SCHOOL ALLIANCE FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT TO VISIT MCS

While the cool brisk air of autumn may signal the much anticipated celebration of “Homecoming Weekend,” the cool autumn air also means there will be a “homecoming” of a different sort. The Marcellus Central School district will play host to visitors from the School Alliance for Continuous Improvement (SACI) from October 18 to October 21, 2011. During that time, the school district will be visited for a curriculum audit of its K-12 Health, Physical Education and Athletics program. In addition to reviewing school district documentation and touring the facilities, the SACI site visit team will conduct interviews with coaches, parents, student athletes, health and physical education teachers as well as other faculty members. Worth mentioning is that many faculty members and administrators have been trained in this total quality systems approach since former Superintendent Dr. Timothy Barstow introduced SACI to the district back in 2002.

What makes this visitation exciting is that this upcoming SACI site visit comes on the heels of the District Planning Team’s (DPT) recent two-year review of our Interscholastic Athletic Plan. The DPT provided parents, coaches, administrators and faculty members with an opportunity to revise and update our current athletic plan that was first developed in 2004 while at the same time incorporating many elements of the University of Maine’s Sports Done Right philosophy. Believe it or not, this upcoming SACI site visit will be our tenth curriculum audit over the past decade. Past SACI curricular reviews in our school district have included: English/Language Arts (October 2002); Science (March 2004), Mathematics (March 2005), Social Studies (December 2005), Middle States Accreditation for all three buildings (October 2006), Middle States Accreditation Part II (November 2007), Fine Arts (November 2008), World Languages (October 2009), and Special Education (October 2010). A special thank you goes out to Assistant Superintendent for Pupil Services Trish McCarron who is coordinating this special autumn visit for the SACI team.