The Lawrence County School system received uniformly positive reviews from an accreditation team on Wednesday and was certified for another five years.
A group of evaluators from AdvancED, part of what was formerly the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, presented the system’s external report at a Board of Education meeting Wednesday at 2 p.m.
Kathy Reifschneider, the lead evaluator for the group, said they interviewed 115 “stakeholders” of the school system over four days — 41 teachers, 20 administrators, 28 students, 8 parents, 13 support staff, four board members and Superintendent Heath Grimes.
The final report was divided into seven domains or environments — Equitable Learning, High Expectations, Supportive Learning, Active Learning, Progress Monitoring and Feedback, Well-Managed Learning and Digital Learning. In all seven domains, the system’s scores were above the national average. The system was rated especially well in the Digital Learning area, with a score of 2.76 compared to the average of 1.88. The system was also given credit by the evaluators for its resourcefulness.
“Being above average in every domain speaks very highly of your school system,” Reifschneider said. “There have clearly been a lot of changes in the last five years, and you could feel the movement going forward and a lot of excitement.”
Overall, the team gave the system an Index of Education Quality score 300.00, compared to the national average of 282.79.
“This review is a real credit to our faculty and staff, and they have the gratitude of our Board of Education,” board chairman Jackie Burch said. “I’ve been around the system a long time, and I’ve never seen as much passion and zeal as we have right now.”
The report listed two “powerful practices” for the system, or areas where it excelled. One was in relation to the system’s method for planning professional development and the other how the faculty and staff worked to create a culture that was highly committed to student learning.
Grimes said he gave credit also to the board for working together for the betterment of the students, and also publicly thanked curriculum supervisor Karen Hitt for all her work in preparation for the accreditation team’s visit.
“Having this team speak positively about the culture in our school system is huge to me,” Grimes said. “Our students are loved and are being given a good foundation.”
AdvancED is the largest community of education professionals in the world. It is a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts rigorous, on-site external reviews of PreK-12 schools and school systems to ensure that all learners realize their full potential. While their expertise is grounded in more than a hundred years of work in school accreditation, AdvancED is far from a typical accrediting agency. The goal isn’t to certify that schools are good enough. Rather, the commitment is to help schools improve.
Combining the knowledge and expertise of a research institute, the skills of a management consulting firm and the passion of a grassroots movement for educational change, AdvancED serves as a trusted partner to 32,000 schools and school systems — employing more than four million educators and enrolling more than 20 million students — across the United States and 70 other nations. AdvancED was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the North Central Association (NCA) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS)—and expanded through the addition of the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) in 2011.
