Westport Middle High School principal Laura Charette was doing one chore or another last week when a student approached her, asked if she could drop one of her two physical education electives and replace it with an EMT certification course that interested her more.

“Of course!” the Westport Middle High School principal replied.

Even a year ago, such flexibility wouldn’t have been as easy to accommodate. But one of the school administration’s recent goals has been to empower students to be “active learners” who have the ability to lead their own learning and shape their own curriculum to a greater extent than ever before.

“It’s a major focus of our district strategic plan,” Charette told the school committee last Thursday night. “I just think that’s awesome! She was coming to us with a plan for her own learning and taking accountability for that.”

The move toward flexible, active learning is one of many educational areas cited by a national accrediting agency that visited the Westport Middle High School this past December. Though visitors from the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC) said there is room for improvement, visitors presented a mostly positive report, and will give the district two years to address some areas they see that could use some improvement before renewing the school’s accreditation.

“They were very pleased with everything they saw,” Charette said.

Westport High School was last accredited by NEASC officials in the Spring of 2013, and schools go through the reaccreditation process every 10 years.

While NEASC used to just visit once every 10 years, that process has changed and now districts have a “collaborative conference” with NEASC visitors after eight years. That conference was supposed to happen in Westport two years ago, but was pushed back until this past December as a result of the pandemic. With that December visit now done, Westport has until 2025 before officials again meet with NEASC evaluators.

In their 37-page report just released and based on the December visit, NEASC officials commended the school in 10 areas, from the spirit of collaboration noticed among staff, administrators and district leaders noticed, to its   “seamless merger of the middle and high schools into one school with the same principal,” to the wide range of courses and extracurricular learning opportunities available to students.

There were a few areas in need of improvement, but superintendent Thomas Aubin said that “overall we’re very happy with the results of the report. We also recognize that areas they pointed out for improvement are the same areas that we had identified.

In the report, the district was rated in six “foundational element” areas, and meets NEASC standards in five of the six, including two different aspects of learning culture, professional practices, learning support and learning resources. One area, student learning, does not meet the standard, NEASC visitors wrote, due to issues with the curriculum.

“The school has yet to have a complete written curriculum in a consistent format for all courses in all departments across the school,” NEASC wrote.

“Several departments have curriculum documents in common formats for many courses, including guiding/essential questions, concepts, content, and skills, and some assessment strategies; however, instructional strategies have yet to be documented in all curricula.”

On Thursday evening, Charette told school committee members that she agrees with the visiting team’s assessment, saying curriculum can be a difficult area to address but is being worked on.

“We’ve made many gains in that area,” she said. “Not everything is done, but we will get there.”

“Principal Charette has worked on codifying our curriculum,” Aubin added. “I can say unequivocally, for our core programs we have a full written curriculum. The struggle we’re facing right now is the electives.”

The next two years

Over the next two years, Charette said school officials will continue to work on goals and priorities identified internally, and by NEASC visitors. School committee members said they’re optimistic the school will continue to improve.

“The word on the street is that we all know that things are really humming in the school, and you should feel proud,” committee member Antonio Viveiros said .”I think it’s jsut being noticed; not just by our community, by others.”

As part of the process, school officials listed areas they’ll prioritize for improvement ver the next two years.0