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Sex & Character

4^th & 5^th Rs Archives Summer Institute & Conferences A 12 Point Comprehensive Approach Assessment Instruments Sex and Character

School As A Caring Community Profile-II (SCCP-II)

In the Eleven Principles of Effective Character Education by the Character Education Partnership, Principle 4 states:

The school must be a caring community. The school itself must embody good character. It must progress toward becoming a microcosm of the civil, caring, and just society we seek to create as a nation. ¹

The School as a Caring Community Profile-II (SCCP-II) is an instrument developed by the Center for the 4th and 5th Rs (Respect and Responsibility)² to help schools assess themselves as caring communities. The SCCP may be administered at any point (ideally at the beginning) of a character education initiative and then at later points to assess progress. Its validity as a measure of caring community is enhanced if it is given to varied constituencies that make up the school:

The School as a Caring Community Profile-II (SCCP-II) is a 42-question survey. The first 25 items relate to perceptions of students; the final 17 items relate to perceptions of adults. Younger children may be asked to answer only items 1 through 34. (For most items, a high rating is positive; for a few items, the reverse is true.) The SCCP identifies areas of strength and areas for improvement. Areas of relatively low ratings, and areas where there are significant discrepancies between ratings by different groups, can then become the focus of efforts to strengthen the experience of the school as a caring community.

Note: The items in this survey seek to gather the perceptions of all members of the school community. In order to validly assess the strength of community in a school, it is important to assess how both students and adults are perceived. Data analysis, however, should protect the anonymity of all individuals, students and adults. An individual teacher may wish to look at the data for his/her classroom, but those data should be recoded and/or entered into a school-wide data pool that does not link classroom data to particular faculty.