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As the school system continues to make some strides coming out of the COVID era, TCSS got a bit of good news from its accreditation agency showing more improvement in scores.

Deana Brown, Assistant Superintendent of Curriculum, Instruction, and Professional Learning went over a recently received Cognia accreditation report which gave them a very favorable report.

Brown said the annual review process covers from the beginning of the fiscal school year on July 1 to June 30 but the accreditation process is on a six-year cycle.

All the components that are reviewed, whether it’s financial operations, HR or finance, everything that is done within a system, all revolve around learning and how it impacts teaching and learning, Brown said.

The first components of the accreditation process are based on narratives, which include self-review as well as stakeholder feedback, student performance and learning environment analysis.

“We review our own data self-reflection, but whatever we present and how we score ourselves, we have to be able to support that and that is what they go back through and evaluate and look at,” Brown said.

Brown said, with those narratives, the first ones are in the four key characteristics: culture of learning, leadership for learning, engagement of learning and growth in learning. 

“On a 4.0 scale, we scored a 4.0 in all of those areas,” Brown said.

For the stakeholder feedback review, surveys went out to students, teachers and parents, which garnered a 4.0.

“With student performance analysis, it’s not so much about the student performance, but how we analyzed it, how we were able to report on the movement that we’re doing and going back to that idea of continuous improvement and how we are going to try to move forward at this point,” Brown said.

“For Learning Environment, we went with walkthroughs. We did multiple walkthroughs so we had a lot of data to go with and we were able to outscore the Cognia average there as well,” Brown said, noting they scored 4.0 compared to the average of 3.0.

Brown said the school system is also evaluated on 30 Cognia standards that are broken down into four categories: Culture of Learning, Leadership for Learning, Engagement of Learning and Growth in Learning.

For Culture of Learning, which deals a lot with just how the schools are running in general, TCSS scored 3.3 compared to the Cognia average of 3.1.

With Leadership for Learning, TCSS scored 3.3, compared to the average of 3.0.

On Engagement of Learning TCSS scored 2.9, just above the average of 2.8.

For Growth in Learning, TCSS scored 3.0, compared to the average of 2.7.

For areas of improvement, Brown said Cognia recommended having district-wide Professional Learning Centers for all grade levels, which is already being worked on.

They also recommended designing, delivering and monitoring instruction for rigor, relevance and high expectations to promote learner-centered experiences.