This much, most Mitty students are aware of. However, what most students aren’t told is that WASC isn’t even the correct name for the program. Or that they can thank the evaluation process for Mitty’s strength and conditioning program, the brand-new (paid!) Google Gemini accounts, and even the omnipresent school iPads. That’s right, the very thing you’re probably reading this article on can trace its origins to those people holding clipboards in the back of your English class. But, why is that? What does WASC even mean anyway? And, most importantly, how will this program continue to affect Mitty? Read on, because this article will answer all of these burning questions and more! 

The entire process of accreditation serves to ensure that Mitty is fulfilling its mission as a school, and that it should remain open at all. Rather than having an outside organization with less internal knowledge of the school be in charge of this critical process, Mitty self-evaluates through the program we call WASC. WASC stands for “Western Association of Schools and Colleges“, which is the title of the program Mitty was formerly a part of. It facilitated self-evaluation for western schools in order to verify that they were meeting educational and administrative requirements. Today, Mitty continues to self-evaluate, but it does so through WCEA, the “Western Catholic Educational Association,” instead. The key difference between the two is that WCEA also evaluates a school’s fulfillment of its Catholic mission. However, the WASC name stuck, and is now used to refer to the accreditation process as a whole, rather than the specific organization. Despite this minor change, the intention behind self-evaluation remains the same, as does the outcome. Ms. Madia, the WCEA coordinator, explains this in an interview, stating that, 

A closer look at the actual process of self-evaluation reveals this. As it turns out, those people who visited Mitty to evaluate, aptly called “the visiting committee”, are just the tip of the WCEA iceberg. The actual process starts two years prior, when a board of teachers and administrators sit down to review the WCEA requirements — which is essentially a fancy checklist— and then gather data detailing the ways in which Mitty meets those requirements. One way this information is amassed is through surveys, which are taken by administrators, teachers, parents, and even students. These surveys are then used to create a report with details about Mitty, such as its Catholic identity, academic aptitude, and co-curricular programs such as sports teams or performing arts.  After this report is sent in, WCEA sends a committee of teachers or staff from various other Catholic schools to confirm what was written in the report. This is the part of the WCEA evaluation that we’ve all seen. The visiting committee also interviews staff, teachers, and students about various aspects of the school, thus completing the six-year cycle of evaluation. 

So, how exactly does writing reports or filling out surveys factor into the changes in Mitty that have been brought about by WCEA accreditation? Another aspect of the self-evaluation process is creating a ‘roadmap’ of sorts, a strategic plan for Mitty to adhere to for the next few years. These plans have been pivotal to numerous changes made around campus. The most recent example of this is the recent acquisition of Google Gemini accounts for the entire student body. They were brought about through recent tech initiatives included in the strategic plan. Ms. Madia explains that, “In the strategic plan, we’ve looked at…curriculum and AI and technological advances—these came out of the strategic plan two years ago. Through the WASC process, one of the elements of the educational improvement plan is to look at the influence of AI on education.”

Other previously mentioned examples of this are the school iPads. Ms. Madia referenced another earlier tech initiative that focused on implementing iPads into everyday school, and Mitty has since seen a shift to almost all work being done digitally. This demonstrates the extent to which students are affected by WCEA evaluations; without them, Mitty would hardly be the school it is today. The impacts of the accreditation process will continue to be seen as future initiatives work to improve our school for years to come.