VIDEO: On Weast's Last Day, A Crowning Achievement

School administrators, PTA officials and board President Christopher S. Barclay gathered in Rockville on Thursday—Jerry D. Weast’s last day as superintendent—to unveil a crowning achievement to Weast's 12 years at the helm of the county school system: a glass trophy symbolizing the 2010 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.

The award, announced in November, is the highest presidential honor an American organization can receive for excellence in innovation, improvement and visionary leadership.

Named for the U.S. Secretary of Commerce under President Ronald Reagan, the award recognizes K-12 and higher education institutions for improving student outcomes, engaging and empowering staff and the community, carefully allocating resources and demonstrating leadership and social responsibility.

Experts evaluate schools on how they do everything from transporting students to school to providing classroom instruction to serving school meals to performing building maintenance.

Montgomery County Public Schools is one of six school systems to win the award since Congress created it in 1987. With seven times as many students as the next-largest district to win, it is by far the largest school system to ever win the award.

Weast talked about the “journey towards quality” that the school system took on its way to the award.

Weast launched a Baldrige program for MCPS shortly after taking the reins as superintendent in August 1999.

“I knew that it would make a big difference, if we took that journey, about the kind of system we would become,” said Weast, whose . “We could go from good to great if we followed that journey. We could persist if we had a plan. We would know how to work better together, use money more efficiently and really get down to what really makes a difference in the life of an adult who works in the school system, and a child.”

Eight Baldrige examiners evaluated the school system’s leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis and knowledge management, workforce focus, process management and results. Examiners spent roughly 1,000 hours reviewing hundreds of documents, visiting 36 schools and interviewing employees from every part of the school system.

“The evidence abounded,” Weast said. “It abounded all the way from early childhood through college. Because our research department figured out how to keep track of kids all the way through their college career, where we could actually prove that we can predict and correlate their success.”

The school system’s development of “Seven Keys to College Readiness” was part of that, Weast said.

The school system was a finalist for the award in 2006, but did not win.

Since then, MCPS has refined and formalized 500 to 600 processes, said Michael Perich, who spearheaded the Baldrige efforts as a consultant to the school system, where he was formerly the director of continuous improvement.

“When somebody says ‘Well, how do you do this?’ and ‘How do you do that?’ rather than just tell them, you can actually say ‘Well, here’s the process map. Here are the measures that we use to see how effectively it’s working. These are the people that are responsible,'” he said.

The award leaves room for “continuous improvement” and the school system has already formed groups to address areas for improvement as identified by Baldrige evaluators, Perich said.

“I think organizations get into trouble when they think they’re pretty hot stuff and live on their laurels,” Perich said.

One area for improvement is parent engagement.

The school system had 12,000 families at a back-to-school fair last fall.

“We’d like 100,000 families [to attend],” Perich said.

Another challenge is using technology to improve communication and share knowledge across a school system of 144,000 students and more than 20,000 employees in 200 schools spread across a county of 500-square-miles, he said.

. Perich said he hopes to discuss with Starr improvements that school officials hope to continue to make.

“We continue to systematically review, refine and adapt our processes to ensure that we provide students with opportunities for success at the highest levels, to make sure that our workforce is engaged and productive and also to ensure that our community members are getting the best and the most for their tax dollars,” Barclay (Dist. 4) of Takoma Park said in prepared remarks during Thursday’s ceremony. “Dr. Weast, I am very proud on your last day here to thank you for what you have done to really bring excellence to our operations and into our schoolhouse.”