Building on the work of the Community Committee for Education (CC4E), the Advisory Committees’ work will be influenced by feedback from the roughly 865 people who completed the district’s perception survey in November 2017. Survey results were shared with the Board of Education this week, made available to the Advisory Committees as a resource, and are available
here
. More than 90% of parents and nearly 100% of staff say they would recommend that other parents send their children to our district. This is just one of the many data points that positively reflect the remarkable things happening in our schools.
While the survey results give us much to be proud of, they also give us much to focus on. Specifically, we noticed a significant perception gap between parents, employees, and community members in some key areas. For example, there were gaps regarding perceptions of whether SSSD provides good value for money in terms of tax dollars—only 66% of community members agreed or strongly agreed, whereas parents and employees agreed or strongly agreed at rates of 80% to 90%. This trend persisted in response to the question about supporting a larger bond/mill levy increase to fund the district in the future. Additionally, we saw numerous comments about the need to address teacher salaries in relation to the cost of living in our community.
These are all things that the Advisory Committees will tackle this year. On behalf of the school district, we want to thank the Committee members for volunteering their time to develop recommendations for long-term solutions and strategies that address academic programming, enrollment, and facility issues to serve the needs of our community’s students far into the future. We look forward to updating you on their work.
