A concern that the Evanston/Skokie District 65 School Board conducts too many parent surveys was a topic of discussion at Monday night’s board meeting.
For the past three years, the district has conducted a parental survey in the fall to get a feel for the issues that parents are concerned about.
The plan for this year was to include questions from the principals about specific individual school issues that would be helpful to the staff and the PTAs on issues pertaining to those schoools.
But this year, the survey takes on a new dimension, as the board is conducting an executive search to replace Superintendent Hardy Murphy, who resigned unexpectedly last month, just before the school year began.
The board already has a contract with the ECRA Group, a national educational research and analytical services consulting firm that it has used in the past, and it has been working with ECRA to broaden the survey to cover more topics that would assist in developing a new strategic plan for the district.
But now there are additional questions the board wants to ask, to gain some insights into the traits that parents, as well as teachers, administrative staff, and community members, would like to see in their next superintendent.
In the spring, the district conducts a state-mandated survey based on the Five Essentials of a well-functioning school district.
So the question they were discussing Monday night is whether the district should go ahead with the annual survey in the fall, structured along the lines of information needed for the strategic plan, and then conduct another survey that zeroes in on questions about the potential new superintendent, followed by the five-essentials survey in the spring.
Member Eileen Budde thought the district may be asking for information too many times and that what she termed “survey fatigue” would result in many parents refusing to answer multiple surveys, assuming they had already been there and done that.
From a financial standpoint, it would be less expensive to add a few questions to the fall survey that would accommodate all of the objectives, rather than to commission a separate firm to conduct a stakeholder survey solely to accommodate the superintendent-search issues.
Dr. John Gata, president and CEO of ECRA, assured the board that his firm is well-equipped to conduct either survey separately, or to combine both surveys into one.
While no decisions were made at this “working” meeting of the board, Dr. Gata said he would come back to the board with some recommendations for them to consider.
Survey cost
What is the cost of all these surveys? Is it money that could be spent for better purposes? Parents seems to complain about no information from schools and never asked about school policies or other matters. What are these surveys doing then? Sounds like the studies we hear about daily on coffee drinking and one day its good next day its bad.
Surveys are important
If the district does not reach out into the community for feedback, all they will ever hear are the crazy complaints from the small group of vocal parents with too much time on their hands.
Parental involvement critical
Parental involvement is critical for their childrens' literacy and achievement, but also for building partnerships with the school and certainly for fundraising. Parent evaluations are a necessary part of teacher and school assessment.
Perhaps parents meeting with
Perhaps parents meeting with teachers on how their students are doing, rather then doing a survey. Face-to-face would be much better than sending out a questionaire and hoping everyone returns them
I have an idea
I have an idea: Let's survey people to find out if they're tired of surveys! 🙂