This week, the Northwest Association of Independent Schools (NWAIS) is on campus to assess Northwest Academy. The accreditation organization is here to ensure that NWA is upholding the standards and goals it sets for itself. Accreditation informs colleges that graduates from NWA are reliable and come from a structured school.
“You choose to be a NWAIS member and thus to be accredited,” said Brock Dunn, Interim Head of school. “We want to be accredited by NWAIS because it’s like a badge or a certificate of goodness.”
Over the past year and a half, the school’s staff and faculty have written a detailed report to send to NWAIS. The report is an all-encompassing compilation of the school’s activities such as performing arts programs and finances.
“Part of this 140-page self study report, [made] over the last 18 months, is all the faculty and staff [getting] together into small groups and [talking] about our program, academics, fundraising and admissions,” said Morgan Kunze, Chief of Staff.
The visiting team consists of seven educators from other schools accredited by NWAIS. They’re looking to see if the school is still following their guidelines of diversity, equity inclusion and administration among others.
“Every seven or eight years the school goes through a re-accreditation process to update and maintain their accreditation,” said Dan Dunning, Self Study Coordinator and NWA math teacher.
Last year the school became property owners and because that was a big change, NWAIS gave the school another year to get their finances in order.
“Because we purchased a building in the middle of the process things got complicated,” said Dunning. “For that reason I have been [working on self study report] part time for the past two years.”
Each board subsect worked on one section of the self study report by taking what they know about the school and talking to other faculty members.
“We surveyed students, parents, alumni, faculty and staff,” said Dunning. “We made this giant report based on all of these questions and that report went to a group of people from other NWAIS schools.”
The report went through many drafts until it was finally ready to be turned in. Now, the NWAIS people are here to compare what NWA said on the report and what happens in real life. The final report should give NWAIS a complete picture of the school and how it operates.
“Our document does not need to say we are perfect, it just needs to be an honest reflection of what someone else might see,” said Dunn.
The team will be at the school Sunday through Wednesday to try and get a feel of the community and how NWA operates. The team was given a schedule of where they need to be and what classes happen when but can more often than not be seen walking about campus.
“They are scheduled for a lot of one-on-one meetings,” said Dunn. “It will look like organized chaos with moments of structure and moments of observation.”
Each member of the team is trying to look at as many of NWA classes as possible. They won’t have a set track of classes that they are visiting, but they will at least visit a class from every department.
“The visitors are dividing their time so that they can talk to everyone they need to talk to and exploring all aspects of the school,” said Dunning.
Rob Phillips is one of two co-chairs on the visiting team. He currently is the Head of School at Seattle Academy of the Arts and Sciences. While Phillips has visited the NWA campus multiple times this is the first time his team members have been on site.
“I first visited the school two and a half years ago and did a pre-visit and just came to check everything,” said Phillips.
This week is a very busy one for the team. They are here from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day and meet up in a hotel after to discuss what they learned.
“Lots of me interviewing people and hearing about the school and what they love about it and hearing about what’s going well,” said Phillips. “We go back to a hotel and we share our perspectives with each other and then ultimately write an evaluation of feedback from the report.”
The team is not evaluating the students or faculty but the whole school. They are comparing NWA to NWAIS standards, not to the accreditor’s respective schools.
“It’s not our job to think about your school from how we do it at our school, it doesn’t matter how we do it at our school,” said Phillips “Our job is to take what the school says about themselves and give feedback on it.”
Once the team is finished with all of their meetings and looking at all of the classes they will all meet up to compile their own report.
This report will tell the school if it will get re-accredited but also if their report matched what ours said. It will highlight areas of commendation as well as bring to light areas of potential growth. If re-accredited it is very likely the school will be given a set of conditions. NWAIS will tell us to update or change something like a strategic plan and then the school will have a certain amount of time to fulfill it.
“Last year more than 50% of the schools that NWAIS visited were given conditions so they may say to us ‘hey you will get your re-accreditation if you do A, B and C’,” said Dunn. “We’ll be excited to respond accordingly.”
The last cycle the school went through in 2014, NWA was given conditions and then had one year to meet them. If NWA is to get them again, a person from the NWAIS team would come back to the school and make sure the school made the changes. If the changes were made, we would officially become reaccredited.
Dunn, Dunning and Kunze have shared how grateful they were for this experience and being able to interact with people they might not have talked to otherwise.
“It’s been awesome to work in this capacity for the school and facilitate this process and has been really wonderful to see all groups of people who might not get a chance to work together, to get that chance and have these conversations,” said Dunning.
