NIPSA Bits and Pieces
What Do You Think? – How Should NIPSA Grow?
The NIPSA board has been investigating the possibility of inviting non-accredited proprietary operations into NIPSA membership to possibly enhance the offerings for service, conferences, networking and other services that NIPSA cannot now offer due to budgetary restraints. What are your thoughts about this? —can we have non-accredited members? If so, what should be their role in our association? Please share your thoughts with us. Email us at jaws1139@aol.com and give us you opinion.
Accreditation Alliance Formed
Several accrediting and educational associations have banded together to for the Accreditation Alliance. Among them are the Middle States Association, New England Association, Western Association, and Northwest Association (all regional accrediting agencies): NAIS and NCPSA (the latter of which NIPSA is a member); and a European accrediting agency. The purpose of this move is to facilitate cooperation among the various agencies involved. Notably, Advanc-ED (SACS and North Central Association) are not members and did not join in this effort.
Allan Blau, Former NIPSA President and Present VP, Honored as EducationalEntrepreneur of the Year
The International Academy of Educational Entrepreneurship has honored Dr. Allan Blau,
longtime NIPSA member and supporter as the 2010 EDUCATIONAL ENTREPRRNEUR OF THE YEAR, Dr. Allan Blau. Allan is currently the Founding Director of Cornerstone Day School and Effective School Solutions of New Jersey. There is a long history of successful educational experiences that led up to this present position.
In naming Dr. Blau the Academy cited “what we identify as a true EDUCATIONAL ENTREPRENEUR – ‘a person who has served as an educator prior to organizing a business related to education and has invested time, energy and capitol to create, develop, and market a program, product, service or technology to enhance learning. Allan has not only done this several times since 1963 when he first taught Public Speaking in a local New Jersey High School, for eight years he served as President of NIPSA, The National Independent Private Schools Association during the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
In 1978 Allan, with a partner founded the Barnstable Academy, a tax paying school designed to meet the educational needs of children with a variety of special needs. For the next 19 years he continued providing excellent learning experiences for literally hundreds of students. In 1997 he founded Sage Educational Enterprises a proprietary school for children with emotional problems. In 1999 he sold his interest in Barnstable Academy and semi-retired to the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts but continued his
work with Sage and in fact, opened two additional campuses in New Jersey.
In 2006 Allan, responding to the increasing need for a program for children with major and serious psychiatric disorders, returned to New Jersey. It was then he and his partner, the Executive Director of High Focus Centers, founded Cornerstone Day School. So that he could devote his full efforts to Cornerstone and his exceptionally fragile population, Allan sold his interest in Sage.
By 2008 Cornerstone had developed a program that is now recognized as the premier program in New Jersey for psychiatric adolescents. To provide for the influx of new students at that time, Cornerstone moved into a newly renovated and expanded facility which was designed specifically to meet both the education and clinical needs of these students, and in 2009 Allan and his partner founded Effective School Solutions, ESS. Although only created last year, ESS can now be found in four New Jersey Counties and is expected to expand elsewhere in the state by the end of next year. Effective School Solutions is an example of public-private partnership where all are winners, there are no losers. ESS brings quality mental health services to public school children without sending them out of the district.
All of us interested in Educational Entrepreneurship as a concept which encourages schools and colleges to insure the learning, practical application and appreciation of the skills and values of the entrepreneur by students they serve, should be excited and encouraged by the life of Dr. Allan Blau.
