Fremont City Schools to launch stakeholder survey to shape new strategic plan

Fremont City Schools officials said they will launch a districtwide stakeholder survey this week to gather input for a new strategic plan and recently adopted vision and mission statements.

District leadership introduced the survey at the Feb. 10 board meeting. Brent Parker, the district's lead communication liaison, said the form is organized into four respondent categories'students, staff, parents/guardians and community members'and uses 1-to-5 rating questions to measure priorities and perceptions such as bullying-free environments, instructional quality, caring staff, clean facilities and extracurricular opportunities.

The survey is designed to produce two comparisons: how important respondents rate district features and how respondents rate Fremont City Schools on those same features. Parker said responses will populate a spreadsheet that staff can filter by stakeholder group to spot trends and differences between students, parents, staff and community members. "Once they hit the submit button, it will automatically compile that data into that spreadsheet," Parker said.

The district's superintendent (name not specified in the meeting transcript) and Parker said the form will be distributed to students, families and staff by email and will be posted on the district website; Parker also said he will include the link in a video update. Board members warned that posting the direct form link on social media could invite outside responses. "When you look at the analytics of our Facebook page, we're reaching people all over the country and the world. We really want this to be stakeholders within Fremont," a board member said; Parker agreed the website and targeted messaging would be the preferred method.

During board discussion, a member asked whether student responses could be separated by grade level. Parker said that grade-level or school-level questions can be added easily in the live Google Form and noted the form is a "living document". The superintendent said adding such demographic options would be useful and feasible.

Parker also described two repeated rating sections organized in the same order so staff can compare responses across stakeholder groups. The first section asks respondents to rate the importance of items such as "quality instruction" or a "bully-free environment." The later, similarly ordered section asks respondents to rate how often or how well those same features appear in Fremont schools.

Parker said the district hopes for broad participation and will use the data to write action steps and strategic objectives for the coming plan. He told the board the survey would "go live this week," be emailed to staff and families, and be accessible via a link on the district website; community members without district email access will be able to use that web link.

Board members and staff noted past use of similar surveys during earlier strategic planning cycles and said the district regularly collects feedback in other forms. The meeting concluded with the district asking stakeholders to take a few minutes to complete the survey once it is posted.

The district did not give a deadline for responses during the meeting, nor did it provide an exact public URL for the survey at the time of the presentation.