WASC committee brings high remarks and praise for our school

_{By Jordan B.}

Last month, the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC) visited our school to do an evaluation. WASC is an organization that certifies schools to give diplomas. WASC comes to the school and analyzes the teachers, administrators, students and talk to parents. If WASC doesn’t think a school is doing a good job, it can shut down the school and make sure that no one graduates which affects everyone.

WASC comes every 3 years to check if the school is preparing students for college and future careers. For CATS, they gave a 3 day evaluation, starting on Sunday where they met with administrators and some parents. Came Monday, they started observing the teachers. Finally on Tuesday, they asked students questions and watched them. 

To  prepare for WASC we participated in challenges every Tuesday during advisory that were asking questions about WASC and our school.  Administrators thought this was a good idea because it was reminding the students of the our school’s mission, vision, and learning outcomes, or the skills we’re supposed to know before we graduate, such as, being college and career ready, active and effective communicators, technologically literate, and socially responsible.

“I think you guys know the information but I want to make sure yall know how to communicate it how they expect you to,” said Ms. Fordham, assistant principal. 

While visiting, WASC committee member, Keri Kimes, said, “When I first came I noticed a vibe, it was clean and everyone seemed comfortable walking in.” 

One of her biggest concerns from the last visit was that we weren’t focusing on our writing standards because it wasn’t even listed as one of our objectives when the committee visited previously. Now, she said she was glad to see there was more focus on it. She also said she was happy that they increased partnerships and that the graduation rate increased. Overall she didn’t have many concerns and she said we shouldn’t get a bad report. 

In the report, the committee believed that CATS demonstrated progress in areas that improved student outcomes. Based on the report, staff should focus on increasing mastery in literacy, writing, numeracy, critical thinking and technology skills. This essentially means we need to improve our academic success. They also said administration should ensure that all students are prepared to successfully transfer to post secondary education. This means the school needs to prepare all the students for the future career and for college. The last thing was that the school should further strengthen their partnerships. The school has partnerships with Educare, Weber Community Center, Los Angeles Education Partnership, USC Annenberg and more. Before the next visit our school will try to fix all the recommendations that WASC left.

Good job CATS!