For the first ten years or so of our school’s existence, we spent a lot of time trying to prove that we were competent. At that time, there were no accreditation options that we found competent enough to pursue. We told potential clients that we were accredited by results. And our results were good. We were building a quality program. We worked extra hours, sought improvement in every area, followed through with the programs that worked, and accomplished more than anyone expected we could. When God finally opened the door to accreditation through the North Central Association, Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI)/AdvancEd, an agency who accredits private and public schools all over the region, we were excited to score really well in our review for acceptance. Flash forward nine years, and we were winning an award for being the school in Oklahoma that most exemplifies the ideals and virtues of AdvancEd.
A lot of traits can help a person become a leader, but competence keeps him in leadership. Followers want to know their being led in the right direction. I remember when the focus shifted from “we’re lucky to have people sending their kids to our school” to “people are lucky to have our school.” Our measure for this change was the amount of aspects for which we had to apologize. (“Sorry. We can’t do that yet.”) Our only apologies at this date are for the lack of space since we’re growing, lower teacher pay than their public-school counterparts, and not having a big enough high school to offer team sports or a full orchestra yet. We have a plan to remedy these in near future.
Now in our twentieth year, we have become the school in which to be in our area. It took a long time to gain the reputation, but we are happy that all of our hard work has paid off. We are competent educators, and our students’ accomplishments and tests scores prove it.
Our goal for our students is that they become competent leaders themselves. This requires that they not only be competent in their studies, but also that they become competent in the soft skills required for success in any jobs for which they might apply. This is the one place I love social media. Within a day of each display of competence, our families see the child and know of his accomplishment. In fact, one of the comments from our evaluators in our recent five-year accreditation review was that our awards are celebrated daily (as opposed to some “big win from ten years ago” being the focus of the school).
As I’ve mentioned a couple of times in this piece, we just had our five-year accreditation review two months ago. We’ve not seen our scores yet, but in the final meeting with our evaluators, we got the idea that they were extremely good. The only concern they had was that we were not training our staff enough on what we as a family do to make this school so successful. Good point. We’ve been working ourselves to the bone to become the most competent educators around, but we’ve forgotten to make sure all of our teachers are competent in our methods. Challenge accepted! In fact, these last five TriOpinion topics (and the next sixteen) are all part of our school-wide (teachers, students, and parents) study of indispensable leadership traits. It is our goal to make sure that our leaders, our leaders-in-training, and our parents of our leaders-in-training all understand what makes a competent leader. It’s exciting to hear first graders speak about character and have a fourth grader say, “I’m just working on my charisma!”
- Michelle