SVA Receives National Accreditation

This past January, ScenicView Academy was extremely proud to accept a plaque recognizing it as only the second school west of the Mississippi to meet the high standards of the National Commission for the Accreditation of Special Education Services (NCASES). NCASES’s stated mission is to ensure that standards exist which permit special education agencies to voluntarily validate their performance through measuring it against national standards. Specifically, this meant that ScenicView had to demonstrate its compliance with 292 carefully worded objective measures of excellence to a site review team of experts in the field of special education. If you really want to get an idea of the monumental scope of the task, you can check out the actual standards at www.napsec.org/ncases_standards.html.

Preparing to pass our site review (which took place last November) was a complex process that took several years. Back in 2005, as we read through the NCASES requirements for the first time, we wondered if that process would even be worth the effort. Would meeting the standards take us in the direction we wanted to go, or would they force us to transform into something we didn’t want to be? Worse—would they just take up resources without resulting in any significant changes at all? At the time, ScenicView was a fledgling program in the middle of constructing a new building, solidifying a team model, and gaining official tax status as a “school”. We decided that the timing was just not right yet, and filed the standards away as something to ponder on for a future date.

By 2008, however, we felt ready to revisit the idea of NCASES accreditation. The program improvements over the previous three years had made us fairly confident that the process would be a positive experience with the potential for significant benefits.

Completing our year-long self study provided tremendous opportunity for self-evaluation and internally initiated program refinements. The nerve-wracking three-day visit of the Site Review Team provided outside, expert review of our program, validation for our treatment model, and myriad suggestions for further program refinements. And although the process is behind us now, ScenicView continues to reap ongoing benefits from all the hard work we put in. Thanks to our new accredited status, we look forward to national recognition as a quality agency, enhanced fundraising and recruiting capabilities, and (most importantly), an enhanced ability to achieve our mission and vision of helping students with learning disabilities lead interdependent and fulfilling lives.

With the successful achievement of accreditation, ScenicView joins a select few organizations nationwide which have merited this distinction. Becoming accredited is not a one-time shot, however. ScenicView will have to heed our core value of “Never Be Satisfied” and continue improving in order to pass its reaccreditation visit four years from now. Still, it is an exciting achievement that represents a significant step forward for our school, and we would like to extend a very special thank-you to all the staff, students, board members, and parents who helped make this success possible!