Majuro schools get WASC thumbs up

Students walk out the front gate of Delap Elementary School in this Journal file photo. DES received a six-year accreditation term from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.
Students walk out the front gate of Delap Elementary School in this Journal file photo. DES received a six-year accreditation term from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges.

Delap Elementary School’s US accreditation has been extended for six years, the longest term given by the Accrediting Commission for Schools of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). DES is RMI’s only public elementary school that is WASC accredited.

In a letter to DES Principal Loretta Case, accrediting commission chairperson Damon Kerby said as a result of the school’s self-study and satisfactory completion of a site visit by a WASC team earlier this year, WASC has accredited DES through June 3, 2022. The Delap school is required to produce a mid-cycle report in 2019 and WASC will send a team to make a two-day visit that year.

The latest WASC action continues DES’ previously achieved accreditation status with the US educational agency.

Assumption Schools and Majuro Cooperative School were also given the thumbs up by WASC, following accreditation visits earlier this year.

Fred Van Leuven, the executive director of the Accrediting Commission for Schools of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), wrote Assumption Principal Biram Stege last week that the school’s accreditation is “reaffirmed through the end of the six-year cycle ending in June 2019.”

Assumption, which has been WASC accredited for over two decades, was re-accredited for a six-year term in 2013.

Coop School was re-accredited through 2022, with a mid-cycle WASC visit in 2019.

Read more about this in the July 22, 2016 edition of the Marshall Islands Journal.