Kids First Monadnock!

Anika Clark
Sentinel Staff
(Reposted with permission of the Keene Sentinel)

SWANZEY CENTER - After years on “warning” status by the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, Monadnock Regional Middle/High School is now on probation - possibly putting its standing as an accredited school in jeopardy.

In an April 5 letter to the high school’s principal, Joseph Smith, the association’s public secondary school commission attributed the change in status to the school’s failure to meet certain accreditation standards for a range of issues, including building issues, instruction and community resources.

The decision came months after a report by the association outlined many areas in need of improvement.

“The probation status is to serve as a notice to the district that losing accreditation is the next step if the district does not respond to the Commission’s recommendations,” said a press release sent to The Sentinel by Superintendent Kenneth R. Dassau.

If it lost its accreditation, Monadnock would follow the course of the former Thayer High School in Winchester, which lost its accreditation in 2003.

Now Monadnock must either show cause for the commission to re-evaluate its probationary status or demonstrate how it’s fixing problem areas in a two-year progress report due Oct. 1, 2008. School officials must also submit a special progress report this November, according to the release.

A definitive answer about when the school might lose accreditation if it fails to pass any of these benchmarks was unavailable this morning.

Among the problems listed in a report compiled by an accreditation committee and released a few months ago were poor air quality and numerous facility woes - including inadequate facilities for the nurse and science labs that fail to meet Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. In addition, the report described the school as overcrowded, noted fire doors that don’t have handicapped-accessible buttons and said unlocked exterior doors give improper access to the building during school hours.

The school was also told in the report that it needed to formalize its staff mentoring program for new teachers and “encourage members of the school community to become active leaders and supporters of the school’s well-being.”

As for the school board, the report urged the body to work “more effectively” with the community in the future, to increase support for budgets and other financial requests.

But the report raved about many aspects of the school, including excellent educational opportunities and a dedicated staff.

The report also called the Monadnock Community Connections School - an alternative high school program in Surry - a “high quality example of alternative programming and assessment.”

Information for the report was collected by a 15-person committee of educators, assigned by the Commission on Public Secondary Schools, and hailing from numerous New England states.

The accreditation team drew conclusions from a variety of sources, including tours of the school, classroom observation and a review of materials offered by a school self-study committee that spent 30 months preparing for the evaluation.

At the Monadnock school board meeting Tuesday night, Smith stressed that accreditation has not yet been lost.

“We have a lot of work to do,” he said, but described the two years before the 2008 progress report as a window of opportunity.

Both Smith and Dassau expressed confidence that the flaws cited at the middle/high school could be corrected.

But Smith also described the consequences if accreditation is lost - principally that Monadnock students applying for college would lose one determination that they come from an up-to-par school. According to the accrediting organization’s Web site, the loss of accreditation can hurt local property values and students’ admission chances at some colleges. Accreditation is a voluntary process.

“This is a wake-up call, and we all need to work as a team to get this accomplished,” said school board Chairman Colline Dreyfuss of Swanzey.

But board members had numerous questions about the report, including what evidence was used to determine school air quality is poor.

Smith also took issue with some of the report’s conclusions - such as weaknesses drawn from the original self-study findings years ago that Smith said have already been addressed.

For example, Smith said, although the report recommended teachers be given more time and resources for interdisciplinary work, “We are doing some more interdisciplinary teaching. We’ve got teams working on that.”

It is not yet decided whether school officials will challenge the probation.

However, Dassau said, “It’s a high bar for us to substantively address given the number of items that were cited. … There’s just too many of them out there.”