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District reports higher family survey participation, modest gains in engagement scores
Summary
Geary County Schools presented results from its annual family engagement survey, reporting 969 responses (up from 618) and small increases across categories including welcoming environment, communication and support for student learning; per-school breakdowns and percentage-of-family response rates will be provided later.
Geary County Schools presented results from its annual family engagement survey during the board meeting, reporting an increase in participation to 969 responses this year from 618 responses last year.
The district said the survey, administered through a vendor (TASIN) during parent-teacher conference time, uses a Likert scale from 1 to 5 and produces sub-scores for welcoming environment, effective communication, supporting student learning, sharing power and advocacy, and community involvement. The superintendent's presentation gave district-average scores for last year and this year; examples cited in the meeting include a previous welcoming-environment score of 3.78 and an overall district average of 3.68 in the prior year. Staff said each category increased this year, and noted that multiple questions in the welcoming-environment category were above 4.0.
Staff highlighted strengths: improved participation, growth across all categories and subgroups, high ratings for staff being welcoming to families and for communication in families' preferred languages, and strong teacher-family information exchange during conferences. Areas for improvement identified in the presentation included community involvement and "sharing power and advocacy," where scores remained lower than other categories (presentation figures showed community involvement and sharing power scores below the highest-rated categories). One example given was the question asking whether parents receive positive feedback from teachers, which moved from about 3.25 to about 3.75.
Board members asked whether the district could provide per-school percentage response rates (responses as a share of each school's families). Staff said they will provide the individual-school comment sets and will try to compute percentage-of-families response rates, but that the current distributed reports show raw counts by school, not percentages.
Ending: The district plans to repeat the survey next year during the second semester and will continue to share building-level results with site councils and leadership teams; staff said they have planned professional development for administrators to address areas for improvement.
