PROGRESS AND PROCESS EVALUATION

PROGRESS MONITORING AND PROGRAM and PROCESS EVALUATION

AT

VERGENNES UNION HIGH SCHOOL

(Prepared by: Ed Webbley, Peter Reynolds, Tom O’Brien, and Carol Spencer)

Meetings, Discussions and Studies about further participation in NEASC

In order to understand the potential impact of creating a unique VUHS progress monitoring system, we made some inquiries about the ‘accreditation’ aspect of our NEASC membership. The results of these inquiries are just below in item # 3.

3. Studies of the impact of accreditation on VUHS students’ acceptance into college.

a) November, 2005. In order to begin a dialog among educators, community and board, the superintendent authorized an initial inquiry. Lisa Presson (who was working at ANWSU at that time) contacted 20 colleges. She eventually had information from Middlebury, Castleton, St. Michaels, Ithaca and Harvard. Her one page report of the conversations, websites and e-mailed information led her to the conclusion “…accreditation does not appear to hold much weight with colleges and universities.”

b) We followed up this study with a more systematic study in November, 2007. We hired the services of an impartial college admissions officer from Rider College in New Jersey to conduct a survey for us. She used a database of schools to which VUHS students had applied or at which they had been accepted the previous school year. The 50 colleges and universities were contacted initially by email and then subsequent contacts were also made via email and phone. In the end, each school was contacted three times via email and one time via phone. The questions each school was asked are the following:

What does your college/University feel about regional accreditation agencies?
Does regional accreditation weight your college/University's decision one way or another?
Would your college/University not take a student, otherwise qualified, from a school with no particular accreditation?
Given 2 applications of equal or equivalent merit, one student coming from an accredited high school and the other student from a non-accredited high school, would the accredited application have a higher priority in your admissions process?

The schools that she had solid data from were

Castleton State College

Community College of Vermont

Florida State University

Georgetown

Green Mountain College

Northeastern

The Ohio State

Penn State

Quinnipiac

Sterling College

Temple University

University of California at Santa Cruz

University of Delaware

University of Maine

University of Maine at Farmington

The conclusions the researcher drew from her study were

Overall, it appears that a student from Vergennes High School would not be at a disadvantage if the school chooses not to reapply for state accreditation. It would be a benefit to the students at the high school for their counselors to contact any colleges that students have not applied to in the past and check on their accreditation policy. There are so many colleges and universities in the country that it would be a shame for one of the students at Vergennes High School to be rejected because proper research on the institution was not done. As long as the applicant is qualified I would doubt highly that an institution would not accept them.