About SACS Criteria:

Savannah State University is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). Accordingly the University must meet firm accrediting criteria for institutions of higher education as established by that organization. Currently, under SACS guidelines, there are 56 specific criteria for which the University must be able to document full compliance at periodic intervals.

Each of the criteria is essentially on-going “function” that needs to be undertaken or maintained regularly or permanently somewhere within the university. In order to ensure that these criteria are adequately and properly complied with at all times, each is assigned within the SSU Strategic Planner to the responsibility of some specific organizational unit. Once assigned, the organizational unit and its leader are accountable for satisfying the criteria, evaluating compliance, and entering a record of that compliance into the Strategic Planner.

These assignments are made, in keeping with SACS guidelines, by the University’s SACS Liaison and the Vice President for Academic Affairs. The assignment of SACS criteria to units is the only exception to the more general rule that only a unit head may enter, change, or manipulate Strategic Planning data for his/her unit.

Since each SACS criteria is placed as an on-going functional task in an organizational unit, the unit is obliged to annually review and evaluate the degree to which the criteria is being met (as the unit must with each of its functional tasks) and this evaluation is subject to review by the unit leader’s supervisor annually as an aspect of the leader’s regular performance review process.

Then, because SACS criteria are each assigned somewhere, and since the record of that assignment together with a record of its regular evaluation is maintained in the Strategic Planning data base, it is a relatively trivial task to print a current report at intervals to document for SACS that the University is attending to compliance with the SACS criteria as a portion of its regular annual evaluation process.

As members of an organizational unit review the functional tasks for which the unit is responsible, it is possible that they may find an assigned criterion that they believe misplaced in their jurisdiction. In that event, they should undertake negotiation with either the SACS Liaison or the VPAA to remove the task from their unit and reassign it to another. But no SACS criteria may remain unassigned. Some unit must remain account table for compliance with each criterion at all times.