We at The Straz and the Patel Conservatory know Alice Santana is the best. It’s always nice, though, when others notice as well.
Alice, The Straz’s vice president of education and community engagement, has won the Cognia Excellence in Education Award for 2023.
Cognia is an independent non-profit organization that accredits primary and secondary schools in the United States and other countries. The state-level award goes to “one educator who systematically and systemically models [Cognia] values through their day-to-day efforts to improve outcomes for their students.”
Those values are:
- Dream Big
- Stand for the Learner
- Be Bold and Daring
- Drive Potential
- Be Tenacious
- Build Connections
Like the Patel, Alice said, Cognia’s values focus on student-centered learning.
“It’s about the students’ experience and how we are able to help enhance them and grow them through our programs,” Alice said.
Cognia’s primary focus is on public, charter and independent schools. Few external programs, such as Patel, have Cognia accreditation.
“Cognia values the fact that we are a non-traditional facility, but we are able to provide education of the highest quality,” Alice said. “One of the things that they pointed out in our review is that we have working industry professionals on staff here.”
Patel sought Cognia’s accreditation to establish that “our curriculum is constantly being reviewed and is up to the standards of any in-school program that you would find,” Alice said.
Cognia’s re-accreditation process takes place every five years,” Alice said. “It’s part of the continuous improvement plan where we check in on what we submitted last time as areas that we would like to improve upon, review our curriculum and put it through the Cognia Accreditation criteria.
“It’s about a year-long process to get all of the materials together and the review and the data analysis and everything else we use in creating our school improvement plan for the upcoming year,” Alice said.
The plan passed muster and Patel maintained its accreditation.
“We scored the highest we have through the entire re-accreditation process,” Alice noted. Cognia also “provided us with a report on their findings and will provide us support as we go through this next cycle.”
The accreditation process has great value internally as well, Alice said.
“The accreditation process affords us the opportunity to really reflect on the work that we do, and how we will continue maintaining the curriculum in a way that will always remain student-centered in our work,” Alice said.