By Karen M. Giuffre', M.Ed. Founding Director, Voyagers Community School

Voyagers’ Community School in Eatontown, New Jersey, is proud to announce that we have been recommended for accreditation by the Middle States Association visiting team! Our Prekindergarten through High School program offers “Traditional academics in non-traditional ways” based on a constructivist philosophy.

For those of us in the progressive education field, the challenge of explaining and often defending our approach has become part of an ongoing dialogue that reaches well beyond the classroom. Although we know, as professionals who work closely with children everyday, that our pedagogy is successful, there are times when we are called to prove ourselves by parents, students, educators, community leaders and others. Sometimes the call comes from collaborative colleagues around a table asking,”How do we know?” About three years ago, Voyagers’ Community School committed to taking a good look at itself through the eyes of Middle States Association (MSA). We decided to seek accreditation through a rigorous process set forth by an impartial entity.

Through our first ten years, we measured success by looking at our process and ensuing outcomes. We were certain of our effectiveness. Then came a time when we decided to prove it to the naysayers, and to allay the fears often expressed by unknowing prospective students, parents and grandparents. We thought, “Accreditation could help “prove” that our approach is valid.” It was a risk because the opposite could be found and revealed, or worse yet we could find ourselves shifting and changing to meet the standards expected by MSA.

When seeking accreditation, there are many things to consider. First, you must choose an accrediting agency. Our school chose to accredit through Middle States Association because they purport to assure that a school holds itself to its mission, vision, beliefs and goals in daily decisions; remains committed to continuous improvement in student learning and to its capacity to produce the levels of learning desired and expected by its community; and operates in a collegial and collaborative way with all of its stakeholders. Given these standards among many more we felt no pressure to change, instead we understood the challenge, to narrate for a visiting team and for the larger organization the who, why, where, what and how at Voyagers’.

To be clear, we are, with 65 students, quite possibly among the smallest schools being considered for accreditation by MSA. Also, being open for 13 years we are most likely among the younger schools to be considered. Being an amalgam of various approaches including holistic, democratic, progressive and reggio inspired wasn't in our favor either. More commonplace alternative approaches accredited by MSA seemed to include Montessori, Waldorf and Friends schools, all grown from an underlying, longstanding and clearly defined philosophy. While making our accreditation choices we were well aware that we were part of what, by many, is considered a fringe movement in education, albeit known among our colleagues to have deep traditional roots. Despite these probable reasons to retreat from the painstaking process of accreditation we moved forward in inimitable Voyagers’ fashion.

Over the years since we first expressed our interest in accreditation we have committed an obscene number of hours to organizing, examining our work, and peeling back the onion to see clearly who we are, what we do and how we tell our story. Some 300 self-study pages later, we are proud to have secured an accreditation recommendation without compromising our philosophical foundations and underpinnings or changing what we do in any way. It was, at times, difficult to fit our long-winded answers into the boxes provided, mostly because telling our story required out of the box explanations. We often slightly, and sometimes not so slightly, altered the format provided by MSA. In doing so, we offered all the information requested and more. We provided a good sense of who we are. This became clear when the visiting team saw our school in action and had fewer or quite different questions than we anticipated.

Since the purpose of the self study was to benefit the school, we made the MSA format and approach to gathering data fit as best we could. We organized our answers to question after question in a way that made sense to MSA while engaging in an examination of ourselves and our work. In the last two years of our self study no less than 20 people, working in collaborative teams, searched for evidence and composed responses to groups of questions. Often larger groups and sometimes everyone would come together to take a look at the work in its entirety. We realized, on paper we looked more traditional, this stirred up concern. Many times during staff meetings and board meetings we considered whether the process was changing our approach. Throughout, we were lead by our resolve to tell our story so that MSA could hold it up to their light and have a good look, but also so that we could digest it and connect all of our moving parts into one whole conglomerate.

In a small private, nonprofit school who has the time for the daily routines let alone the demands of accreditation? Composing a self study, which requires more than cursory input from all community members, teachers, students, parents, board members, etc, is not for the faint of heart. In our case, we assigned three coordinators, composed a steering committee of six and created about 25 subcommittees. Teachers, administrators and board members spent an inordinate number of hours looking at everyday practice, current and archived documents, responses from surveys and founding and planning documents to answer the questions MSA posed. During the closing months, at least 4 people read and reread sections and 3 people read the document in its entirety, in many cases, asking committees to return to their work. Just moments before releasing the document to the visiting team we were editing and adding more data.

What follows, the visit, is harrowing no matter how confident you are. It's like baring your foibles to your mother or father in law. In our case, a committee of four visitors, none from a progressive school and one from the MSA office, which is unusual, spent three days in our school. With notepads and clipboards in hand they held up in an office with our 26, 2 inch binders. They wandered from class to class and corner to corner of our building with obvious purpose. They followed our students outdoors to the arboretum and our playground areas and through a fire drill. They talked to countless people including the owner of our janitorial company and our board president. They verified our data through observation and questioning and assessed our contribution to the education of a community of children and their representatives.

Every individual who participated in our accreditation efforts from start to finish poured their hearts into the process, often following long days in the classroom and at desks. Our work spilled over into staff meetings and development days that would have otherwise been spent on other pressing matters. Gaining accreditation is quite the endeavor. We took on, as a small school, what much larger schools hesitate to consider. Significant in this process is the financial commitment. Beyond paying for extra staff hours, which is the greatest and most constant drain on an operating budget, there are fees to an outside survey companies, accountants and bookkeepers, and in our case an attorney who was asked to review an existing document for clarification. Of course there are the application fees to MSA throughout the process and then the cost of hosting a visiting team for three days and nights. For almost a decade, our understanding of the monetary commitment and the years of consistent effort necessary for accreditation, outweighed the anticipated benefits, especially when compared to what else the school needed in its early years. Among responsible and realistic reasons for pursuing accreditation is the prominence of boosting enrollment. Early in the process this was the only way to grapple with the related costs.

The Middle States Association Visiting Team has recommended us for accreditation with accolades. This brought tears to the eyes of many and was cause for celebration. However, we are only in the home stretch. The report generated by the visiting team alongside our self study will be reviewed by MSA staff and several of their committees before a final decision is made in the spring of 2017.

At this juncture we have already benefitted in ways we never anticipated. We now know and have memorialized for others what we do, why we do it, how we do it and how and why it works, without a shadow of a doubt. We also know where we need to improve and we have action plans and committees in place. There are benefits to the self study process even if accreditation is not the outcome. We have set larger goals and created the framework necessary to reach our goals, particularly those related to student achievement and organizational strength. Accreditation is an ongoing process, we will be held accountable to each other and to Middle States Association for our progress. There was a time when we might have bristled at the notion of some outside entity “snooping around” but now we realize the overarching benefit and value of accreditation.

We are proud to have exposed our constructivist methods and practices to those representing a well respected accreditation agency, without wavering from our founding philosophy, adjusting our history or changing who we are. We look forward to the end goal which is accreditation, but we are basking in the knowledge that we are changing the world with another ripple in a big pond. This process helped us accurately assess how we function. We can now with certainty make strategic improvements for our future.

We welcome others who are invested and interested in progressive education to contact us about a visit or professional development opportunities at Voyagers’ Community School.