In February of 2019, we started our journey to becoming an accredited Council of International School (CIS) of which is a two to three-year process. The CIS accreditation is a rigorous school-wide evaluative process that measures alignment with internationally-benchmarked standards and provides guidance for continuous improvement. The CIS community includes 720 schools and 540 colleges and universities representing more than 110 countries. You can read more about CIS at www.cois.org.
We are an International Baccalaureate (IB) World school that implements the Primary Years Programme (PYP) in the Elementary school and the Diploma Programme (DP) in the High School. Both of these programs are currently in the process of a five-year evaluation. The CIS and IB organizations partnership for accreditation and evaluation visits and in September of 2021 we will welcome them into our community to complete this process.
In November of 2020, we started the next phase of our CIS accreditation and IB evaluation process which involves evaluating all aspects of our school through domains identified as; purpose and direction, governance, curriculum, wellbeing, staffing, facilities, and community partnerships. During this time our teachers, educational assistants, non-teaching staff, administrators, board members, and parents (where available) have been meeting weekly to review our school practices against the CIS and IB standards. It is a process that is collaborative with the intention of recognizing all of the systems, policies, and processes we have in place toward being a highly effective learning progressive school. Integral to this process is critiquing areas of growth with developing strategic plans as we become a CIS accredited school and further enhance and develop our IB programs: PYP and DP.
During this process, our community members have demonstrated their educational expertise, their passion for learning, and their commitment continual growth and improvement. Our IB and CIS journey has shown that as a community we are committed to ‘Being our best with Africa and our World.’
In September 2021, we will welcome IB and CIS representatives to our school to finalize the accreditation and evaluation process. It is an exciting time for us as a community as we get to showcase our school and community to the IB and to CIS.