Brother Martin Scores Exceptionally Well….

AdvancEd Senior High Team

Every five years, as part of the school accreditation process, AdvancEd, the umbrella organization that works with SACS, sends an external review team to visit our school. Their job is to validate a self-assessment in which the school identifies strengths and areas for improvements in its programs, organizational structure, and resources. In preparation for this visit, Brother Martin began a self-evaluation process starting in the spring of 2015. This included the formation of committees, each centered on rating ourselves by each AdvancEd standard and its accompanying indicators. In addition, electronic surveys were sent to students, teachers, and parents, asking for their opinions on a wide variety of school aspects. An additional survey explicitly focused on the Catholic identity of our school was also given to these three groups of stakeholders.  Finally, these committees collected “evidence” of our self-assessment: copies of manuals, meeting minutes, curricula, and so on.

When the visiting teams arrived (one team focused on our junior high program, one on our senior high program), they observed over forty classes, met with panels of students, faculty, and parents, and examined the evidence the committees collected. At the end of their visit, they provided their “exit reports,” indicating their findings and making their recommendation for our re-accreditation. They noted the “powerful practices” of our strong school culture linked to the educational charism of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart and to the extensive resource programs available to all students. For “Priorities for Improvement,” they charged us to expand our classroom instructional strategies to allow for more differentiated instruction and asked us to further refine our action plan for the next three years.

Finally, we were given scores in three main areas: Teaching and Learning Impact, Leadership Capacity, and Resource Utilization. You can see from the chart below that we scored significantly higher in each category than the national AdvancEd averages. Of particular note is the almost unheard of perfect 400.00 score for our junior high program in resource utilization. Brother Martin will complete a “progress report” in 2018, indicating the progress we have made to the date in the areas that we and the visiting team identified as areas for improvement.

AdvancEd/Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) Accreditation

2016 AdvancEd External Review & Exit Report Findings

IEQ scores   (Index of Educational Quality)