There is that familiar feeling when the second period bell rings a couple of minutes early. No, it’s not a VHgive session, but rather another survey. Students may blow through the questions or thoughtfully consider each answer, but D128’s goal remains to use these surveys in order to improve our community.

This school year, D128 is scheduled to take a total of five surveys: Social Emotional Wellbeing, Equal Opportunity Schools, Continuous Improvement, Illinois Youth, and 5Essentials. Depending on the questionnaire, the data is interpreted on a school-wide, district-wide, or state level.

There is an immense amount of time devoted by our District to surveys; there are five months that we take the time out of our school day to fill out the surveys. For these results to be more effective, we must understand that more of the community must respond.

 Greg Stilling, VHHS assistant principal, works to push out surveys to students, adults, and staff to ensure they are being taken. As a student, you have probably gotten an email from Stilling providing information on an upcoming survey, or reminding you to respond to one you haven’t taken.

Our first survey of the school year focuses on social emotional health and acts as a checkpoint for our learning support staff to provide students the help they need, according to Stilling.

“Those [Social Emotional Wellbeing Surveys] are some of the ones that especially the counselors and social workers like, because it can help us see the bigger picture and how our student body is doing,” Stilling said. “But, it also shows if there’s any individual kids who are really struggling who we need to meet with.”

However, this survey impacts VHHS beyond just connecting students with support staff. Stilling notes that the trends of this data serve to help improve our school into being a safer space.

“If we see our kids are really anxious, and they’re reporting a high level of anxiety, then we start to think we need to run more groups focused on anxiety. We need to learn if we can embed this in the curriculum we already have or if it’s something we need to offer as a LST [Learning Support Team],” Stilling said.

From Stilling’s connection of this survey to providing students the help that they need, it is clear that it is pivotal that D128 works towards motivating students to complete it.

This also means there must be strides in the accessibility of the survey to ensure all populations are able to take it.

Andrew Young, Director of Student Programming and Data Analysis at VHHS, mainly works on the logistical side of surveys, making them as accessible as possible.

“I’m working on the back end to make sure kids in resource areas are actually taking it. That students in PE class aren’t in the locker room and can actually have the space, the time, hear the announcement, and can take it,” Young said.

However, Young also has to dive into more complex questions, like whether students proficient in languages other than English are given the resources possible to accurately respond.

“One of our first questions anytime there’s a survey going out is what other languages the survey is offered. That’s really important to us right now,” Young said.

However, even with the work done by the District to give students everything they need to respond, there are still worries of the data not representing certain parts of the population.

“And so, what if that student doesn’t fill it out? You know, there’s certain surveys that we just have to hit a benchmark for the state. And then there’s certain surveys that we wonder, are other students, maybe the students that we needed to fill out the most, not filling it out?” Young said.

Young’s fears of the survey not reaching everyone are well-founded and can be paired with concerns that students are not responding to surveys thoughtfully. Students who take the survey without fidelity can become an invalid data point. Yes, that means if you took a survey in less than a minute, you are not a part of the data that is being interpreted.

“Some kids just click the buttons to get it done. We can see that it took a student 15 seconds in some instances: that data point is not valid,” Young said.

According to Young, applications like Panorama flag certain patterns in responses. There are various questions that fall under the same theme, and drastic differences in a student’s responses to the same themes, as well as the amount of time it took them, allows D128 to consolidate responses into usable data. This means, the number of student responses can differ from the actual amount of responses being analyzed. Moreso, it isn’t just that all students should respond to the survey, but rather that each response should be thoughtful and done diligently.

Charlotte Eames, Director of Data and Assessment for D128, oversees the data analysis from students, staff, and parents. This can be seen as a meticulous process.

In simpler terms, she looks for trends and themes in the responses, in order for the District to see what needs to be addressed. She also works with Abbie Gutzmer, the Data Coach at VHHS, to help interpret and organize the data. D128 has hired specific people in order to put these results to good use. However, we must strive to get thoughtful responses from all students to see holistic trends of our whole student body.

One of Gutzmer’s main focuses is to analyze the data from in-house surveys.  However, though D128 works towards using this data, it can cause fatigue for the community because of the amount of time they are being surveyed.

“We’re a school recognizing right now that surveys are so important, but that we’re over-surveying our kids,” Young said.

Due to this concern, Eames worked with a team of people in order to address this issue, and work towards remediating survey fatigue.

“We heard from our community that’s too many surveys. So kind of a big team of people who got together over this summer that said, ‘Okay, how can we streamline this? What information do we need? What’s most important? How can we adjust?’” Young said.

This team concluded that the Equity and Inclusion survey could be given every other year. However, this year the number of surveys still amounted to five because an outside entity required D128 to take the Equal Opportunity Schools Survey, according to Stilling.

Eames believes that the commentary that she receives this year on the surveys will help dictate future actions on the issue. Overall, her message is that D128 will still work towards efficiency with surveys.

Additionally, another criticism about the surveys that may explain the lack of engagement is the length. Eames explained that with applications like Panorama, the district is put in an ‘all or nothing’ situation. They either have to choose all the questions that target a certain theme, or none.

“All of the questions exist in the Panorama system; we don’t make those questions up. But they’re in categories. And we really only have an opportunity to choose categories. So a category might have eight questions. Then we really want to hone in on that category. Okay, that added eight questions to our survey. So with that one, we have a little bit less freedom. We can choose fewer categories, but for the things we want to know, there’s a certain set of questions that are already there,” Eames said.

Eames understands and hopes to make the surveys as short as possible, even noting that shorter surveys help keep responders engaged.

“I would say, I’m a fan of the shorter, the better in terms of the time, in terms of student attention, staff attention, everybody’s attention,” Eames said.

 According to Eames, it is hard to address these concerns and get valuable feedback.

“Nobody wants to sit and do a survey for 45 minutes. But sometimes, there’s just things we need to know. And it takes longer,” Eames said.

However, the consequences of these drawbacks can be detrimental. With long surveys and potential over surveying, it causes a lack of responses.

“It’s also hard because parents don’t fill it out at nearly as high a percentage as the kids do…It’s hard to draw real dramatic conclusions because we get a way higher percentage of kids filling it out than parents. We just are constantly emailing it or putting it in Paw Prints or different ways…people don’t really want to take the time to fill it out,” Stilling said.

Understandably, there are only certain actions that can be taken in order to keep the integrity of the survey, but there is an action that the district can take to improve the number of thoughtful responses that is attainable: improved communication.

As Eames stated, it is hard to cut down on the number of surveys and the length of them. However, there is still an aura of demotivational from students that affects the time and effort that is put in these surveys. This means all the work to improve from the data is ultimately meaningless because students don’t see the point.

As humans, we want to see the products of our labor. Imagine you are baking a cake: you put countless hours making the batter and coordinating the flavors. If you were unable to see the final cake, there would be no satisfaction. Moreso, you may be deterred from baking another cake.

This is the effect D128 should fear, and should aim to fix. If students cannot see the results and effect of their survey, there is nothing that will push them to thoughtfully complete them. According to Young, there are many positive and necessary impacts of surveys.

 “They speak to culture and climate. They speak to a number of things and how we can internally improve. Because that’s just what great organizations do for a number of reasons.”

 As Young said, this is important to note: D128 wants to ‘continuously improve,’ and these surveys allow the opportunity for feedback that can impact classrooms. It would not do the community justice to have our district remain stagnant and not try to improve.

The district has teams of people who focus on making the data worth something that can allow changes to be made.

“I know students aren’t seeing the direct effects of what their survey results are. But from where I stand, I feel like we are giving the people who need the information the information they need….There are conversations on a regular basis on ‘Something needs to change here, what can we change?’” Gutzmer said.

Gutzmer is right: there are conversations by some administration working towards change. However, the motivation to do surveys diligently needs to be improved because that is how a tremendous amount of valid data can be collected and utilized.

Improved communication of survey results and effects to the community allows for the people to see all the great work the District is doing. It is clear D128 works towards being the best version of itself, but allowing others to see the tremendous amount of time and energy that is put into this allows the community to be more engaged and present.

 So, let’s make surveys an even more integral part by allowing the community to see how D128 is trying to improve.

Fun Fact: According to Stilling, the reason why students take surveys during the second period is due to policies at Libertyville High School. There, students have the option of arriving late or leaving early if they have a study hall during the first or eighth period. Moreover, since third-seventh are lunch periods, that only leaves a second period for the survey to be administered.