November 6, 2006

Announcing Accreditation:

Logan County Childrens Services has undertaken the goal of becoming an accredited agency through the Council on Accreditation (COA), a national accrediting body for public and private social service agencies.  COA accreditation is a comprehensive process including a self-study and on-site review by trained Peer Reviewers.  At the center of the COA organization and this process are the three core principles of credibility, integrity and achievement. 

In seeking to be accredited, we are committing to provide the best services we can and to hold ourselves continually accountable to the community we serve, to the people we help, to national standards and to ourselves.  We accomplish this by holding ourselves to the highest standards and having outside reviewers look at our performance to ensure we are meeting the standard set for us.  It is a statement to the communities we serve that our organization has complied with nationally recognized standards of best practice and allows us to achieve the highest recognition for delivering quality child and family services.

LCCSB began looking into COA in October 2005 to decide whether accreditation was for us.  The official kick-off for the COA process at LCCSB was in July 2006 as we had our first Tailgate Party.  This process requires us to take an in depth look at our services and practices and see if they align with nationally recognized standards.  If our practices do not meet these national standards, we will be developing programs and policies to meet them.  As part of the implementation process, we will be asking a variety of community stakeholders to participate in this process by completing surveys and learning about the new programs at LCCSB. 

LCCSB is confident that through this process we will be able to make an already good agency even better.  And by doing this, we will better serve our children and families.  We invite you to look into this process further by either visiting www.coanet.org.