AdvancED Nebraska is pleased to announce Dr. Barbara M. Schweiger as the recipient of the AdvancED Excellence in Education Award to honor her service and leadership in promoting and advancing excellence in education to NCA CASI accredited schools and students in Nebraska.  Dr. Schweiger is currently the Administrator of Human Resources and School Improvement at the Archdiocese of Omaha.

Throughout a long and distinguished career, she has supported Nebraska schools and students in a variety of educational capacities.  Early in her career, she was a teacher at St. Cecilia and St. Pius X in Omaha.  In her 37 years at Omaha Public Schools, she taught in the elementary schools and served as Reading Specialist and Consultant, Supervisor of Elementary Summer School, Supervisor of Reading Services, and Coordinator of School Improvement and North Central Accreditation in the Central Office.  Dr. Schweiger also worked at the Nebraska Department of Education as Coordinator of Reading and Writing Frameworks.  She has taught graduate courses in reading at both the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

After retiring from Omaha Public Schools, Dr. Schweiger accepted a position with the Archdiocese of Omaha where, for the past eight years, she has been a leader in promoting academic excellence in the Catholic Schools, while at the same time supporting the Archdiocesan School System and its educators in honoring the Catholic culture and identity.  She has continued to serve NCA CASI and AdvancED as a Lead Evaluator and Team Chair or Member on numerous school and school system External Reviews.  Her career has been dedicated to the improvement of education and the needs of students.   Congratulations to Dr. Schweiger!

If you were unable to attend one of Nebraska's four Continuous Improvement Workshops or would simply like to review the information about ASSIST or prepare for an External Review, AdvancED has developed a number of online resources for your reference.  You can watch a 12-minute video tutorial about ASSIST that provides an excellent overview of this new reporting platform.  Several online guides are available as well: Quick Start Guide to ASSIST, Guide to Administering Diagnostics (i.e., the Self Assessment and Executive Summary) and the Self Assessment Workbook.

For schools that are hosting External Reviews in January 2013 or after and will be required to complete stakeholder surveys and student performance data, there are resources such as the Guide to Administering Stakeholder Surveys, a Student Performance Workbook, and worksheets for Stakeholder Feedback and Student Performance.  Please contact our office to find out how you can begin using these resources today.

With the release of the new Standards and Accreditation Protocol, updates to the original Catholic Identity tools and resources became a priority for AdvancED.  At the beginning of the update process, AdvancED became aware of a national initiative led by Dr. Lorraine Ozar, Executive Director for the Center for Catholic School Effectiveness, School of Education, Loyola University Chicago, and Dr. Patty Weitzel–O’Neil, Executive Director of the Roche Center for Catholic Education, Lynch School of Education, Boston College.  A series of meetings resulted in a collaborative agreement between Dr. Ozar, Dr. Weitzel–O’Neil and AdvancED to provide project support for the integration of the new National Standards and Benchmarks for Effective Catholic Schools into the AdvancED Accreditation Protocol.

Beginning in the fall of 2012, Catholic Dioceses schools can apply the newly developed Catholic Criteria, and access a suite of diagnostic Catholic Identity surveys in AdvancED’s Adaptive System of School Improvement Support Tools (ASSIST), a state-of-the-art, web-enabled platform for accreditation and continuous improvement.  Catholic Dioceses also will have access to system-level Catholic Identity criteria that is aligned with the school content in the same way that the AdvancED Standards for Quality School Systems align with the AdvancED Standards for Quality Schools.  As an additional diagnostic tool in ASSIST, Catholic schools and school systems will be able to incorporate these newly developed criteria into their internal review process.  AdvancED will provide training and guidance for Catholic Dioceses on the integration process and its relationship to accreditation.  For more information, contact Dr. Eddie Krenson, Vice President for Nonpublic School Services at ekrenson@advanc-ed.org or Dr. Mary Ann Keeley, Director of Accreditation for Nonpublic School Services at makeeley@advanc-ed.org.