As a career school, there is an extensive approval process we must go through to be approved to be an up and functioning school. Our process took about 4-5 months from start to finish. This included when we first decided we wanted to open a school and initially inquired about it. To give you a little background of our curriculum and school, we purchased our classroom materials from a very successful dentist in California. He created the curriculum for his dental assisting school he opened in his office, then began to sell it to other start-up schools across the country. There are now hundreds of schools that use his curriculum he developed to teach their students.
Approval Process
Since each state is different, we did have to make some edits to our curriculum we purchased to meet the requirements for Ohio. We had to submit all our teaching materials along with enrollment agreement, catalog, syllabus and more to the State Board of Career and Colleges. We had to get approved for all our paperwork, length of program and what the students would learn throughout the course. Each year, we have an audit of our previous year and must get reapproved. We must submit the graduation rate and student employment rate so they can make sure our school is successful and students are indeed getting jobs. We really pride ourselves on keeping in touch with our students long after they graduate so we know who they are working for, if they are advancing their career in dentistry or still working in the dental field. We send out a graduate survey about 9-12 months after a student graduates to get feedback on what they feel we could change or add to the program to better prepare our current students. We are always adding in additional study guides and learning materials to help the students maximize their knowledge.
Transfer
We often get the question if any of our credits or parts of our program transfer to other colleges or universities. The answer is no. However, if you plan to go to school for dental hygiene, during the application process you do receive extra points towards being accepted into the program if you are already a dental assistant. Not to mention, how much more knowledge of the dental field you have going into an extensive program like dental hygiene. You also must be a dental assistant to apply to the EFDA program at Ohio State, so while our program doesn’t transfer, it can be a prerequisite to or bonus to getting into another program. See our previous blog on what an EFDA is if you want to learn more.
