From March 11 to 13, members from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges came to inspect Aragon’s campus as a part of the school’s accreditation process. A committee of educators came and met with the administration to work on the WASC process throughout the year.
The time between the visits varies depending on how well the committee scores the school. For the past years, Aragon has met or even exceeded the WASC standards for schools. The last visit was in 2018, and the last mid-year review was in 2021.
Preparation for the WASC visit involves an 18-month process where the administration compiles a comprehensive report detailing progress on past objectives and outlining future goals.
“WASC begins with a self-study process,” said biology teacher Cathryn Kliegel. “WASC sends us a list of questions, and we have to do a self-study and evaluation to decide how we are doing on those criteria.”
The WASC committee reads the self-study report and then comes to the school campus to observe.
“They are looking to validate what we wrote in our report,” said Aragon WASC coordinator Amelia Salis. “The final report was about 64 pages. And they had a rubric that they would use to assess how we did in each aspect of each focus group. They assess us based on that and what they see in our report.”
During their visit, the WASC committee had a meeting with students from the Leadership class as well as students from the Student Equity Council.
“We all know that Aragon is very academically stressful and competitive, and so that was a main point that was brought up as a negative for the school”
“We talked about some of the negatives that happen at Aragon,” said junior and Leadership student Brooke Barson. “As well as a lot of the positives that occur on campus.”
The students presented their thoughts about the negatives that exist at Aragon to the committee members.
“We all know that Aragon is very academically stressful and competitive, and so that was a main point that was brought up as a negative for the school,” Barson said. “[We talked] about how [taking] [Advanced Placement] classes kind of puts you in almost a different school than taking normal classes.”
They also talked more about the positives of Aragon.
“I talked about how my teachers are really supportive, and especially as a junior, we all know that this time is super stressful,” Barson said. “Specifically during that week, we had two papers due from different classes. I was talking about how the teachers were understanding of that and made the deadlines more flexible for us, just because they knew about the amount of stress that was going on at the time.”
Western schools must be accredited by WASC in order to maintain the value of their diplomas and maintain academic excellence. A new WASC committee will visit in four years to undergo the renewal process again.
