SACS Letters Normal for 'Advisement'

Although the accreditation will remain on “advisement” until at least Dec. 1, the by AdvancED was part of the global agency’s regular monitoring process.

“We keep an eye on all schools, so there wasn’t anything significantly new to them in this process,” AdvancED President and CEO Mark Elgart said after a news conference at the AdvancED headquarters in Alpharetta midday Friday.

AdvancED, the parent of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Council on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI), was responding to letters sent to the agency from Cobb residents concerned by recent Board of Education actions, especially the .

Training for the Board of Education will be the key for the Cobb school system to return to full accreditation without special monitoring, Elgart said. He said the system was put under advisement in 2009 because of the inexperience of board members, and the current board has even less experience.

Elgart said advisement is the first and lowest of three thresholds SACS uses to identify school districts being more closely monitored. He said advisement means the district has concerns to address. The next level is “warned,” which means issues must be dealt with in a timely fashion. The highest threshold is “probation,” which means critical issues must be addressed within six to eight months. Atlanta Public Schools is on probation.

Cobb County school board Chairwoman Alison Bartlett and Vice Chairman Scott Sweeney met with Elgart at the AdvancED headquarters Wednesday afternoon after the full board’s work session. Elgart said Bartlett had asked whether the meeting could be delayed until the school district hired a new superintendent.

“I said, ‘There’s no need to (delay the meeting) because that has no impact on what we’re going to talk about,’ ” Elgart said. “The calendar is a local issue; it’s not an accreditation issue. The community and media made it bigger than it was. The superintendent (Fred Sanderson) and the board chair know the process, and if you talk to them, the process played out the way we expected.”

He said he will meet with the full school board at a public meeting in the future.

Elgart said Cobb officials “were appreciative of the support and assistance we supplied.”

On the same day he announced that SACS has restored full accreditation to Clayton County’s public schools more than two years after revoking it, Elgart also defended his nonprofit agency's role in public education: “Everyone in America wants public schools to be better; they just don’t want it to be their school that has to do better. We understand when communities get upset when we take adverse actions, but our actions are designed to help them improve.”

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