The accreditation visiting team from the Western Association of Schools Colleges came to Oak Park Feb. 28 through March 2 to assess the school and its quality of education.

After the visit, the school needs to put together a final report to send into WASC. The school will hear back either in the beginning of April or after school gets out in June. Depending on the results, the school will either simply send in a written update in three years or receive another visitation in three years.

The visit began on a Sunday afternoon. Six ASB cabinet members gave the visiting team a tour of the school.

“I think it went real well,” math teacher Cathy Lory, who co-directed the school’s WASC committee with math teacher Robin Midiri, said. “The school looked beautiful, the gardens were trimmed, the buildings looked great, fresh paint was applied to certain rooms, the school looked beautiful. The kids were fabulous … They took the visiting team all around. [The students] looked awesome and they spoke well.”

Afterward, the visiting team was led to the Pavilion, where a showcase of various on-campus extracurricular activities was set up.

The next three days, the visiting team continued to evaluate the school via classroom visits, meetings with various focus groups and a 300-page report that had been prepared by the school’s WASC committee.

“[With the classroom visits], they were just looking to verify that what we wrote is an accurate perception of what happens on campus,” Lory said. “[For example], when we wrote about iPads being used in science classes they wanted to see, are we using iPads in science classes?”

Teachers, parents and students have been working on the WASC report since the beginning of the year.

“[Students] would switch off between meeting as a student group and discussing the strengths and weaknesses of the school and meeting with our focus groups which consisted of a couple students, administration, parents, teachers and other various staff,” senior Weston Pollock wrote in a text.

Pollock was in charge of overlooking the performing arts portion of the report.

“We emphasized on the growth of the performing and visual arts programs,” Pollock wrote. “I explained how the band program has grown a lot in the last three years.”

The last step is to submit an action plan – essentially the school’s vision for the future – that includes some of the suggestions made by the WASC visiting team.

“I think, based upon the feedback we got, the suggestions we were provided were things that could easily be adapted into our action plan,” Lory said.

Health teacher Eric Pryor also said he believed that these suggestions would not significantly alter what Oak Park has already set up.

“I don’t know if I took away much, to be honest,” Pryor said. “We do a pretty good job here, so I don’t really have a take away except hopefully we don’t have to do it for another six years.”

Physics and engineering teacher Ken Jones sees this as an opportunity for the school to reevaluate what it has been doing.

“Teachers need to be reflective in their actions about what they’re teaching,” Jones said. “They need to be self-reflective to think about what it is they need to be better … not only as a teacher, but about the school as a whole.”

Lory said that there were two main areas of improvement.

“The first area that we want to improve upon is including more of our real-world application curriculum, continuing with the Common Core curriculum, the NGSS, the next generation science standards … Stuff like that,” Lory said.

The second major critical need was a focus on student stress.

“One of the suggestions was, besides looking at the AP, Honor students, or the students that are involved in a lot of extracurricular activities, or the special needs students, we also need to make sure we identify and work with the middle student,” Lory said. “Sometimes the students in the middle feel their needs are not always being addressed or they’re not talked about.”

Overall, Lory said she is optimistic about how the visit went.

“Some of the things we were really praised for included the community involvement,” Lory said. “Of course, the high level of academics was [also] mentioned.”

As long as the school maintains its work ethic, Pryor believes that WASC should be of little concern.

“I think if we just do what we’ve been doing for many years and don’t get lazy and don’t rest on all the awards that we get, if we just keep working hard, I don’t see why we’d have to worry about WASC and the feedback we get,” Pryor said.