City Schools of Decatur Requesting Community Feedback for Strategic Plan
Decatur Metro | March 14, 2016 | 12:29 pmCSD sent around this note to the community this morning…
As the system begins the process of drafting our next strategic plan, it is important that we get your feedback. Please take a moment to fill out the short strategic plan survey in the link below.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/decatur-city-ce
The survey will close at 5 PM on Thursday, March 17.
The survey can also be found on the CSD website at:
www.csdecatur.net
Thank you for being a part of this process!
Really, this is the best survey that our school district can create? There are 8-10 answers to each question, but you are asked to pick only the top answer. Several of the answers are related to the others. I don’t understand how they could get clear picture from such limited responses. Maybe rank the top 3 answers, with a weighting system?
My thoughts exactly. I clicked on the link, began the survey and then chose not to complete it.
Glad to hear it wasn’t just me. I struggled through the survey yesterday but was unhappy about it. It was so poorly designed that I doubt it will solicit meaningful feedback from the community.
Agreed. I am not impressed with this. Several of the responses ask whether you would like to keep or change the “current system of …” like we all know the process the school system uses to attract and retain quality teachers (for example). I have been impressed with the teachers we have so far, but i have no idea how they were selected or what is done to retain them, so I can’t say whether it should be kept or improved upon.
Thank you for saying this. I was wondering if it was just me. I guess as an instrument to force one to write text rather than choose a response, this survey works well. But whoever devised the survey ought to have their privileges revoked. Why is the school system so blatantly bad at this stuff sometimes? I really hope the results from this don’t actually guide any thinking, but I have a feeling, based on the choices, that we are being led in certain direction here. I get the feeling they are trying to justify certain paths we are already on. I don’t typically look so skeptically at a online survey, but this one is so bad, I can’t help but think there must be ulterior motives. Again, I ask, why does the school system not understand how to solicit feedback sometimes?
Always been this way, not that that’s an excuse. Actually, online surveys, however weak, are an improvement. In the fairly recent past, requests to get parent or community input would be met with the response that they didn’t have the funding and logistical support to do a survey as though they had to do a census and had never heard of free online survey/poll tools or apps.
Like being a writer, the drawback of being someone who creates valid and meaningful surveying is that every jackass thinks they can do your job. Including, I’m guessing, well-intentioned folks at CSD.
There’s a reason why surveying with measurable margins of error is expensive. Because it requires valuable experience and skill to properly construct. Everybody thinks that tools like Survey Monkey democratized the industry but all they really did is empower people to gather data that’s approximately equal in value to if they’d just made gut decisions from the beginning.
I agree that good survey design takes expertise and experience but this survey would probably have been improved if staff had just tried to answer it themselves. I think they’d have quickly seen the issues with how it is constructed. Getting general input and feedback from the community doesn’t have to require the same level of methodologic rigor as a research survey. But you have to be able to answer the survey logically. Seven simple, open ended questions would have gotten better feedback.
I see the problems you see with the survey but please do not ignore it. Use the “other” choices (with space for comment) or the last question, “7. Please provide any other comments”, to give your free text feedback best you can. Then, if you still feel that your feedback isn’t adequate, send a separate full response to CSD asking that it be considered by the contractor who is compiling the community feedback. This is a chance to provide input, maybe even influence CSD. Public institutions tend to interpret a lack of response as everything is hunky dory, whether or not that’s what you meant by your non-response. Can’t blame them.
My big beef is that this went out today, Monday, and is due by 5 PM, Thursday. That’s not a lot of time for the word to get out or for busy working folks to get a chance to reply. I really think that they should give folks at least the weekend as well. If this was a deadline for a work project, I’d be asking why the request was so last minute.
Just another example of shoddy performance out of the CSD Central Office. Right on the heels of the Riley fiasco. I would love to see some positive changes happen, but I lose a little optimism with each passing day.
I agree with everything stated above.
This is the intro to the survey: “City Schools of Decatur is developing a strategic plan and invites you to participate! The district wants to hear your thoughts on what you want your public schools to provide for students, what the schools are doing well and what challenges the schools and students face. A planning team representing the school district and the community will use this input to assist them in developing the plan. All survey responses are anonymous. Thank you for lending your voice to improving the City Schools of Decatur! The survey is being administered by the Georgia School Boards Association.”
The survey is being administered by the Georgia School Boards Association? Did they write it? If so, we paid for this survey?
The best surveys I’ve taken also provide explanations, such as: CSD is nearing the end of its current Strategic Plan cycle and met “blank goals” etc. etc. Help the district refine its path to ensure all students graduate with the competitive edge necessary to be ready for the college and careers of their choosing…
Something like that…
Personalize it to Decatur! We’ve done so much good work in the past decade. Showing it off as we set the agenda for the next decade helps community members who might not have students in the schools or are new to CSD be thoughtful in how best to respond.
This is so generic (and flawed) that it’s embarrassing. I haven’t spoken to a single person that didn’t agree. If this is the best we got, I fear for what the plan will be.
I filled it out but I see how the answers will be skewed toward the age children a person might have–if they have children at all.
Worst. Survey, Ever.
I would like to extend gratitude and the benefit of the doubt to the administrators who thought of doing this, but it’s so horribly done, it’s as if they were just going through the motions.
Sure, like Scott says, there are experts for this kind of thing–I took an entire semester graduate level course on measurement and learned how to design surveys–but there are way too many choices and no way to select more than one or weight them according to importance, and even someone without training who tried to honestly take the survey herself would realize the errors.
There was potential here to get some good information, but it was completely wasted. I hope they take the time to do this over, if they really do want feedback that is meaningful and they can actually use.
I urge the School Board and Superintendent to all take the survey so they can see why it doesn’t work. I don’t think it would be a horrible idea for CSD to come up with a simple survey that works and then re-issue the better version. I think our community does better with “Ooops, that was released before adequate checking, here’s a better survey” than with just letting this stand and some people giving up on the survey and others being cynical about it.
The first question can stand although it should have the option for checking multiple answers since one can easily be a parent AND a business member AND a community member etc. And then 4 or 5 simple, open ended questions should get the kind of qualitative feedback needed if there’s no time or expertise to create complex, well-organized and designed quantitative and qualitative questions with proper skip patterns and response logic. Qualitative, open-ended feedback is harder to tabulate and summarize but at least it’s more straightforward and useful than what the current survey will get. Even if the survey were to be open for a couple of weeks, there’s only going to be a few hundred responses. I’d just put it all into a Word document for reviewers/users of the data to review visually for key concepts/themes, organized by question.
I’m sure that the school board and superintendent would have taken the survey if they weren’t too busy trying to cover up any and all details of the “independent investigation” into the Susan Riley firing fiasco.
This is so poorly designed that it would be laughable if I weren’t concerned that the results will be used to make decisions IRL. Please complete the survey and choose ‘other’ and explain how ridiculous the choices are. And even the mention of ‘communication’ in the midst of the Riley fiasco? SMH.
It’s disappointing to see CSD paying organizations like GSBA to do shoddy, generic work when there are people in our community who could have created something more valid and meaningful for free. I concur with AHID and others that a re-do is in order. This time, call in people who are experts in CSD to craft a quality survey, and then publicize it well and give constituents time to respond.