From Monday to Wednesday, a visiting team from the United States Western Association of Schools and Colleges will evaluate the high school’s bid to become the first public school in the Marshall Islands to be U.S. accredited. If successful, it will be only the fifth school in the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau to meet U.S. academic standards. Marshall Islands High School is the country’s main public high school, with an enrollment of close to 1,000.
The WASC visit is the culmination of more than three years of work that started when Sr. Dorothy Nook was principal at the school. “The Ministry of Education, parents, teachers, students and the administration have done a lot of work to get things up to standard,” said MIHS principal Gary Ueno on Friday. “This has been a learning experience for everyone.”
Ueno said the move for U.S. accreditation was an initiative of the Ministry of Education and Nook and “I just carried it on when I became principal.”
The WASC team arrived at the weekend and will begin its assessment of MIHS from Monday through Wednesday, and is expected to deliver an exit report on its findings Wednesday afternoon.
The visit follows completion by MIHS of a “self-study” that describes the school and how it is meeting or plans to meet the range of academic and learning standards required of an accredited school. The WASC team will compare what they see with the self-study.
There are currently only four schools throughout the Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau that are WASC-accredited, and only one public school. In the Marshall Islands, Assumption Schools and Majuro Cooperative School, in Chuuk, Xavier High School, and in Palau the lone public school to have achieved U.S. accreditation is Palau High School.
Ueno said working to meet U.S. accreditation standards has required a lot of changes at the government high school that was founded in 1963.
“The good thing about the accreditation process,” said Ueno, “is it gets you to be consistent to meet the standards and to get the learning process in order.”
