Woodcrest Christian Receives Six Year Accreditation
Woodcrest Christian Receives Six Year Accreditation
Every six years, each public high school in America is evaluated through a process called accreditation. An independent organization sends a team of educators to the school to verify that the school is meeting national criteria that demonstrates a high-quality level of education and meets the academic expectations of colleges and universities for incoming students. While some Christian schools do not participate in this process, the Woodcrest Christian School System has participated in accreditation for 18 years and is evaluated by not one but two national organizations; the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). WASC is the organization that evaluates all public schools and colleges in the western United States. And while public schools limit their participation to just high schools, WCSS has all three of our schools go through the accreditation process.
We just completed the accreditation process this Spring. After spending almost two years writing a self-evaluation report focused on key standards, a team of seven men and women from various schools visited all three of our schools and verified what we submitted in our report and made additional observations regarding the education that was taking place. The real focus of this entire process is to help us perform a self-evaluation and determine where we can improve the quality of the education we are providing to our students. Even though last year’s Parent Satisfaction Survey indicated that over 90% of parents agreed or strongly agreed that we are providing an effective and Christ-centered education, we know that we have room to improve and desire to do so.
The result of this year’s accreditation was overwhelmingly positive. The visiting team was very impressed with the Christ centered education that takes place in our classrooms, the quality and level of care our teachers demonstrate each day for students, and the rigorous level of academics matched with a holistic approach to developing students spiritually, emotionally, physically, and socially. In fact, the team was required to give us three major commendations and they gave us eight! They were also required to give us three major recommendations and they gave us just three and those were ones that we self-identified as areas of improvement. Specifically, we realized that we needed to do a better job at providing ways for parents to give us and receive from us feedback on the effectiveness of our programs, create a more systematic way to collect data on the effectiveness of our programs, and continue to work on increasing the critical thinking skills among our students. Despite the glowing report, we will continue to focus on improving the quality of education that we provide knowing that our students need our best to be prepared for what God is calling each of them to in their lives.
