A statewide association of education researchers has recognized Alleghany County Public Schools for its committment to the involvement of students, parents, employees and the general public in decision making and policy development.

During its meeting Monday at Boiling Springs Elementary School, the Alleghany County School Board learned that the Virginia Educational Research Association named the school division as recipient of the 2008 Charles Edgar Clear Award.

Alleghany representatives will accept the award during VERA's annual state conference in Charlottesville Friday, September 19, 2008. The award is given annually to an individual, group, or organization that has made a sustained contribution to educational research or evaluation in Virginia or in the nation. The award is competitive and nominations are sought from educators across the state. Alleghany was nominated by Dr. Wayne Worner, former dean of the Virginia Tech College Education and a regular consultant for the school division.

"For the past six years, Alleghany County schools have engaged in a systematic approach to soliciting stakeholder views and using that input in their short range and long range planning efforts," Worner said in a statement issued by the school division. "Alleghany's experience and the value the school division assigns to the results of stakeholder input should serve to enlighten and motivate other school divisions to undertake similar efforts.

Like many school divisions, Alleghany County gathers large amounts of survey information and information related to student test performance, graduation and drop-out rates, attendance, discipline and participation in extra-curricular activities Worner said. However, Alleghany's intense analysis and applications of the data go well beyond standard practice, he added.

"We are in an era when many school divisions are engaging in 'data-based decision-making' and creating 'data warehousing' to help them evaluate current practices," Worner said. "Typically those data sets include financial and test achievement data as well as other performance indicators. Only rarely do school divisions match Alleghany's efforts to supplement the numbers with routine evaluation of the views of students, parents, employees and other citizens."

Since his arrival in 2001, Alleghany Superintendent Dr. Bob Grimesey has maintained division-level advisory committees that participate in the development and evaluation of survey questions and results. Advisory committees exist for teachers, classified employees, parents and the minority community. Other members of the division-level staff engage in similar activites with advisory committees made up of employee groups and mixed groups of parents, staff and local agency representatives. They include a safe schools committee, a health insurance committee and advisory committees for special education, gifted education and textbook selection among others.

Principals also seek input and advice through their PTA or PTO executive councils, booster club boards, and advisory committees for parents, employees and students. "The structure of the advisory process may vary from one school to the next, but the School Board has made clear its desire that our school division and all of our individual schools provide a regular formal means by which all stakeholders can be involved in the continuous improvement of our schools," Grimesey said.

Advisory committees perform traditional roles of advising administrators in determining ways to solve these problems, Grimesey explained. "The Clear Award recognizes our efforts to use advisory participants to identify the questions that we should ask on surveys and then to engage the participants in helping us to analyze the results of the responses to those questions. In the process, our stakeholders help the administration to advise the school board on the priority order of our school division's goals for improvement."

Alleghany is among 17 of Virginia's 132 school divisions in which the division and all of its individual schools met all of the "adequate yearly progress" requirements of the federal "No Child Left Behind" law in 2008. It is one of only five school division that have earned that distinction for three years in a row.

"The involvement of staff members, parents and the community in decision making and policy development has been a critical part of our students' academic success," Grimesey said. "We need them to help us to identify areas in which we can improve and to develop strategies to address those areas. The Clear Award certifies that we have developed a program that enables that involvement."

The Clear Award is named for Dr. Charles Clear, a prominent Virginia educator who contributed to the early development of VERA. He promoted educational research and evaluation through his position in the Virginia Department of Education.

Source: Virginian Review, Tuesday, September 16, 2008