High school district gauging school climate

The Valley Stream Central High School District will be conducting a survey, beginning on March 19, in order to gauge how students, teachers and parents feel about the district’s teaching, learning and overall school climate.

The survey will take approximately 30 minutes to complete, according to Superintendent Dr. Bill Heidenreich, and will have participants answer questions based on a five-point likert scale, ranging from highly satisfied to extremely dissatisfied. Students, teachers and parents will rate their satisfaction level with items including communication, school pride, discipline and respect.

Heidenreich said the district administration and Board of Education had started discussing the idea of a climate survey in November. Heidenreich was asked to find out about surveys in a variety of school districts and landed on the National Center for School Leadership survey, which he and the board then decided to pursue.

“What we ultimately decided was that we liked the one that the NCSL was doing because it was benchmarked to national standards so it gives us the ability to compare ourselves to others,” Heidenreich said.

The survey will close on April 27 and Heidenreich said the data would most likely come back in May or June. “The goal, of course, is to get a pulse on the sense of the community, and the most important thing about the survey is what you do with the data once you get it,” he said. “Because if it identifies areas in need of growth or improvement, that’s certainly going to be a topic of much discussion over the summer and into next year.”

Once the survey is completed and the results come in, the real work for the district administrators and board members begins. “What I anticipate is sharing this data with the school board and the administrative team and then putting together a plan of action,” Heidenreich said. “If we find, for example, we’re not highly rated in an area like communication, we’ll start to come up with a plan to say, ‘OK, how can we improve upon that?’ Likewise, we’ll find areas that we’re doing well in and it’s important to understand what we’re doing there that’s working.”

Heidenreich said that participating in the survey will cost $3,500 and would be available online for teachers and parents to fill out. Students, however, will take the survey during physical education classes. “One of the concerns that we had of administering the survey online was it would mean that we would have to close our computer labs down to instruction,” Heidenreich said, “and we didn’t want the administering of the survey to interfere with our instructional program.”

Heidenreich said he is confident that the district’s students and teachers would participate in the survey, but the parent group is the hardest to reach. He added that when a similar study was done about 10 years ago, there were changes made in the guidance area due to the results.

“There’s a history of the Board of Education using the data to modify programs and I would encourage parents to exercise their voice and participate in the survey,” Heidenreich said.

Co-President of the Central and Memorial PTSA, Ray Mohamed, said the PTSA members seemed to like the idea of a climate survey when it came up at a recent Shared Decision Making Meeting.

“I think they liked the idea become sometimes you don’t necessarily get the same feedback in an open forum because not everyone likes to get up and speak or say something, maybe a few people do, but most don’t,” Mohammed said.

A link to the survey will be posted on the district’s website starting March 19.