WASC to visit school, certify accreditation

From April 27-30, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) will visit Saratoga High in order to assess and certify the school’s accreditation.

As a third-party organization that works with the California Department of Education, WASC mirrors that of a licensing agency, confirming that the school is actually putting its claims into action.

“There are always multiple groups working to enact changes at Saratoga, but WASC is a time where all of them come together to share ideas,” senior Jennie Werner, chair of the WASC student home group, said.

After intensive brainstorming sessions, the WASC leaders, comprised of teachers, administration, parents and students, compile a list of the areas where Saratoga could improve.

“From there, a task list that states what the school wants to change is created and prioritized,” Werner said. “We attempt to ensure that students have a balance between sleep, school and free time.”

Assistant principal Kevin Mount said that part of the accreditation is a cyclical review, which means that the review repeats itself anywhere from every two to every six years. In fact, after the last WASC accreditation cycle six years ago, the current partial block schedule was created.

“For SHS, the longest review period is six years,” Mount said. “We are also required to do a mid-cycle report. It’s like a self-evaluation we complete.”

A large part of this accreditation process is the visitation, where members of the WASC committee check in on classrooms, speak with students and teachers and meet with parents. 

“We are required to send a report to WASC,” Mount said. “So when they visit our school, what they are doing is confirming that they report we sent them was accurate.”

WASC also provides the school with tools to generate generic questions about how they can improve the school, which the staff can use for their self-study.

According to Mount, the staff has been working on self-study since March 2013.  They have begun looking into areas of growth, or things they can do to make Saratoga a better place.  Afterwards, they build an action plan around those areas, in which they focus on in the next six years to make the school an even better place to teach and learn.

Although the action plan generally revolves around the same things, such as helping students value learning over “doing school,” Mount said that the staff also wants to try and find other methods of assessing students’ knowledge.

“We want to support high academic achievement through a variety of best instructional assessment strategies,” Mount said. “We are attempting to focus our curriculum more on depth than breadth, or rather, quality of learning rather than the quantity.”

Beyond the academic changes that the staff hopes to make, student health also remains a top priority.

“Sometimes students are so driven here that they don’t necessarily maintain a healthy balance between academics and other things,” Mount said. “We really want to help them by encouraging making good choices and balancing your life a bit.”