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Somerville councilors, CAG members call to pull and rewrite school survey amid bias concerns
Summary
City committee members, School Committee representatives and Community Advisory Group members told the joint Somerville committee that a community feedback survey about replacing Winter Hill and Brown schools appears biased; administration says promotion paused and staff will review survey data and proposed revisions.
Somerville City Council Committee Chair Lance Davis urged the administration to withdraw the community feedback survey released the same day, saying the questions “seemed to be focused specifically on deriving negative data for the possibility of retaining the two neighborhood schools.” The request came during a joint meeting of the council’s school buildings, facilities and maintenance committee and the school committee subcommittee.
Committee members and Community Advisory Group (CAG) participants said the survey’s wording and response options created a positive framing for a larger, combined school and did not give respondents a neutral way to register opposition. That, they said, undermined public trust in a process that will lead to a Proposition 2½ debt-exclusion vote to finance any new building.
The argument for reworking the survey centered on fairness and measurement: critics said the survey lacked clear demographic identifiers, used response categories that pushed…
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