On Feb. 28 and March 1, McDowell Mountain Elementary School will receive a site visit from the Arizona Education Foundation (AEF) thanks to the hard work of McDowell Mountain Elementary School Principal Valerie Dehombreux and others in the MMES community.

The site visit is just the second part in the arduous process to get McDowell Mountain awarded the status of an A+ School of Excellence by the AEF.

The first part of the process was a 40-page, 15,608-word report on MMES, started back in Oct. 2017 by Dehombreux, who first heard about the prestigious A+ rating when she was in high school.

“I had definitely heard of Arizona Education Foundation’s A+ School of Excellence award since I first began to teach in Arizona 21 years ago,” Dehombreux said. “And I believe even before that as an Arizona junior/senior high school student. I looked into it for MMES in fall 2016 during my third year there, but discovered the requirement that the school’s principal had to have been in place three full years. So we began the process in my fourth year, 2017-2018.”

Other requirements for eligibility include the school operating for at least six years and Arizona Department of Education rating of an A or B.

“MMES has not had a letter grade since 2014 because, with only third grade testing, there is no cohort to show growth,” Dehombreux said. “Our last letter grade was a B under the previous formula that used the former test, AIMS, and this formula did not involve calculating growth.”

To write the 40-page application that included 31 site/demographic information items, 21 narrative items with word limits from 600-1500, and a one-page student assessment data sheet, Dehombreux relied on numerous committees that included MMES parents and staff.

“Committees met monthly or bimonthly to discuss and write their ideas on graphic organizers about what to include as well as review and edit many of the sections I wrote,” Dehombreux said. “The main independent reviewers and editors were site council community member, Peter Conti, MMES preschool teacher Evelyn Sonenschein and MMES counselor Juanita Smart.”

When writing the report highlighting the achievements of MMES, Dehombreux found the hardest part to be the word limit.

“I enjoyed writing the narratives but they definitely took a lot of time,” Dehombreux said. “However, what I found to be most difficult and time-consuming was paring down the narratives to meet the word limits; not because I was rambling but because I had so much to say about our amazing school.”

After submitting the report in early January, MMES found out they had been selected for a site visit by the end of the month.

“The purpose of their (AEF) visit will be to confirm that our school is truly as amazing as we say it is,” Dehombreux said. “And our hope would be that we are awarded an A+ School of Excellence award that we would be notified of in April.”