COGNIA Accredited

What is COGNIA?
COGNIA is the largest community of education professionals in the world. We are a non-profit, non-partisan organization that conducts rigorous, on-site external reviews of PreK-12 schools and school systems to ensure that all learners realize their full potential. While our expertise is grounded in more than a hundred years of work in school accreditation, COGNIA is far from a typical accrediting agency. Our goal isn’t to certify that schools are good enough. Rather, our commitment is to help schools improve.

Combining the knowledge and expertise of a research institute, the skills of a management consulting firm and the passion of a grassroots movement for educational change, we serve as a trusted partner to 32,000 schools and school systems—employing more than four million educators and enrolling more than 20 million students—across the United States and 70 other nations. COGNIA was created through a 2006 merger of the PreK-12 divisions of the North Central Association Commission on Accreditation and School Improvement (NCA CASI) and the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools on Accreditation and School Improvement (SACS CASI)—and expanded through the addition of the Northwest Accreditation Commission (NWAC) in 2011.

What does COGNIA mean for St. Benedict School?
Over the past two years, all elementary and high schools in the Diocese of Trenton have engaged in an internal review process using the COGNIA model.  This review process provided an online format that enabled us to examine all areas of St. Benedict School from Catholic identity, to academics, to institutional matters, to strengths and challenges, to goals for improvement.  Once we completed our review, we uploaded our report for assessment by the Diocesan Department of Catholic Schools.  Formal accreditation from COGNIA occurs at the Diocesan level on behalf of all Diocesan schools.  The process culminated with a visit from an COGNIA external review team on November 1-4, 2015, which included site visits to ten schools.  Although St. Benedict will not be one of the schools that the team will visit, our report will contribute to the overall Diocesan process.