By the end of January, the plan was finished and Aimee, secretary Tish Lindquist, and I spent two full days putting together the final report. It turned out to be a tight eighty-page document (not counting the appendices). Aimee and I were proud of the report. It was honest, not too watered down, and capped with an action plan that could take us into the next century.
Now if only the powers that be could understand the report...
Dr. Geoffrey Duncan, the assistant superintendent of the district, is in charge of the district’s WASC coordination. He’s been on many visitation committees in the past, and is a king of bureaucratic bullshit, in other words, a perfect WASC critique-monger. Or at least for the Old WASC, the PR, whitewash, kind of report. This Old School thinking became all too obvious in December when GoD (I’m not sure if his middle initial is O, but he has been given the moniker over the years) critiqued our Section Three, the response to the last visitation’s committee’s recommendations.
In past reports, this section was the longest and the most crucial; it was the area in which the site could really toot its own horn, extolling the virtues of what it had done in the past three or six years to make an incredible strength out of what had been a weakness just years before. Of course, in the New WASC, the Action Plan was key... this showed the path to the future, to reform, to improvements. But GoD didn’t see it that way. He felt our Step Three was too tightly written, not glorifying enough. He couldn’t see how this all-important step could be so quickly dispatched... we would not get a six, if he was our visiting committee’s chair. Duh.
He’s not. And Aimee checked back with our chair, Jeanne Taratino, a woman who had been impressed by our multimedia blitz in September (when she just happened to be visiting). Aimee asked about the relative importance of the major rec’s and was told not to sweat it. The Action Plan is the focus, since it is now a process, and anyone who says otherwise is not following the procedures of the New WASC. So there.
Of course, in late February, the wrath of GoD came down upon us again. He had the WASC chairs at all schools send him the Action Plans, the now all-important narratives that would present the process of improvement for the individual sites. Two days later, it was back on our principal’s desk. Duncan had not understood it. He had taken a bolded sentence from the opening paragraph to be our goal of reform. It wasn’t: it was a statement of our present situation. He also sent us copies of the other schools’ Action Plans. Outlines. Bullets. Not narratives. No wonder he couldn’t understand ours. It was written in prose, words. Our fearless leader highlighted the sentences that would have been bulleted on an outline and sent it back to GoD. Now he understood. Suddenly, it was a good plan.
God (not GoD) help the school that he visits.
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