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District releases interactive budget survey results; teaching and instruction ranks highest across respondents
Summary
A district survey of 1,255 respondents ranked teaching and instruction as the top funding priority, with differences by respondent group on athletics, paraprofessional support and central office. The board was shown interactive dashboards and open‑ended themes on April 24.
Superintendent Murphy and district staff walked the board through results of a 2025 spring budget survey the district launched to gather community priorities and comments.
Murphy said 1,255 people completed the survey and demonstrated how the dashboard allows filtering by role, school and demographic group. "The best possible score that you could get, for wins would be 14," Murphy told the board, describing the survey’s method of pairwise comparisons among 15 budget categories.
Across all respondents the top priorities were teaching and instruction, focused academic supports, and arts; paraprofessional support and social‑emotional supports also ranked highly for some groups. Central office administration and professional growth were ranked lower across most respondent types. Student respondents placed greater emphasis on athletics and activities than other groups did; staff tended to rank paraprofessional support higher than students.
Open‑ended answers revealed common concerns: opposition to broadly increasing staff duties without clarity or compensation; requests for greater transparency on how the district would use any savings; repeated calls to maintain or increase art and music programs; and advocacy for stronger special education services. Several respondents urged the district to reduce central office costs first, and many asked for clearer definitions and examples of the “expanded roles” referenced in the survey.
Murphy and staff showed how the dashboard breaks out responses by race, school, role and by whether respondents reported students receiving special education, multilingual or free/reduced‑price lunch services. Board members asked for comparisons to prior years and for outreach strategies to increase participation among underrepresented communities.
No board action was taken; staff said the dashboard and raw responses would be posted to the district website and used in upcoming budget conversations.
