Despite getting a renewed school accreditation, McCurdy Charter School still needs to improve on community engagement and implementing technology in classrooms.
After three days of final field work, from Feb. 9-11, a team from AdvancED, one of the biggest accreditation agencies for schools in the country, recommended a five-year renewal of the charter school’s academic accreditation.
The renewal will take effect when the current accreditation certificate expires in June.
McCurdy Director Janette Archuleta said she is satisfied with the renewal.
“We are elated,” she said. “We are especially proud of the review team’s comments for teaching. We got a very good score in that. We’re just very pleased with the quality of teachers that we have.”
McCurdy last received accreditation in June 2010 and once the former private school chartered with the state, school administrators were able to transfer the accreditation to the charter school in October 2012.
Archuleta said administrators had been preparing required documents for the process since July 2013.
They started training teachers in preparation for the team’s classroom observations at the beginning of this school year.
But AdvancED New Mexico Director Priscilla Fernandez said despite the favorable result of the renewal process, the team identified two improvement priorities for the school.
These two weakest points for McCurdy are not enough communication with the school’s stakeholders and an insufficient digital presence in classrooms, Fernandez said.
To assess community engagement, she said the team conducted 78 interviews involving parents, school administrators, teachers and students. She said interview results indicated administrators have not reached out to community members enough with regard to the direction they want to take for the school.
Fernandez said this is a minor issue. Still, she said administrators should continue the outreach despite McCurdy’s recent transition to a charter school.
“One of the improvements that they could work on, the focus would be the transition from the McCurdy private school to McCurdy Charter School,” she said. “It’s just working on that transition.”
Fernandez said more importantly, the school should focus on training teachers on how to effectively use technology such as iPads and various software in the classroom. She said they should also have more digital resources available to the students.
She said other schools in the state also experience technological deficiencies.
“That’s one of the areas that we focus on in the state of New Mexico, so this (McCurdy) is not different,” Fernandez said. “That’s not a surprise. We want to make sure that there is hardware and software in the classrooms and the curriculum is available to everybody.”
Judy DeVargas, whose daughter is a high school freshman at McCurdy, said although she is happy about the accreditation renewal, she agrees with the identified improvement priorities.
DeVargas said she wants the school to especially improve on traditional ways of reaching out to the community.
“(McCurdy does) things on our website, but it’s all paperless,” she said. “There’s very few things mailed out and I think that’s toward where the improvement needs to be. Not everyone has access to a computer. I don’t think there’s enough parents using computers.”
She said teachers should also recognize the increasing importance of digital resources.
“Now that the state testing is done on computers, it’s important that our technology is up to date,” she said.
McCurdy second grade teacher Diana Garcia said the school should advertise its meetings more in local newspapers to encourage parents to attend meetings. She said the school is doing what it can to implement a digital environment at the school.
“With technology, we’re doing probably as much as we can,” Garcia said.
Fernandez said McCurdy’s strongest point is the quality of teaching. In some indicators, such as teachers’ high academic expectations, the school scored slightly higher than the world average.
The accreditation team also examined other aspects of the school, such as facilities, athletics and student attendance, but did not find any issues that need to be addressed, Fernandez said.
Fernandez declined to release the draft list of McCurdy’s scores, saying AdvancED officials finalized the scores Feb. 20 and the list will not be released until March.
Archuleta said the rating of her school’s teaching quality is based on the intensive process.
“Our strongest point was the teaching environment,” she said. “They have a rubric and they went into every single one of our classrooms and graded what they saw. They also interviewed elementary, middle school and high school students.”
Every elementary teacher at the charter school teaches math and science, Archuleta said. At the secondary level, the school has four full-time science teachers, two full-time math teachers and a math tutor.
Archuleta said she agrees the implementation of more technology is an issue for the school. She said the construction of a new building for the school will permit officials to install more digital resources, such as media hubs.
Administrators are in the process of applying for a federal loan from the United States Department of Agriculture to fund the construction of a new school building.
“It is just so critical for us to get into a new facility that will be able to handle the type of learning that we want to do,” Archuleta said. “At this point, we have our technology plan and one of the highest priorities is that we acquire more equipment.”
Fernandez said she expects school administrators to address the identified priorities soon. She said AdvancED will send a copy of their accreditation scores to administrators for them to further assess the conclusions.
“I’ve known McCurdy for many years and they’re very respectful of the improvements,” she said. “They want it to be a great school for children.”