Samo visits the WASC

 The Samo staff has begun the cycle of preparation for the upcoming visit from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) committee which is a non-profit organization that is responsible for the accreditation of schools and colleges in the west coast. The purpose of accreditation is to ensure that schools are maintaining a certain level of fundamental education for every student. “They’re currently working and retired educators that work in a team collaborative effort to be able to take a look at schools and look at the program they have and see if their meeting progress or making progress towards ensuring students are learning and that they’re learning at the level there school sets for them and that’s also set by the state,” WASC Coordinator Dr. Regina Zurbano said.  It is essential for a school to get accreditation, because if not the students and teachers could get negatively impacted. For example, a student’s diploma from an discredited school could potentially not be recognized as having met the minimum education standards and therefore their diplomas wouldn’t mean anything. The same thing could happen with classes students might take from a school without accreditation, colleges or other high schools may not accept their coursework. WASC is important because it validates the quality of a school’s program and it guarantees that there are a certain level of standards being taught. According to Zurbano, when it was implemented about 20 years ago, it was a way to make sure that no matter where a kid went, they would be taught the same thing.  “It was basically just kind of like the honors system of everybody who teaches knows there's a certain level of material to be taught at a certain pace, but some people could teach things that they liked like their pet subjects or their pet projects and spend more time on it then others,” Zurbano said. “Accreditation also ensures that, that we’re making sure we’re giving high quality instruction and that our support for our students is of the highest quality” The WASC process is a six year ongoing cycle. First, the school writes a self study that takes about one to two years which is what Samo is working on right now which has five chapters that the school looks at. They take a look at the entire school program and all the data such as attendance, enrollment, number of teachers enrolled, suspension and expulsion data and achievement in tests; they even disaggregate by ethnicity, gender or socioeconomic advantages. At Samo, they break up the groups by departments to analyze data and look at different issues and changes since the last visit which is chapter 1 called school community profile.  According to science department chair Sarah Lipetz, teachers have been working in Professional Learning Communities (PLC’s) to help students achieve success with the material that they teaching. For example, teachers have incorporated more “claims-evidence” writing into their teacher so they are expecting students to do well on Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC) testing. “Each of the department chairs will be facilitating work within their subject area,” Lipetz said. “During our meetings together, we are able to collect and evaluate student work samples so that we can norm grading and develop strategies to scaffold learning. Each department has been working with our school’s literacy coach (Cindy Milwe) to develop teacher capacity teaching in reading and writing.”  Chapter four, a huge chapter that the school has to look at is broken up into five topics. The school has to look at organization and government of the school, instruction, curriculum, assessment and accountability, and school culture and student life. The five different sections of chapter four are assigned to the five different houses and with the variety of staff in each house, there job is to look at the school for the lense that they are assigned. When it comes time for the actual visit, a committee of volunteers from similar schools comes to the school after reading the self study report two months in advance and ask questions and observe people in classrooms and at lunch to see if what is written on the report is actually true.  Due to a major staff turnover, the visit was postponed to March of 2017 so that it could be led by our new principal Dr. Shelton and that he would be able to be here to see the entire cycle pan out.  “I continue to do it because it’s a great professional development, you get to see other schools, see the great things that they do and it's not like a comparison, but if there are things that people do that are great why not share that, and you get to see how other people that are passionate provide for their students,” Zurbano said.