By Rhiannon Saegert/managing editor

The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools’ Commission on Colleges completed TCC’s evaluation, leaving the school with four recommendations for improvement and a secure reaccreditation.

Schools are required to meet at least 85 standards to earn reaccreditation. If a standard is not met, a school receives recommendations from SACS.

The SACS team endorsed TCC’s Quality Enhancement Plan, Critical Thinking — Power On, offering suggestions on how to strengthen the plan, but no recommendations against it.

“It was just a huge event, lasting many years, resulting in a very positive project,” SACS liaison Steven Hagstrom said.

TCC received three recommendations in the institutional effectiveness category and one recommendation in the faculty category.

“We still have a little more work to do,” Hagstrom said. “Our last visit 10 years ago, we had seven recommendations. There were one or two surprises, one or two things we knew were going to come up, but overall, this is exceptional.”

Hagstrom said the institutional effectiveness recommendation is one of the most common. The recommendations mean TCC needs to document changes made in educational and administrative support programs and the effects of those changes more thoroughly and in more detail.

“They want to see how we evaluate how well we’re doing,” he said. “Every administrative unit — how do we do things, how do we evaluate what we’ve done, how do we do it next year?”

The third recommendation was the result of a misunderstanding: When SACS asked for information on TCC’s community service, it received information about TCC’s service learning programs.

The fourth recommendation had to do with faculty whose qualifications differ from SACS’ requirements. Colleges must make a case for these faculty members. TCC received the same recommendation in 2003.

“We’re going to fight this one,” Hagstrom said. “We argued it then and won, so we got that recommendation removed, and we’re going to do it again.”

Chancellor Erma Johnson Hadley said the problems can be fixed through more detailed documentation.

“We probably did not document enough to suit their concerns,” she said. “We didn’t give them enough detail on how we closed the institutional-effectiveness loop.”

Hadley said TCC’s accreditation will be reaffirmed in June.