North Central Evaluation
Debbie Stafford posted an interesting discussion about North Central accreditation on the AASL Blog. Having been a high school librarian, the secondary schools were particularly concerned with our North Central status. Some of the elementary schools even sought North Central accreditation. However, much of that changed with meeting the Missouri School Improvement Program standards and many of the elementary schools dropped North Central as an evaluation tool. I would like to know how many high schools have continued with North Central accreditation.
I haven’t had a lot of experience with the administrative aspect of getting accreditation, but I was involved with the leadership of the Missouri Association of School Librarians when North Central proposed to eliminate the quantitative standards for libraries. As we all know, the 1998 standards no longer indicate the number of items that should be in a library or even how much square footage should be present. We worked diligently on our letters to North Central but to no avail as North Central with the school improvement route.
Currently the Accreditation Standards for Quality Schools has very little to say about school libraries:
Standard 3: Teaching and Learning
3.10 Provides comprehensive information and media services that support the curricular and instructional programs.
Well, at least we’re in the document, although the word “library” doesn’t appear any place.
Debbie in her original posting asks
A question – do we have a need for the old qualitative “guidelines” in addition to the more general learning standards? Are we better or worse off without them?
I ask the question of how important is North Central to schools at this point? I don’t really know. Is it important enough for us to discuss trying to go back to the old quantitative standards?
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