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Despite boasting of seven No Child Left Behind Blue Ribbon Awards district schools -- an honor given only to the nation's most successful schools -- the superintendent wants his district to continue to improve.

"That's what great school districts do," he said. "They don't rest on their laurels. We take it as our obligation to improve what we do."

Last week, administrators attended a workshop to learn how to interpret the Malcolm Baldridge Criteria for Performance Excellence as an assessment guideline and how to plan for continuous improvement.

The Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award is given in the industry, health care and service sectors, including education. The last local organization to receive the award was Medrad Inc., a biotechnology company based in Indiana Township, in 2004.

Organizations that apply for the award are judged on leadership, strategic planning, data collection and analysis, human resource development and results. Those criteria are used to measure how effective an organization is at achieving excellence in performance.

Only four school districts across the country have received a Malcolm Baldrige Award since 1999. However, the award itself is not the goal for the district. Mt. Lebanon Assistant Superintendent Deb Allen said school officials plan to use the Baldrige award criteria to raise student achievement and improve the district.

"While we would consider it a wonderful honor to receive the award, we are solely focused on taking a good school district and becoming a great school district," she said. "The award is not our current focus."

Mark Blazey, a national Malcolm Baldridge training consultant who conducted the workshops for Mt. Lebanon, said school districts are seeking ways to improve themselves because of increased competition.

"Being the best is a recipe for disaster if you don't seek continued improvement," Blazey said. "There are other school districts who want to take that crown away from you. Using the Malcolm Baldridge criteria as a framework, schools are now taking a look at how they can optimize their current resources at the lowest cost possible."

The district's current strategic plan was created with the Baldrige award criteria in mind, Wilson said.

"The real connection to the Baldrige award is with our strategic plan," Wilson said. "We are using their criteria as a benchmark to move us forward."

In the recently revised strategic plan, the district will use standardized tests, student work and comparisons with other schools as the primary measures of student academic growth and performance. The colleges and universities graduates attend, student awards and recognition, surveys and focus groups also will be used.

School officials also would like to see 95 percent of its students achieve learning targets in nine areas: technology, communication, interpersonal skills, problem solving, reading and comprehension, the development of a work ethic, mathematics, critical thinking and an awareness of current global and cultural issues.

"We're not looking at our strategic plan and the Baldridge criteria to be some type of quick fix," Allen said. "We're in it for the long haul."

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