NEASC Visit Concludes

Our ten-year decennial visit concluded on Wednesday, December 5, and we are looking forward to seeing the final report from the visiting team when it is released in the next couple of months. We are grateful for the approach this visiting team took, in terms of its compassionate, thorough, and insightful look at who we are and what our school aspires to be.

The initial feedback from the team has been positive, and, when we receive the final report, we are confident that the recommendations being made will help guide our trajectory toward even higher standards of excellence. We share this in that we acknowledge that no school is perfect, and that we have some work to do in terms of the accreditation standards and our own practices in order to continue to build toward outcomes and opportunities that benefit our students and community alike. Some key takeaways, though, that we do feel confident in sharing now include those comments about this community. Our visiting team chair has been conducting or chairing visits since 1982, and, in that time, he indicated he had never seen a parent panel as excellent as ours; our school culture and climate was described as "the single best thing we have going for us, in that everyone shows up every day, including students, and feels respected, warm, welcome, and safe." The conversations about leadership were humbling, and the resources we have for students to be successful and to support teachers, including our counseling and student service model, help empower teachers in the classroom.

From a recommendation standpoint, we anticipate some challenging goals being set for us, as to how we can leverage the things we have in place to engage in a richer, challenging dialogue about what we want for students, the practices we put in place in class, and ways for students to demonstrate their learning. We kept hearing the term "raise to bar," and we also know that this creates, for us, an opportunity to build synergy between the schools in our district and help drive strategic planning, since the recommendations being made will be felt by students in our school who are just starting in kindergarten or preschool!

In short, we say thank you. We thank the Dream Team Steering Committee of co-chairs Molly Hendrickx and Nicole Yakstis, Michael DiMeglio, Tracy Larkin, and Christine Prior, our administration colleagues, our faculty and staff, our students, our community and our school committee. To paraphrase School Committee Chair Ms. Stark at Wednesday's School Committee meeting, we have the "awesome responsibility" of caring for the students of Uxbridge, and we embrace that task with the diligence that care demands. To have that work validated by a team of peers with neutral lenses from across New England is high praise, and to see those recommendations in writing will only enhance that care and responsibility as we move forward, together.

The presentation we shared with School Committee is linked below. We look forward to communicating the findings publicly later this year!