Palisades Charter High School is fully accredited by the Western Association of Schools & Colleges (WASC).

PCHS is currently in a WASC accreditation year. Paul Mittelbach is serving as our WASC Coordinator, he has been diligently

working with the PCHS WASC team, staff, and community to gather data and information for this year's report. The PCHS WASC visit will be held on March 12 - March 14, 2018. We welcome the WASC visiting team to PCHS!

1. Chair: Mark Swanitz, Principal, Santa Ynez Valley High School
2. Member: Ms. Naomi Lara, Principal, Assurance Learning Academy
3. Member: Ms. Christine Graves, Assistant Principal, Mission View Public School
4. Member: Mr. Tom Karnes, Valley Oaks Charter School
5. Member: Ms. Amie Macbeth, Lead Teacher, Ivy High School
6. Member: Ms. Sharmeen Mahmud, Counselor
7. Member: Mr. Aaron Smith, Learning Lead
8. Member: Mr. Alex Yoshinaga, Teacher, Diego Valley Public Charter

Palisades Charter High School’s continues to update it's original 2012 school-wide action plan. Those revisions every year are characterized by:

• the hard work of all stakeholders
• the efforts of school leadership to adhere systematically to the action plans;
• an increasing awareness of the need to ensure equitable educational opportunities for all students
• school-wide efforts to implement
  • Long-Term Strategic Planning

  • Common Core standards

  • A new, up-to-date evaluation tool for teachers

  • New technological systems and applications for students, parents, and staff

  • Deeper and more frequent collaboration and common assessment in Professional

    Learning Communities

PCHS is fortunate in recognizing that its stubborn areas for growth, such as bridging the educational opportunity gap and building a network of systemic academic and personal support for students, are both within reach of being addressed due to promising new technological and pedagogical developments, and traceable to two flaws in the 2012 Action Plan that can be corrected through the collaborative WASC accreditation process.

The Long-Term Strategic Planning Committee (LTSP) was established in 2012 as an administrative advisory body that is open to all stakeholders. It has enabled PCHS to continuously refine and reshape its mission, vision, values, and goals to meet student needs by embedding the 2012 WASC Action Plan goals and Visiting Committee recommendations into the school’s Long-Term Strategic Plan (LTSP, Appendix A) and Local Control and Accountability Plan (LCAP, Appendix B), annually measuring and evaluating the school’s progress toward meeting these goals, and revising and updating accordingly. The LTSP Committee meets monthly and is composed of five standing committees (1: Academic Achievement and Innovation, 2: Facilities/Operations, 3: Family and Community, 4: Fundraising and Development, and 5: Technology). It has added a new model for shared accountability and decision-making. The monthly meetings are a great opportunity to hlep PCHS with school planning. We encourage all stakeholders to particiapte, join a group, assist with  team collaborations and help improve PCHS’s already existing Professional Learning Community (PLC). 

The files below comprise the document prepared for the WASC Accreditation Team: