Sweetwater District high school earns first Bronze-level recognition

What do Boeing Satellite System’s Spectrolab of Sylmar, California, Sharp Healthcare of San Diego and the San Diego County Regional Airport Authority have in common with Montgomery High School— a comprehensive high school located less than five miles from the Mexican border?

These organizations and six others used the Malcolm Baldrige National Award criteria to demonstrate continuous improvement and best-in-class performance in several key business areas. The national award recognizes three organizations each year. And several states such as California emulate the program to provide more opportunities for improvement.

The California Council for Excellence (CCE) recognized nine companies and organizations with 2004 California Awards for Performance Excellence (CAPE) and Montgomery High is one of those select few. Officials noted the school’s “commitment to student development and parent involvement in student learning.” Montgomery High is the only educational organization to win in the Eureka category, the highest level that one can apply for.

Principal Karen Janney revitalized the Montgomery High School campus when she took the reins four years ago, and has since produced gains in student achievement and boosted campus professionalism and morale. Both a mentor principal and local and state administrator of the year, she went one step further—adopting the Malcolm Baldrige Award criteria for organizational excellence.

And the hard work that Janney and her staff completed paid off. Montgomery will be honored at the 11th Annual CAPE ceremony to be held on Friday, March 18 at the Riverside Convention Center. A dozen staff members will accompany Janney, the champion of teamwork who instructed staff in the three principles of business book author Ken Blanchard’s Gung Ho!®. She not only changed campus culture, but empowered students.

According to Janney, “Success builds upon success. Good results happen because we plan for it. We have high expectations and we set students up with the perfect support systems, and that’s why we have gotten results the past couple of years.”

And those results are impressive. Montgomery has the highest number of students attending the UC-CSU system in the Sweetwater District, as well as the highest number of students completing A-G college entrance requirements. And Montgomery also has the lowest crime rate in the district, indicative of the school climate.

Janney attributes some of the success to including students in conversations with the Montgomery staff. Asking students about test conditions for example, or how students need to be motivated, means that students give constructive feedback and become part of the decision-making process.

The CAPE program was established in 1992 as a continuous improvement program that utilizes the 2004 Malcolm Baldrige Award criteria. CAPE recognizes companies and organizations from the private and public sector, including business, health care and education, for their commitment to performance excellence. Approach, deployment and results are assessed against the Baldrige Award Criteria.

Organizations are judged on leadership, planning, customer satisfaction, professional growth, learning-centered processes and most important of all, results. Those results are compared to benchmark companies and high performing schools, for example.

“This forward-thinking leadership is both inspirational to our district and representative of how special Sweetwater principals like Karen Janney are,” said Sweetwater Board President Jim Cartmill.

“It may not be widely known, but Karen Janney was one of the torchbearers locally during the Olympics,” Superintendent Ed Brand said. “Now she has set the pace for other schools and the district to carry the flame of school improvement.”

Every morning Janney speaks on the KMMI school broadcast station to students with words of wisdom. She signs off saying “make it a great day or not, the choice is yours.”

For these young Aztecs, there are great days ahead.