To remain accredited, San Jose City College is in a race against the clock, and the school seems to be losing.

As a result of the recent Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges team’s visit to SJCC, Academic Senate President Chris Frazier called an emergency meeting Nov 29 to address the college’s lack of preparedness in meeting basic accreditation requirements.

At this meeting the AS established a process to centralise the Student Learning Outcomes.

The emergency AS meeting was the result of the Nov. 15 AS meeting where Frazier said, “SJCC was told on several occasions by the ACCJC officials that meeting the SLO deadline appeared to be a losing proposition.”

If SJCC fails to meet requirements for Student Learning Outcomes — assessments by faculty of what students should learn in each class — by the November 2012 deadline, SJCC could lose accreditation and up to 85 percent of its students, Frazier said.

“We’re failing,” Frazier said. “We’re failing seriously.”
The student learning outcome, SLO, process requires that the SLO be written, tested in the classroom and then course material is revised according to this testing feedback.

“A number of departments have not written their SLO and certainly one-half of our departments have not begun testing their SLO. There are issues here. I don’t know the answer. This is close to panic.” Frazier said.

Vice President Greg Nelson said, “You cannot be in compliance as an institution unless you have these three criteria in place, SLO, Program Review, and Integrated Strategic Planning. These are basic criteria. It takes away from classroom instruction. At my last institution, it was a burden we had to overcome, time is not our friend.

College President, Barbara Kavalier was asked to share her views about the Accreditation team’s visit and the purported comments from the accreditation team, “we don’t think you can make the Nov 2012 deadline.” She said, citing from her notes, “The visitation team leader, Dr. Morton said, “The college has made progress in SLO development.

“The faculty accreditation team has developed a SLO timeline based upon meeting our objective by the (year-end) 2012 goal.”Kavalier said. “We do know the accreditation team was impressed with the progress we made. They said they saw a dramatic and significant change in SJCC from the time of their last visit.”

Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges refused comment until the final results of their visit are forwarded to SJCC at the end of January 2012.

What is truth?

Frazier’s statement, “We’re failing, were failing seriously.”
Kavalier’s statement, “We do know the team was impressed with the progress we made,”

The accreditation visiting team’s purported statement, “we don’t think you can make the Nov 2012 deadline.”

The SJCC Times will share the answer when SJCC receives the results of the accreditation committee’s visit due by the end of January, 2012.