The Georgia Department of Education has resumed seeking parent’s input on experiences with local school districts with the return of its College and Career Ready Performance Index Georgia Parent Survey which is due Friday, Dec. 15.
A Fulton County Schools (FCS) spokesperson said this survey provides a foundation for each school’s Climate Star rating score. A rating from one to five stars is issued, with five stars representing an excellent school climate, and one star representing a school climate most in need of improvement.
The survey is anonymous and confidential and can be found online.
The survey provides the school system and local schools with important information across five key areas:
- Teaching and learning
- School Safety
- Positive relationships
- Resource allocation
- Parent involvement
Failure to reach even the low benchmark required of 15 parents from each school participating can substantially impact schools. A school not meeting that benchmark will receive zero points for the survey portion for state accountability, FCS Executive Director of Strategy and Governance Ryan Moore said.
“We are actually taking a more aggressive approach on that participation rate because we do want to hear that feedback from our parents,” he said.
FCS wants to match last year’s participation rate, which was approximately 22 percent of the school district’s total parent population responding to its survey.
Now that the state has resumed its survey, FCS has pulled duplicate questions that appeared in the school district’s survey. Moore said they are trying to limit survey fatigue.
The state requires a 75 percent participation rate on the student and personnel surveys. A school not meeting that benchmark will receive zero points for the survey portion for state accountability.
The school district has made a substantial effort to make this data actionable, transparent and public, he said. FCS schools and district staff utilize that data to develop strategic actions and make continuous improvement efforts happen at their school or department level, he said.
Surveys are broken down into different domains such as instruction quality or curriculum materials quality, he said. They survey relationships with questions like “Are there positive peer-to-peer relationships, peer-to-adult and adult-to-adult?”
“There’s actually a really important question for students that we’ve used as a benchmark of student advocacy for years, and it’s ‘Do you have an adult that you can go to in the building?’ So do you have a trusted adult?,” he said.
If people in the school district don’t know how to access academic or non-academic programming, that is revealed quickly in the surveys, he said. Successful communication has to be achieved.
“For the board and for Dr. Looney, getting input from our community and all of our stakeholders is critical. So we’re trying to use both of these ways in the most effective possible methods that we have available to us to make sure that we’ve got a two-way communication going,” FCS Communications Director Brian Noyes said.
