A Brief Early History of the Florida Catholic Conference Accreditation Committee

     On February 1, 1969, I left the comfortable confines of Miami, where I was born and raised and had practiced law for 19 years, and headed up north. My destination was Tallahassee where I helped form the Florida Catholic Conference to represent the bishops of Florida in their dealings with government and the secular community, as well as to coordinate amongst the then four dioceses of Florida, as directed by the bishops.

     When the conference opened for its first day of business, we were faced with various issues including abortion, euthanasia, and the advent of problems involving parochial and other private schools. As a general rule the controversies that arose around these issues were in their beginning stages and would blossom forth over the ensuing years. 

     With respect to education, most of the debate on the federal level centered on granting tuition-tax credits to parents who sent their children to private or parochial schools. That effort, which built up a lot of steam, was eventually struck down by a ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court.

     In terms of state education issues, there was growing public/media attention and legislative interest in the lack of regulation of non-public educational institutions. In response, the President of the Florida Senate established a select committee, focusing enormous press attention to the problems. The scandals primarily involved diploma mills and phony colleges and universities that were being incorporated in Florida, along with problems in the trade and vocational schools. There was only one private high school, not Catholic, in Florida that attracted a lot of attention in the press, but that was enough to throw us into the ambit of the select committee.

     At the same time several problem areas arose that caught the attention of the school superintendents of the Catholic dioceses. 

1) There existed disparities in the professionalism and quality of education at Catholic schools in the state. Some parochial schools had excellent programs. In fact, some were accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. Others had been accredited by the State of Florida, but in the mid-sixties, the attorney general of the state ruled that such accreditation was unauthorized.  These schools were then left without any outside accreditation. Prior to the division of the dioceses in 1968 and the elevation of Miami to archdiocese, there was very little diocesan oversight given to parochial schools. 

2) The public school sector was being closely monitored and changed at that time, placing some degree of internal and public notice on what was going on in other schools, including ours. There were several private accreditation systems looking at their own schools generally, such as the Florida Council of Independent Schools, which accredited many private schools and also represented them before the Legislature.

     Our superintendents of schools began meeting with me and looking at these various problems. Early on they recommended to the Florida bishops that we set up our own accreditation committee to develop standards and spend some time in bringing all of our schools in-line with those standards.

     At that time the superintendents were Monsignor William McKeever of the Archdiocese of Miami and Monsignor Mortimer Danaher of the Diocese of St. Augustine, both long-time superintendents, along with Father Frank Mouch of the Diocese of St. Petersburg (and his assistant, Father Jerome Diffley) and Richard Corrado of the Diocese of Orlando. Corrado was finishing up a doctorate in education at the University of Florida. He induced Dr. Lee Eggert, under whom he had studied, to join our accreditation committee. Eggert had been dean of UF’s School of Education and was a nationally recognized expert in accreditation. He was also the private school representative on the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools for the State of Florida. Dr. Lee Roberts was the head of the accreditation office at the Florida Department of Education and also became a member of the accreditation committee.

     When they made their recommendation to the bishops for an accreditation program, the Catholic superintendents, who were very conscious of their roles as Catholic educators and not pastors, proposed an accreditation program that spoke only of the schools, and not the pastors or the parishes. The general feeling was that Archbishop Coleman Carroll, who chaired the conference, would never approve of us bringing the pastors into the accreditation program. When the superintendents’ proposal was brought up to the bishops, however, Archbishop Carroll spoke first, asking, “Where are the pastors in this whole program? It will never work unless the pastors are made an integral part of the accreditation process.”

     This was then reported back to the committee members, who embraced the whole idea and came up pretty much with what the system is today, in which pastors have been included in the process from the beginning of the first accreditation meetings at the schools.

     I think this is a great thing based, not on any knowledge of my own, but on reviews of the program that we received periodically from principals and pastors. Pastors were generally enthusiastic about it. One principal commented that the accreditation process was the first time that she and the pastor had conversed about the school in the several years that she had been there. She was, needless to say, enthusiastic.

     After the accreditation standards and procedures were approved by the bishops and the initial round of reviews were completed, the then-four dioceses were finally integrated into a standardized system. Schools from each diocese are now accredited every five to seven years.

     As all this was going on, we also worked with the other private school groups to form an organization called FAANS (for Florida Association of Academic Nonpublic Schools), to help make sure that we were not adversely affected by any legislation. FAANS, which still exists today, consists of a number of private school organizations, both religious and private.

     I sat on a committee of that organization that developed a proposed piece of legislation we felt we could live with if we had to accept some type of state oversight. The proposal set up a board of private school educators and provided for a lot of separation between the state and the board. The draft legislation was shared with certain legislators including the chairman of the Senate select committee, Senator Fred Karl.

     While no legislation affecting our schools was ever introduced, the FAANS proposal, interestingly enough, ended up being the model for the regulation of private universities and colleges. It also was used later as the model for regulation of vocational and trade schools. 

     It is my impression that most pastors and principals appreciated the work of these accreditation committees and of the process. There were, however, obviously some who were aggravated by it. I remember one pastor who raised almighty cane when he was told classes would have to be limited to 35 students. He insisted that the parish could not afford to reduce the class size, but finally acquiesced. As a side note, when I was in school at St. Theresa’s in Coral Gables we had a class-size limit of 65 students. And the pastor each year, during the middle of the season would require the admission of an additional student or two.

     Another pastor, a leader in the diocese, was furious when our accreditation committee refused to grant accreditation immediately to his parish school. It seemed that the library had enough books, but they were not of sufficient quality to satisfy Dr. Eggert, who firmly believed that a library was a real bellwether of the merits of a school.

     Although the superintendent of that diocese shook in her boots at the vote, we unanimously put off approval for a year to allow some clean-up of the debris around the school and in improvement of the library. The pastor hired two library science professors from his local university to redo the entire library. Not only did he clean up the debris, but he repainted the entire building and refurbished it. He brought in the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, which was duly impressed by whole plant and the admittedly good education the students were getting, and accredited the school.

     After that he contacted us and invited us back. We looked at it and granted accreditation. He then pointed out to any number of priests and others in the area that the Southern Association had accredited his school without any question, yet the Florida Catholic Conference held up accreditation for almost a year. But you take those kind of things, they just go on in this world.

     I have, in several talks to groups, pointed out that, in my opinion, the establishment of the Florida Catholic Conference’s Accreditation Program was one of the best, if least known, accomplishments of the conference.