to look into and where we as a committee or standard are interesting in focusing. After the initial meeting we start either shadowing a student, attend meetings with administrators or teachers, interview teachers or administrators, or observe as many classrooms as possible and interact with as many students as possible,” Marchand said of NEASC’s daily process.
NHS senior Kayla Di Sibio was shadowed by a NEASC administrator for three classes. During this time, the administrator looked at the handouts Di Sibio was given and asked her questions about her classes. “It was kind of stressful to have this guy looking over my shoulder for all the work I did during those classes but at the same time it was kind of interesting to see what kind of questions he had for me and I enjoyed answering them and discussing how many awesome things Newtown High School has to offer for students,” Di Sibio said.
Hanna was randomly selected to be interviewed by the NEASC administrator. “She was a prior English teacher, and we had a wonderful conversation. I showed Great Gatsby papers with GoogleDoc comments so she could understand the time we spend on the process of writing a long-term research paper,” Hanna said.
When the visit came to a close, NEASC gave NHS a very positive evaluation. Though the exact details of the report remain confidential, the committee was very impressed with Newtown High School. “Some strong points were our culture and our climate and our leadership,” Rodrigue said.
The fact that NHS passed the evaluation is imperative to everyone inside the Newtown High School building, especially students planning to go to college. Regionally accredited colleges and universities regard regionally accredited high schools positively during the admission process. “It says to students, parents, the community at large, the district at large that you are attending and graduating from a regionally accredited school, which means that school has met the highest of standards based on the accrediting commission, and that’s extremely important and significant,” Rodrigue said.