DCS Accredition: Halfway Home

Dear DCS Stakeholders:

Please take a moment to read the attached letter from Council On Accreditation headquarters, which notifies the Department that the Central Office has been found in compliance with COA standards. The Commissioner told the core leadership team at yesterday's meeting that agencies like ours do not typically achieve this level of compliance so quickly and with so few exceptions (we had one). This is quite an exceptional accomplishment!

 

With this notification we are halfway home, and we can all share pride in this achievement. But there is still much work to be done as we continue to focus our efforts at assuring that the regions are compliant as well. An agency like DCS cannot accomplish such a monumental task as COA accreditation without the help of every single employee, so I encourage the folks out in the regions to stay the course and give us one last big push towards our goal of overall accreditation.

The team here in central office will continue to provide assistance to the regions through mock reviews and targeted technical assistance in living up to our pledge to help the regions prepare for their site visits, which will commence in January 2009. Working together we can make this happen, and by this time next year we can say that we have achieved agency wide COA accreditation! Thanks for the hard and very important work that all of you do every day to serve the children and families in Tennessee. 

 

Best Regards,

 

TR

 

Tom Riss, MPA
Executive Director

Performance and Quality Improvement