Our accreditation visit ended on Friday. The last day of our accreditation visit was a bit like waiting for a jury to come back with a verdict. They arrived a little before 9 a.m. and we gave them some of the items we had worked on overnight to address some of their issues. They asked a few questions of a couple of the staff and then went into their team room to work on their report. Then the waiting began. We knew we were going to get a few citations but exactly how many we weren't sure. Would it be four, five even seven or eight. We were very confident it would be less than ten and absolutely certain it would be far less than the 25 we got in 2007.
Around 11:40 the team chairman came to get me as chief on site administrator and John as President to give us the preview of the final report they would read as a full team to our staff. They started by giving us the important news, there were a total of four minor citations. None were unexpected based upon the updates they had been giving us and none are difficult to fix. They complimented us on a great visit and asked us to gather the staff for the official reading. They started the official reading by noting that they would only read the citations but that the full report they file would have a lot of comments about the good things we were doing. He then read the four citations which took less than 1 minute. This was a stark contrast to four years ago when they took some 20 to 25 minutes to read off all the citations and violations and it seemed like it went on forever.
When they finished we thanked them and the mood in the room was very congenial. Unlike four years ago when the team couldn't leave fast enough, this time we walked them out, wishing them well and talking about what some of them were doing this weekend in Cayman as they were adding days to their visit to do the stingrays etc. The whole atmosphere was so different from 2007 it was breathtaking. We come out of this visit with some great recommendations for improvement and with some minor fix up work that will take us a week or two to get done. We get the official report from council in a few weeks and by the time we get the official report we plan to have already taken all the corrective actions to address the four citations.
We reported to the board of trustees last night the news and the board was extremely pleased. It isn't a stretch to say this was probably the best accreditation visit in recent memory and perhaps the least citations ever received by the college. We hope to get a five or perhaps even six year grant of accreditation (the max is six) once we finish the corrective action. As one board member noted though, our next accreditation cycle begins now and everything we did right the past three years needs to continue now. As he said, we obviously have developed a process that works so keep following it. I cant help but view this visit as a vindication of our great team and of all we have done over the past three years at the college. This weekend is a time to rest and recuperate then Monday we start the corrective actions and implementing their recommendations and keep doing all the good things that we have been doing to get us where we are now.
