By Maysen Marolda
Staff Writer
The School Site and Wellness Council members discussed possible changes to the Spring Survey, a survey that Costa students and parents take in May, during the Jan. 12 meeting.
The School Site and Wellness Council is a group of teachers, parents, classified employees and students that work with Principal Ben Dale to develop, review and evaluate school goals and improvement programs. It also surveys parents and students in a coordinated effort to deliver healthy programs and consistent messaging to Mira Costa’s student, staff and parent populations.
“I think the meeting was successful in addressing the survey and discussing changes that should be made to improve it,” School Site Council representative and senior, Cole Keefer said. “In the next meeting I expect revisions and new questions to be proposed.”
Attendees viewed the first drafts of the student and parent surveys that will be distributed in May. According to Dale, the surveys were composed because the Healthy Kids Survey in March does not address pertinent topics that the administration wants to be informed of, such as student stress. The survey is taken in April during class time on scantron and is a maximum of 40 questions long.
“The purpose of our survey is to receive stress and workload feedback, as the surveys are important since they help the administration set goals and focus on things that need to be emphasized,” Dale said.
Many attendees proposed adding questions about the implementation of office hours, the new schedule, the new facilities, weighted GPAs, new safety measures and campus renovations that students and parents would like to see in the future. According to School Site President Suzanne Hadley, adding questions on these topics will create a well-rounded survey that provides feedback on several matters.
“This first draft of the student survey did not really talk about about co-curriculars, it was more of an academic focus so I think adding questions on co-curriculars would be beneficial since that, piled on top of homework, correlates to student stress,” School Site President, Suzanne Hadley said.
The administration obtains the feedback from the surveys where it goes mainly goes into the Western Association of Schools and Colleges report to display longitudinal data for the midterm report in two years. The survey has also allowed the administration to target several issues to improve such as student workload, stress levels, homework and technology use based on the responses received.
“A lot of things that come out of the survey we go ‘woah’ and realize that we need to look at this more or change our direction on this,” Dale said. “It is informative to us as a group and to me as a principal, so we change the questions each year to gain new feedback.
Dale encouraged the attendees to go home and make revisions, so at the next meeting they can start to revise the questions. One revision a majority of the attendees proposed was incorporating more Visual and Performing Arts questions. In the March and April meetings, Dale plans on finalizing the questions to prepare the survey for May.
“When looking at the questions, I noticed that VAPA was not an option for several of the questions, when VAPA is certainly accomplishing the same things as other academic subjects,” Director of Choirs Mr. Michael Hayden said.
According to Dale, this is the year to implement wholesale changes because Costa just completed a WASC evaluation. This means that everything that is established will be settled for at least three years until the next WASC assessment. Principal’s Secretary Heather Hoffman stated that small tweaks could be made, but showing longitudinal data in the WASC reports is more valuable as it is favorable to show consistency over the years.
“A difference in our survey is that we are efficient in our language,” Dale said. “We don’t ask a ton of questions, but were asking the right questions. We ask 40 questions that are relevant to us right now, rather than keeping the same three page survey for ten years.”
Leave a Reply