Council on Accreditation Completes Review of SCO Family of Services

The Council on Accreditation (COA,) an international, independent human service accrediting organization that promotes best practice standards, just finished up their re-accreditation review of SCO. COA accreditation demonstrates that an organization follows the highest performance standards, ensuring clients are receiving the best possible care.

A team of eight peer reviewers spent four days reviewing nearly 100 case records, interviewing over 500 staff, clients, and Board members, and visiting 40 SCO locations throughout New York City and Long Island. Prior to COA’s on-site visits, SCO submitted a self-study of hundreds of thousands of pages of policies and procedures for their review. The entire COA review examines 1,747 standards.

During the COA Exit Interview, the reviewers spoke about SCO’s strong leadership and engaged Board of Directors. They described a culture of kindness in every program they visited. And they were most impressed by the passion, compassion and expertise of our staff.  They noted strong staff-client relationships where staff felt like “proud parents” at their clients’ accomplishments and where clients described the services they received as “life-saving.” The COA reviewers made clear the respect they have for SCO Family of Services, and the admiration they have for the people who work here.

The reaccreditation process occurs every four years and entails a tremendous amount of work preparing for and hosting the review. Thank you and congratulations to all SCO staff, Board, leadership and clients who helped make SCO’s review such a success, especially SCO’s PQI team for leading, managing and coordinating this very intensive process.

The COA review team will create a final report from their findings prior to issuing final accreditation.