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The Journey to Excellence Continues: A Chugach Update
The Chugach School District won the 2001 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for creating a successful performance system using input from schools, communities, and businesses and allowing all students to meet with success and take ownership of their educational careers. Since that time, school districts throughout the United States have expressed significant interest in Chugach's accomplishments. The Chugach School District became swamped with requests for presentations and technical assistance. To better assist organizations, Chugach School District has formed a nonprofit organization called, "Reinventing Schools Coalition" (RISC). Chugach's Baldrige Award has generated opportunity to offer hope to all children in all walks of life.
The Reinventing Schools Coalition is a non-profit organization whose goal is to help 1000 districts and 1 million kids. The Coalition is creating schools that meet the needs of all children, helping students to develop a passion for learning and to reach their full potential by facilitating educational systems to:
- Develop a shared vision based on the needs of all stakeholders
- Foster cultural diversity to improve systems
- Implement a standards-based design that incorporates "best practices"
- Build a continuous improvement process which leads to excellence
- Support school-to-life services including a variety of outcomes for all students
The Coalition will provide training in effective leadership to ensure reinvented schools will be systemic in their approach, replicable, and sustained over time. This model incorporates best practices from research to develop systems of excellence, which meet the individual needs of students. District funding is tied to an ongoing evaluation process based on progress along the Reinventing Schools continuum and focusing on continuous improvement.
Chugach School District success has led fifteen additional districts to replicate the processes used by Chugach now known as the Quality Schools Model. The redesign of their systems has met with encouraging results; however, Chugach School District needed an innovative way to quickly capture the critical data to continually improve their system. The Aligned Information Management System (AIMS) is a highly intuitive software tool for aligning teachers, students, parents and school administrators, which will facilitate the adoption of a Quality Schools Model.
The AIMS software suite is being developed to offer an alternative to outdated, vertical, or custom-built software packages and to address the issues of information portability, stakeholder access, and reporting flexibility which remain unresolved in the school district software business. With the release of version 1.0, AIMS provides a significant advance in the way student performance is being measured and managed.
- AIMS is fully web-based allowing seamless deployment to Macs or PCs in the classroom without the need for expensive hardware upgrades.
- AIMS is designed with a highly secure web-based architecture which will relieve districts of the burden of internal support, save money and provide scalability to millions of users.
- AIMS has a highly intuitive user interface which is easily used by students, teachers and administrators.
Chugach School District and RISC continue the journey toward meeting the needs of all kids.
Wendy Battino has been a part of the Chugach School District for over 9 years as a teacher, principal, and consultant. She continues her educational consultant work with Chugach and several districts around the nation, focusing on reinventing schools based on the Chugach Model. Ms. Battino has an extensive background in school improvement planning, Baldrige processing, and standards-based instruction and assessment. She resides in Talkeetna, Alaska.
Contact Information:
Chugach School District
Re-Inventing Schools Coalition
9312 Vanguard Drive, Suite 100, Anchorage, AK 99507
Phone: 907.522.3132 , Fax: 907.522.3399
wjb@pobox.mtaonline.net
© December 2003 New Horizons for Learning
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