Institutions receive accreditation from either a regional or national accrediting body.  Generally, it’s the institution that receives accreditation which covers all the programs offered by that institution at the time of the accrediting visit.  There are other accrediting bodies that accredit individual programs only, and that form of accreditation is referred to as specialty accreditation.  Recently, we received notice that our Emergency and Disaster Management program had received specialty accreditation from the Foundation of Higher Education.  I asked Dr. Chris Reynolds, Program Manager for our EDM program and our Fire Science program, to provide a little background on what the FoHE accreditation means for this program.

In 2007, the Emergency and Disaster Management program of the American Public University System initiated its accreditation request with the Foundation of Higher Education for Disaster and Emergency Management and Homeland Security. The Foundation of Higher Education (FoHE), working through the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Higher Education initiative, along with practitioners and academics from around the world, developed a set of emergency and disaster management educational standards based on a hierarchy of educational objectives (much like Bloom’s Taxonomy).  These emergency management standards are centered on emergency management “best” practices, as defined by NFPA 1600 and the FEMA Higher Education initiative.

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