Public Comments Sought for 2023 NAACLS Standards Draft
As previously mentioned in the NAACLS News, at its September 2022 meeting, the NAACLS Board of Directors charged a task force to review and suggest changes to the NAACLS Standards. Before we get into how to comment on the standards, NAACLS would like to express our gratitude to the volunteers who worked on this standards draft. The amount of thought and work that went into these standards over the last six months is remarkable. Thank you for the time and effort you put into this project.
Before beginning your commentary, please review all instructions. Due to the volume of suggested changes to the standards, NAACLS will gather comments a bit differently than usual. We will use Alchemer, the same software we use for our Annual Survey of Programs. Unlike the Annual Survey, you will not be required to enter information in every field to proceed. The only field you must complete is one for an email address. Only the NAACLS Staff will see your email address; the NAACLS’ Review Committees and Board of Directors will review all feedback presented anonymously.
We recommend you review the 2023 Draft Standards before starting with your comments (a pdf of the draft standards is available here). You will not be able to log out and log back in. As a result, you may wish to make some notes on the standards before starting the process. To make the process more efficient, NAACLS added a table of contents so you may navigate the standards easier.
All new standard language will be available on Alchemer (though, as we said above, we encourage you to review and take notes on the changes beforehand). Each change has a designated field to enter your comments. Please do not enter a comment from a standard outside of the standard associated with the field. NAACLS has included an image below as an example.
Please note, Alchemer does not have the same formatting capabilities as Microsoft Word. Please forgive any formatting oddity or inconsistency within a sentence, paragraph, or the structure of an outline. The Board of Directors, Review Committees, and NAACLS Staff will focus on formatting once the content of the standards is decided upon.
Please avoid using the back button in your browser toolbar. If you need to go back to a previous section, either do so in the table of contents or scroll to the bottom and use the “back” button option provided by Alchemer.
Before the final submission of your feedback, NAACLS has provided a field for any comment you have about the standards that did not fit any of the previous sections. Please reserve all comments not directly related to standard changes to this section.
The Board of Directors has not finalized standard compliance requirements for documentation or narrative elements. The Standards Compliance Guide development will begin once the board approves the standards. The board has not set an implementation schedule for these standards.
NAACLS will not gather public comment outside of the link below. NAACLS will not review comments submitted via email or through discussions on third-party.
Once you are ready to begin the public comment process, you may access the materials here. The public comment period will close at the beginning of the business day, June 12th, 2023. NAACLS will not accept comments made on or after June 12th.
Thank you for participating in this process; NAACLS appreciates and looks forward to your feedback.