School of Nursing earns 10-year accreditation

by Mark McGowan

Accreditation reviewers from the Commission on Collegiate Nursing Education (CCNE) left the NIU School of Nursing last October greatly impressed: No one had said a negative word.

Not the faculty. Not the staff at clinical sites. Not even the students.

"They had never heard of a school spoken of so highly," assistant chair Ken Burns said.

The glowing praise contributed to this spring's 10-year accreditation of the School of Nursing and its bachelor's and master's degree programs with no recommendations, the best result possible.

CCNE commissioners determined NIU met all four compliance standards and found no reasons for concern. Although a progress report is requested in four years, the next on-site evaluation is not scheduled until the fall of 2011.

"This is a tremendous honor for the School of Nursing. Ten years is as long as you can get," chair Marilyn Frank Stromborg said. "This was a flawless visit."

Program reviewers lauded the School of Nursing for its communication between faculty and students, its leadership, the strength of its programs and its state-of-the-art facilities.

NIU's School of Nursing enrolls more than 600 students in baccalaureate, graduate and RN completion programs and also offers a post-master's family nurse practitioner certificate of graduate study and an adult nurse practitioner master's degree.

Students practice at more than 50 clinical sites throughout northern Illinois, including NIU's own Tri-County Community Health Center, which provides affordable health care to low-income residents of DeKalb, Ogle and Lee counties.

The accreditation comes after two years of hard preparation, which included the creation of a 350-page self-study of the School of Nursing.

Burns said every faculty member was involved in work groups and writing groups, attending retreats and committing to long hours, late nights and weekends. A couple individuals served as editors of the various reports to combine them into the phonebook-sized document submitted to CCNE in advance of the visit.

When the reviewers arrived, some visited clinical sites, watched faculty working with students and interviewed agency staff. Others visited on-campus classrooms to observe how faculty teach. Some met with the president, the provost, the dean of the College of Health and Human Sciences, the nursing faculty and Stromborg and Burns. Others made a trip to the distance education classroom in Gabel Hall.

Reviewers also sorted through records and files in an "evidence room" that contained several plastic tubs filled with documents supporting findings in the self-study. Those papers, including student projects and exam samples, now consume three drawers of a file cabinet.

They also were provided with computers for access to the school's Web site, as well as hard-copies of each online page, and spent considerable time analyzing everything to determine whether the school's educational philosophy is found in all elements of the curriculum.

Meanwhile, a team from the state of Illinois that visited NIU during the same three-day period in October also issued the school a clean bill of health.

"It's an exceptionally strong program that supports and furthers the university's mission," Stromborg said. "We're quite proud."