|
As of last week, Pierz Schools is now a Level 1 Certified High Reliability School. This framework, based on 40 years of educational research, defines five progressive levels of performance that a school must master to become a high reliability school—where all students learn the content and skills they need for success in college, careers, and beyond.
High Reliability Schools (HRS) is a continuous improvement process, modeled after processes of some highly successful organizations, whereby we constantly monitor all areas of our school system for effective practices. We monitor mostly by use of surveys of employees, students, and parents/community (most recently at Parent-Teacher conferences at Pioneer February 13th and 15th and the high school will survey parents at their P/T conference in March). From each survey, the lowest ranking areas of that segment of our school is identified for needed improvement and a team of employees works toward growth. Once improvement is measured, the whole process repeats, thus the continuous nature of improving our schools.
There are 5 levels of HRS, that actually represent different large areas that are important to creating the most highly effective school system.
the first of which is ensuring we have a Safe, Supportive, and Collaborative Culture. “
Other Levels include:
- Effective Teaching in Every Classroom,
- Guaranteed and Viable Curriculum
- Standards Referenced Reporting
- Competency Based Education
Certification means the HRS national experts have reviewed the processes we have in place and have given us the ‘stamp of approval’ saying we meet the standards for a Highly Reliable School system at that level. We will continue to implement the processes we put in place to be considered a Safe, Supportive and Collaborative School. Then at the same time we are now also working to seek certification at Level 2, “Effective Teaching in Every Classroom.”
In order to support this process it is important to provide professional development for all of our staff to help with continuous improvement. We use many of our “Teacher Workshop Days” for this purpose.
| 
