City schools receive high marks from AdvancED

Published 4:15 am Tuesday, April 23, 2019

The Cullman City School System recently had its AdvancED accreditation renewed for another five years, and the report from the accreditation team gave the system high marks in almost every area.

In a Cullman City School Board work session Monday morning, City Schools Curriculum Coordinator Sharon Windham outlined some of the highlights for school board members.

As part of the accreditation process, a team from AdvancED toured the system’s schools to observe classes, and interview 178 teachers, parents, community members and board members.

The report that the team prepared measures 31 standards, which include a system’s leadership, promotion of learning through quality teaching and positive relationships and distribution of resources to improve the learning environment. Each standard is graded on a color scale with red indicating an area that needs focused improvement, yellow representing an area that could be enhanced, green indicating an area that meets and expectations and blue representing an area that exceeds all expectations.

Windham said the Cullman City School System had 23 blue scores, five green and three yellow with no areas receiving a red score, which means the system is exceeding expectations in most areas.

“Overall, I am very pleased with the report,” she said.

Windham said many of the other school systems she has talked to about their accreditation had at least one red area in their report.

“I’m so pleased at our teachers, our students, our parents and just everyone,” she said. “When you look at the details of what exceeds expectations, that’s just commendable to our staff and our students and our parents.”

The systems three yellow indicators included areas like the promotion of collaboration and more integration of digital learning, along with a formal structure to develop relationships between adults and students, but the yellow score does not mean the system is not already doing those things, Windham said.

“That means you’re doing it, but they want us to keep working on it and keep making it better,” she said.

The AdvancED report also included an overall grade, called the Index of Education Quality. Cullman City Schools received a 375.32 out of 400 in that score, which is a big increase from the system’s score of 290 from five years ago and shows the progress that the system has made in that time, Windham said.

Overall, Windham said the AdvancED report was a great review of the school system.

“They said ‘Your system has it, they’ve got it going, just keep doing it,’” Windham said.