This past Sunday, members of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges arrived on campus tasked with overseeing the accreditation process for San Luis Obispo High School. They’re here through Wednesday to evaluate the legitimacy of our school’s accreditation and to interview students and teachers about life at SLOHS, aided by a 180 page written report of all goings-on authored by Assistant Principal Julie Mamo.
On Sunday, the team held a meeting in district office room J2 in which administrators and parents of students spoke about the issues and virtues of the SLOHS system, and the subsequent day they began to “skulk”, as one WASC reviewer said, about the campus, observing how classes are run.
They also held a meeting with students that this Expressions reporter was lucky enough to be invited to. The meeting was attended half by students randomly selected by WASC from the classes they visited that day, while the other half was comprised of students selected by our administration to represent the student body. However, upon inspection it could be noted that the administration’s selections were noticeably higher achieving and more outspoken members of the student body.
“It’s interesting that the people [selected by administration] in the meeting where higher achievers. I wonder how the issues discussed would have been different had the people present been a more randomly selected group” said junior William Hastings.
The meeting was held between only students and WASC associates, no SLOHS staff were present.
The issues brought up mainly consisted of work related stress and campus social issues. Topics touched on included the cookie-cutter nature of SLOHS math classes of like levels but different teachers, the inverse phenomena occurring in English classes, amount of homework assigned and the mean after school work time of students, and minority representation in higher level classes like AP and Honors.
The accreditation team will conclude their work on Wednesday, and we will know their verdict by early summer.
